Status of Women committee  Higher cases of rural crime? Is that it?

Status of Women committee  In a lot of cases, it is a lack of access. Rural communities have a vast area outside of urban. It's not so much a lack of education—although we have seen, historically, that those in rural communities are less likely to go on to post-secondary education—as it is the barriers that they are faced with when they do try to reach out to services.

Status of Women committee  Even in the detachment we've seen that conversations with our officers have grown. They do recognize the victims are home with their aggressors so they're coming to us and saying, “We were called to this house and she's not making a statement. She doesn't want to press charges, but we feel there's something going on.”

Status of Women committee  For me, I feel we need an equitable distribution of funding between urban and rural centres. If funding is funnelled more into the urban centres to build the capacities there.... We need more officers. We need more patrols. We need way more officers than we have in our detachments to cover the area.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  Yes, I have.

Status of Women committee  Yes, for sure. I feel that in an equitable funding distribution going out to the rural communities, to those organizations.... Even looking at the history of our budgeting and our funding applications and how much they have grown, our operational cost is greater than what we receive in funding.

Status of Women committee  I, for sure, see that it's something we would get behind. Touching on officers and domestic violence—and this is in no way to diminish their role or their capacity, and it's human too—they see the hard stuff daily. When they're called to domestic violence and the victim is not openly saying what happened, won't give a statement, they're tied; there's only so much they can do.

Status of Women committee  To be honest, from our perspective, we actually feel a lot of the victims are not contacting us. With the restrictions in place, with so many people out of work, the victims are stuck at home. As you said, they're in isolation or quarantine with their aggressors. They can't contact us.

Status of Women committee  They do, but it's taking them longer. They're talking themselves out of reaching out. They're not seeing the support they need in their rural communities, so they say, “What's the point? They can't do anything for me here. I'm not going to get the help I need.” When we do reach out to them, we have so many barriers that we have to try to knock away to build their confidence, and let them know we're here for them in whatever capacity we can help.

Status of Women committee  From my understanding, and as I said, our executive director deals with the funding aspects, so she would have more information on that, but up to two years ago, all victim service units were capped at $150,000 as a funding grant. It was—

Status of Women committee  Yes. We were continually told that they were trying to access the victims of crime funding. That was changed to what our belief was that victim service units could actually access that funding when it got reconfigured. Two years ago, urban centres were granted twice the amount.

Status of Women committee  Our unit is capped at $150,000 per annum. That is regardless of how extensively our files have grown over the last number of years. We are very limited in how we can offer direct support under our mandate until victims' own support systems kick in, so we rely a lot on Alberta Works for our victims when it comes to accessing shelters.

Status of Women committee  Sorry. Okay.

Status of Women committee  In our society the funding goes through our executive director. She applies for all of our funding, so I can't speak to knowing what funding is applied for exactly, other than that Justice and Solicitor General funds our core organization.