Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for inviting me here. It's a pleasure to be here.
I am a therapist with a background in social work. Since 1994 I have been working as a social worker, a rehabilitation worker, and a victim support worker, and now since 2009 I have been offering my clinical expertise to my community. Wearing this hat, I have witnessed and I have talked to and worked with a huge number of the women whom you're talking about and you're studying about in this committee.
The thing that we have to understand is that there are many kinds of cultural norms here for talking about the sponsored women and why they are coming, why they are accepting. I have worked with over 100 women who are, one by one, telling me if they had known that the information their husband gave them the first day was wrong and fake and overexaggerated, they would never have come. If they had known the signs and symptoms of abuse, of the mental health issues that their husbands suffered from, they would never have come.
Most often these women who come, and they're going through what they are going through, we have to treat them for the mental health issues and the psychological damages they have experienced through this situation.
First of all, since 2009 my organization has been offering many programs to a wide range of families, mostly Farsi-speaking communities—people from Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and you name it, those countries whose people speak Farsi. You may question why Farsi-speaking. It's because we...myself, I come from Iran. Twenty-seven years ago I left Iran. I and many of my colleagues who left Iran all these years, we know by experience, lived experiences, that people have been traumatized and they are still being traumatized.
You know the human rights situations in Iran. The most of what we are offering is about offering our clinical expertise. What is clinical expertise? It's helping people understand the importance of healthy relationships, of anger management, of interpersonal relationships, of understanding the effects of traumas on their minds, understanding healthy parenting. These are the things that we are offering through our programs.
We started as an agency with seven counsellors. Now we are 22 people, although we are operating mostly based on our clinical-based programs and some small grants. Still, we are able to offer parenting, marital relationships programs, youth support programs, you name it.
In those programs we are dealing with and exploring the issues of migration for women and men equally. As a parent, as an individual, what are the issues that they are dealing with in adjusting and being integrated into this community? There are issues of loss of identity, boundaries, victims' rights, parenting responsibilities, mental health issues. That is huge, and that is very silent; it is stigmatized. We are explaining relationship health and the psychological stressors that we as a community are going through. Migration has never been something that we people from Iran, Afghanistan, and those countries learned or were used to. This is a situation that we are in because of the long-term operation of human rights worsening in our home countries.
The psychological stresses that many people are dealing with and living with, they come here with. We bring, with our luggage, those traumas. Understanding those traumas is very important in order to understand those men who are abusers and those women who are being abused. I have worked with those men too.
I have asked many of those men why they have been doing this. What is going on? I have visited them in jails, hospitals, mental health institutions, and so on. They all tell me, once they trust that they can talk and that they are being understood, after a therapeutic relationship has been built, that if they had known this type of behaviour was wrong, they would have never done it. They are men who have been abused and mistreated as children. Since I'm working with male survivors of sexual abuse as well in another agency other than my own, I know both sides of the story.
What we are dealing with are the layers of stigma, layers of denial, layers of blame, layers of guilt and shame—and collective shame. In understanding why many of those women who are coming here and being abused are not reporting it, and why they are not asking to leave the situation very quickly, it is not only because of the fear of the police and authorities here, not only because of the fear of the CIC, deportation and so on, there is also the fear of what people would say about them back home.
The fact is that many of these women are being forced to stay in marriages because the families back home are asking them to. They are advising them to stay or wait a little bit more until their children are grown up, until this has been done, until they have found jobs, until they find some friends. These are the situations I am working on with women day by day. These women are very traumatized.
It is important to even understanding those men. In our agency every year I do a survey to understand what is the level of violence and domestic abuse that is going on, because no one talks about it.
In our parenting program, many newcomers arrive, people who have arrived one, two, or three weeks ago. They have learned about our programs through the Internet, social media, radio programs that they are listening to daily, and so on, or just by word of mouth. They attend our program. The name of the program is parenting; however, we are talking about many other things. Once they arrive, they are able to ease off and talk about the level of hardship they have gone through. The women are able to hear us—