February 18, 2015
Presentation to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Status of Women
December 4 / Ottawa – Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to discuss with you promising practises in our collective efforts to prevent and eventually end violence against women. The Canadian Network of Women’s Shelters and Transition Houses brings together 12 provincial and territorial shelter networks which represent over 350 shelters across Canada. The Network is a young organization which was incorporated in November 2012. Our provincial members hold a wealth of experience and expertise as most have been in operation for more than 25 years.
The Network represents a unified voice that works to make violence against women a priority. Shelter workers across the country recognize that services alone will not put an end to violence against women. The Network, along with its member shelters, is committed to working towards long term systemic change. For this reason, our presentation will speak to both promising practices which deal with the immediacy of the needs of women and their children fleeing violence as well as promising practices that could lead to the long term change required to make a visible difference in the rates of violence against women in Canada.
It is important to be reminded of the fact that shelters contribute much more than a safe place to stay. They provide vital services and resources that enable women and their children who have experienced abuse, to recover from the violence, re-build self esteem, and take steps to regain a self-determined and independent life. Shelters also contribute to awareness-raising and social change as part of broader efforts to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.
I will begin by first presenting a few promising practises which have been put in place by our members. Women leaving volatile abusive partners face the extreme challenge of accessing timely and responsive safety supports from courts and police. All too often, their lives hang in the balance. In 2001, the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) piloted Dr. Jacqueline Campbell’s Danger Assessment tool to help shelter workers assess abused women’s risk of lethality and to advocate for women’s protective needs with legal and police services. This tool is comprised of a set of 20 weighted questions and an incident calendar which women complete alongside shelter workers. A 2009 study on this program showed that while the process of completing the Danger Assessment Tool is emotionally difficult for women, it often affirmed their decision to leave, motivated them to take action and develop a safety plan, and finally raised awareness of community services. Justice and other provincial services also found the tool helpful for their roles. It can also serve as a research tool for tracking and comparing danger levels. Since 2009, the Danger Assessment Tool has since been disseminated in Alberta through its inclusion in the ACWS Shelter Practice Orientation Manual.
Through the Walking the Path Together (WTPT) program, the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters has recently adapted the danger assessment tool for off-reserve shelters serving Indigenous women, alongside a safety plan tool called Protection, Options, Planning: Taking Action Related to Safety (POP-TARTS).
Once risk has been assessed, at-risk women need mechanisms for coordinating with multiple safety and support services. A Circle of Safety and Support is one such mechanism which is offered on Prince Edward Island. In this program, women who are concerned about their physical or emotional safety because of family violence can be referred to a Circle of Safety facilitator. Together, they select a group of support people in the woman’s life to participate in the Circle: police, victim services, probation, mental health or addiction staff, family, neighbours, friends, employers, church or social group. The group meets in person several times to discuss how they can all contribute to a personalized Safety Plan for the woman and her family. This program helps build links and continuity of care between support services and helps ensure that women feel safe and supported in the community. Most importantly, it reduces the risk of physical or psychological violence or murder for women leaving volatile abusive partners. This support system is best suited for women living in smaller or rural communities.
Women who experience long-term abuse often have co-occurring mental health or substance use concerns. This can create barriers to receiving effective support from women’s shelters. In 2011, the BC Society for Transition Houses piloted the Reducing Barriers project to improve practices in caring for abused women. The pilot took the form of a working group which brought together staff from different transition houses with a range of criteria for accepting abused women as residents, as well as staff training sessions and a Best Practices Toolkit on accommodating women with substance use and mental health concerns. As a result, the pilot evaluation showed that shelters were accepting a 9% higher proportion of women with some kind of substance use or mental health issue, who may previously have been unable to access service at some shelters. The shelters who received the Reducing Barriers training were able to accomodate women with greater needs, including higher levels of poverty and past abuse and lower levels of family support. Women receiving shelter services reported a high sense of support from the shelters after the project, but dissatisfaction in accessing supports and services from the broader community where they continue to face many barriers. This project shows the impact of a harm reduction approach for the most at-risk groups of women through staff training and accommodation. It also highlights the limitations of providing isolated pockets of support within a broader context of barriers for high-needs women fleeing abuse.
It should be noted that a number of promising practises are developed and implemented with project based funding. Although promising these practises often do not live up to their full potential for lack of funding. It is estimated that the time period between the beginning and full implementation of a promising practise is three years. Project funding rarely is beyond two years.
When one implements a practise which has clear positive outcomes, the next logical step is to scale it up. Unfortunately, funding is even more difficult at this stage as governments often reject these applications on the basis that they are duplications of previous work. This was the case with the project in Alberta which had adapted the danger assessment tool to work with Aboriginal women. A proposal was submitted to Justice Canada to scale up implantation of the tool in all of Alberta’s shelters; however, the proposal was turned down.
In March 2014, the Network released the results of its 1st annual shelter survey. We chose to call itShelter Voices to highlight the voices behind the numbers, the voices of the women who have survived abuse as well as the women shelter workers. 242 shelters from across the country responded to our survey.
Shelter workers were asked to identify the top three critical/urgent issues they faced – 60% indicated their concern to effectively address increasingly complex issues clients face, 51% noted the feeling of not being able to affect the systemic causes of the issues facing clients and 46% noted low pay. Shelter workers were also asked if they were able to change one thing that would improve the lives of abused women and their children, what would it be? The top four responses were:
– access to affordable and safe housing;
– a comprehensive and promptly responsive legal system;
– adequate income and social support; and
– services that are interconnected and continuous.
In the words of one shelter worker, “it’s so hard to watch how the system wears women down, especially when they have so many barriers, that they want to give up. That’s why we care so much because every woman should feel like she has a chance to make it”.
Indeed every woman needs to have a chance to make it. For this to happen we need to go beyond addressing the symptoms of violence against women. We need to make a concerted effort to bring about systemic change. A promising practice to enable this is to develop and implement a National Action Plan on Violence against Women. As you may know, the United Nations has called on all countries to have a National Action Plan (NAP) by 2015. Presently, Canada has no comprehensive strategy to deal with violence against women.
We are of the position that the federal government needs to launch a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women immediately. Canada’s National Action Plan on Violence Against Women will need to be informed by the outcomes of the inquiry. The action plan specific to Aboriginal women will thus inform Canada’s broader action plan on violence against women.
National Action Plans can provide a framework for strengthening the systems that respond to violence against women. They call for collaboration between all levels of government, civil society, survivors, and first responders. In April 2014, the Canadian Network of Women Shelters and Transition Houses convened a meeting of 26 women who represented various sectors of the violence against women movement in order to begin to develop a blueprint for Canada’s National Action Plan on Violence against women. This work is ongoing and we sincerely hope that all political parties will commit to the development and implementation of an action plan as part of their platforms for the 2015 federal election.
The network, along with many partners feel that a national action plan is a promising practise as it will help ensure:
– Consistency across and within jurisdictions in policies and legislation that address VAW
– Shared understanding of the root causes of VAW
– Consistent approaches to prevention of and responses to VAW
– Collective pursuit of the most appropriate solutions
– High-level commitment to a multi-pronged, coordinated, pan-Canadian approach
– Coordinated, clear, and effective services and systems for survivors of VAW that respect and respond to diversity
In order for Canada’s Action Plan to successfully lead to long term change, it will need to include among other things:
– New commitments and clear targets
– Effective prevention mechanisms
– Universal coverage of response mechanisms for survivors
– Review of justice mechanisms and policing practices
– Support for reliable data collection allowing for better tracking and evaluation and specific mechanisms that allow for better evaluation of data specific to Indigenous/Aboriginal women
– Substantive human and financial resources to support these measures
Finally, the process for developing Canada’s NAP must include:
– Consultation with all stakeholders, including frontline workers and survivors
– The direct and meaningful participation of non-government actors and a formal mechanism for their ongoing participation in the implementation process
– High-level leadership and accountability from governments at all jurisdictional levels
– Clearly-defined, time-bound goals measured against detailed baseline data
– Substantive human and financial resources to support these processes
There are lessons to be learned from Australia where a National Action Plan on VAW was announced after a two year development process which included a broad cross section of stakeholders. Australia’s plan spans over a 12 year period and is divided into four 3 year plans.
Our colleagues in the Australian shelter network have noted that an important part of this work has been the bi-partisan support at the federal level as well as the collaboration of the states and territories. They feel that for the first time ever they have a national landscape, at federal and state/territory levels, where there is a consistent policy understanding of gender based violence.
Although we advocate for an effective National Action Plan on VAW as a promising practice, we cannot stress enough the importance of a broad based consultation with stakeholders in the both the development phase and the actual implementation.
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ABOUT THE CANADIAN NETWORK OF WOMEN’S SHELTERS & TRANSITION HOUSES
The Canadian Network of Women’s Shelters & Transition Houses is a coalition of 12 provincial and territorial shelter networks representing over 350 shelters across Canada. It works as a unified voice to collaborate, educate, and innovate for systemic change that ends violence against women, making Canada a model for safety in the world.
For more information or media interviews:
Lise Martin / Executive Director
(613) 680-5119 / lmartin@endvaw.ca
CNWSTH online:
@endvawnetwork
https://www.facebook.com/endvawnetwork