To me, it's really about breaking the cycles. We know what the cycles are. It's about paying attention to the evidence on what really works. Again, this stuff isn't popular, and it's not for the faint of heart. We've taken some significant hits over the last few years as we've made these big changes.
I'll use one illustration. Earlier, I mentioned family violence. The model that was created as a temporary measure back in the 1970s was the emergency shelter model. That is really great for keeping women safe for 30 days. What we started tracking just in the last couple of years was how many of the women who are there have been there before. We can actually measure the cycle, and it's 50%. Fifty per cent of the women who were in the shelter last year were there before. That doesn't count repeat visits or anything.
If we're looking at breaking the cycle.... We also know that the evidence says that if you grow up in violence, you are five times more likely to be a victim or an aggressor. That's the cycle. We need to intervene differently. On the other hand, locally we also had a ridiculously underfunded charity, a one-person shop, that was working with women for 18 months in a residential capacity. It found that 95% of the women left their abusive partner for 12 consecutive months. There are thresholds, according to the literature, that say if you leave for long enough, your likelihood of going back starts to go down.
There are different kinds of interventions, but we've built entire models around an emergency system. I'm not saying that we shouldn't fund shelters, and I'm not saying that emergencies aren't emergencies. They are. But as long as we keep perpetuating that same most costly, least effective approach...that's what we do in the criminal justice system and in the emergency departments. Every most expensive intervention we have could be prevented for a huge number of people, both in the financial costs and the social costs, because kids are growing up in these awful situations.