Good afternoon and thank you, honourable Chair, Madam Clerk, and all the members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health.
Battered Women's Support Services, BWSS, was formed in 1979. Our mission is to end gender-based violence by changing the historic underpinnings of discrimination against women through education, advocacy and support services to assist all women affected by gender-based violence as part of our aim to eliminate violence, and to work from an intersectional anti-oppression feminist and decolonizing perspective, which is one that promotes equity and liberation for all women.
Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, we are a non-partisan, incorporated, non-profit society and federally registered charity. We are governed by an independent board of directors, and we work in collaboration with similar organizations across Canada and internationally.
Over the past 17 years, BWSS has developed a unique expertise and intersectional approach to the complex and overlapping identities and factors of oppression, disadvantages that impact women and contribute to their subjugation and vulnerability to gender-based violence, including and not limited to domestic and sexualized violence.
We do this through direct service provision. In 2019, we responded to over 18,000 requests for service through our intake and crisis line, counselling, support groups, legal services and advocacy, employment, indigenous women's program, black women's program and Latin American women's program.
We also deliver skill-based training for professionals, systems and community groups, volunteers and other individuals. Training and educational workshops are grounded in sound theoretical frameworks that include trauma, socio-cultural and intersectional theory and practice.
Our advocacy reach includes legal, institutional and systemic advocacy to improve the status of women in Canada and the response to gender-based violence.
I speak today on behalf of Battered Women’s Support Services, where our volunteer and staff team continue to provide support services on the front line, supporting survivors of gender-based violence with crisis intervention, counselling and legal advocacy.
Like our counterparts across British Columbia and Canada, the women who access our services are navigating violence against women and gender-based violence including domestic and sexual violence, poverty, substandard and precarious housing, substance use and ill mental health, sex work and sexual exploitation, as well as compromised immune systems resulting from all of these factors.
The COVID-19 pandemic poses very specific challenges for women in our communities. Our services and programs are the vital community-based response positioned to make a difference. The work of our organizations includes alleviating isolation, as well as providing vital support services that increase women’s safety and keep women alive. Our support services span crisis, domestic and sexual violence intervention.
Last year I had the privilege of visiting China and through those contacts and networks we learned that quarantine was increasing the instances of domestic violence. In those cases, our Chinese counterparts cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the major contributing factor in 90% of the cases. This feedback from our Chinese counterparts in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Jinzhou was clear. It was important to ensure the continuation of services, expand or modify services and take every action available to advise women of services.
In early March, Battered Women’s Support Services thoughtfully and strongly considered these potential increased rates of violence and worked to get out in front of the problem. We recognize the importance of being nimble and creative, so our actions involved scaling up our direct service provision to 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We included email and text options as well as a toll-free number.
We dedicated the homepage of our website to COVID-19 and violence-specific information including safety plans; how to help a friend, neighbour or family member; and a listing of shelters and transitional housing in Canada and internationally. We continue to deploy a comprehensive communications plan utilizing social and mainstream media, advertising, blogs and email blasts.
We advocated as strongly as we could with municipal, provincial and federal governments for unrestricted funding for supplies, service modification and increased staffing levels. We sought engagement with provincial and federal health offices to deliver messaging through their platforms to advise victims of gender-based violence that their physical safety was more important than social distancing, and to seek out crisis line and text support.
We continue to utilize alternative measures to conduct outreach and follow up through remote networks, and we maintain our physical office for drop-ins and individual, in-person appointments.
Through these efforts, demand for our services increased upward of 300%. Calls fell into seven general themes: women who were out of abusive relationships and were experiencing increased post-trauma reactions and suicidality; women currently living with abusive partners who were looking for opportunities to ensure their safety and to understand their situation; co-workers of women who were living with abusive partners where work from home had impacted their ability to assist their co-workers as they had been previously; family members who wanted to know how they could assist their sister, mother, aunt, cousin, who they knew were in abusive relationships; neighbours who had a previous awareness or who had just become aware of a woman in their apartment building or community and were looking for options; professionals who wanted to consult on how they could support their clients under COVID-19; and children and youth who had witnessed their mother’s abuse their entire lives and were calling to discuss how they could plan for their safety, their mother’s safety and that of their siblings.
The contributing factors we have identified through our front-line work over the last three months have been economic insecurity and poverty-related stress; the very real impact of social isolation and quarantine; increased alcohol consumption and the consumption of other substances, licit and illicit; exposure to exploitative relationships; reduced health service availability and access to first responders; reduced contact with schools, neighbours, hairdressers, etc.; fear to seek help and/or leave the house; the inability to temporarily escape abusive relationships and partners; and exposure to ongoing violence, including violence in the community, such as sexual harassment from landlords. Women were profoundly impacted by the scaling back of services, as each service was navigating its own needs in terms of staffing and social distancing. There was also a profound lack of funding support at the front end of social distancing mandates.
In the past, women would contact their support service over the phone while they or their abusive partner was at work or otherwise out of the house. With the COVID-19 restrictions, women have fewer opportunities to leave the house and fewer opportunities to call a support service such as a shelter. Many shelters and transition houses are communal living areas, with shared kitchens, laundry and common areas, and in some cases shared rooms, and in most cases shared bathrooms. This kind of environment is not conducive to social distancing, and numerous women whom we have placed in transition houses have left, citing too much isolation during the lockdown. We have since engaged the private sector as we continue to work with transition houses, and have a floor of rooms in a Vancouver hotel, where we have housed and are housing 15 women and six children on a temporary basis.
Combined with the escalated COVID-19 home-quarantine measures, abusive partners are using isolation, coercion, threats, emotional abuse, economic abuse, abuse of children and companion animals, and their privilege to fully maximize their power and control and exert violence on their victims, with lethal effect.
In one month, we've experienced 11 killings of women. On April 1, a 41-year-old woman was murdered by her 35-year-old partner in Ontario. On April 1, a 33-year-old woman was killed by her domestic partner in Brockville, Ontario. On April 2, Tracey MacKenzie was killed by her partner in Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia. On April 8, 61-year-old Tina Seminara was assaulted by her husband in Osoyoos, British Columbia, and died a week later from her injuries. On April 11, Julie Racette, a 33-year-old woman, was killed by her partner in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
On April 17, a woman was assaulted in Portapique, Nova Scotia, by her long-term common-law partner. She managed to escape and hid in the woods. The man proceeded to murder 22 people, the deadliest mass shooting in Canada's history. The same man intended to killing his ex-wife. Brittany Ann Meszaros, a 24-year-old, was killed by her common-law partner in Calgary on April 27. On May 1, Tina Tingley-McAleer, a 43-year-old woman who was called an amazing sister and great mom, was killed by her domestic partner in Hillsborough, New Brunswick. On May 4, Lois Paterson-Gartner, 55 years old, and her 13-year-old daughter and their family dog were found dead in a murder-suicide carried out by a man they lived with in rural Strathcona County, Alberta.
This number of killings represents a statistical spike in lethal misogynist violence. It is up to Canada to reinforce the community-based matrix of women- and gender-based violence services. For us, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about pre-COVID-19 or now, with the lessening of social distancing measures. We continue to do the work, and we know that gender-based violence was already a pandemic. For every woman who is killed, we know from our front-line work that there are thousands more living in fear.
Thank you.