" The other major thing I learned from the connection with other women across the country was how violence is a part of all of our programs. The more we talked with everyone else, the more we saw how our problems here are the same as everybody's across the country. Violence and abuse and harassment just kept coming up. It's not only here but in courses all over. To this day that amazes me. I had never put it all together before.

At one time all three of the women that were in my class - three out of three - had been abused. I just thought that was a strange coincidence. When I talked to the other women in the research project and found out the high percentage of women that had been abused it was amazing. It was unreal.

When I came back from Toronto, I told the women that we had discussed this whole issue of violence and abuse and how women just like them in courses across the country are being abused. That was the biggest thing to my students, that they weren't the only ones, that they weren't alone.

Nicole Jessop, "Gaining confidence through woman-positive literacy research"