I'm from Pivot Legal Society. We're a not-for-profit legal advocacy organization based out of Vancouver's downtown east side.
As we've heard, this is a very complex issue. In your introduction you mentioned that there hasn't seemed to have been any action on this issue. I'm just going to keep my presentation very, very basic and just talk about three really basic human rights issues that I think the federal government does have the capacity to address. Those are just the basic issues: access to justice, access to housing, and respect for the integrity of aboriginal families in relation to the child welfare process.
Working in the downtown east side, Pivot Legal Society, through our community work and through our affidavit programs, have identified six key focus areas that define the parameter of our work. These include: policing, housing, sex work, access to justice for women, child welfare, and drug policy, and each of these issues has a profound impact on aboriginal women's vulnerability to and experiences of violence.
In the submission today I'm going to touch on three of those issues that I'm most intimately acquainted with, and those are: access to the justice system, housing, and child welfare. I would like to offer some concrete recommendations for change that definitely wouldn't address all of these issues. They're very complex, but I think could have an immediate impact on the safety and well-being of the aboriginal women we work with.
One of my roles at Pivot is coordinating the Jane Doe Legal Network. It's a program that provides legal support and education to women who've experienced violence. Working in the downtown east side, our services are really tailored primarily to women who are living in poverty, many of whom are aboriginal women.
We take an approach to violence and to women that we see, recognizing that violence occurs in so many different settings, not just in intimate relationships, but also within extended families, among strangers, and at the hands of people who hold positions of authority, whether they're landlords, police, or employers.
We also have a broad understanding and recognize that experiences of violence compound over a lifetime, that they're community-wide, and that there are intergenerational impacts. In this context, it's really imperative that when aboriginal women do reach out to a lawyer or reach out to the legal system, they have meaningful, appropriate access to the justice system.
In British Columbia we've seen the opposite of that. Over the last eight years we've seen a constant erosion to access to justice in this province. Those cuts have been felt most profoundly by women living in poverty, disproportionately aboriginal women. The federal government needs to hold British Columbia accountable for denying women—aboriginal women, women living in poverty—access to the justice system. They need to reinvest in legal aid in the areas of poverty law, family law, and representation for victims. Programs like the Family Law Clinic here in Vancouver, which we lost last year, that were tailored to providing support to women dealing with compounding issues of family law, child welfare involvement, poverty, disability, and violence have to be enhanced. They have to be reinstated.
Housing is one of the core issues we work on at Pivot. While violence happens to women from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, for women living in poverty, lack of access to safe, affordable housing options is a major issue in terms of preventing violence, escaping violence, and creating a life of safety for themselves and their children.
Without a safe place to call home, aboriginal women living in Vancouver's SROs and living on the streets are at extreme risk of violence. And for mothers living in poverty, finding adequate housing is a major barrier to safety. We know that poverty rates for aboriginal children are almost twice as high as for non-aboriginal children, and this doesn't even take into account the 20,000 aboriginal children who are living on reserve who aren't even counted.
Off reserve, the core housing needs among aboriginal families is 76% higher than among non-aboriginal households. The federal government has been out of the business of providing housing and investing in social housing for nearly 20 years now. The federal government needs to commit to developing a funded national housing program and to working with aboriginal communities and working with all levels of government to address this urgent need. People need a safe place to call home before they can start to address the whole range of issues they're addressing in their lives, particularly family units.
And then, finally, there is child welfare. I don't think, in my experience, aboriginal women's experiences of violence can be understood outside of their experiences with the child welfare system, both as parents and as children themselves.
In 2008 I was part of a report we released called Broken Promises. More than half of the mothers who took part in the study were aboriginal, and 65% of them had been in care themselves. The interaction between violence in their lives and the child protection system was a core theme. Women survivors of violence are poorly supported and at times re-victimized by the child protection system. There's also a strong relationship between women's experiences of violence and other grounds on which children are removed, including addiction and mental illness.
Children can't be removed from non-abusing mothers as a result of male violence in their families, and people working in the child protection system with aboriginal families must come from a place of understanding the dynamics of violence against women and a historical understanding of colonial violence. This is essential in order to ensure that we have a child protection system that's not re-victimizing women and their children, and is instead empowering them to keep themselves and their children safe.
At the core of our work is the belief that people who have been marginalized are experts on their own lives and that aboriginal women know what they need to keep themselves and their families safe. However, the federal government and all levels of government have a duty to provide women with the resources they need to implement and develop those solutions.
Thank you.