--for the YWCA, yes, but on behalf of our shelter for women fleeing violence, women and their children.
I won't go through the statistics. They're listed here. It's very high in the north.
I just want to say that most women in NWT communities face formidable barriers to accessing services and support to escape from violence. There are only five shelters in the NWT that serve 33 communities spread over a vast area. Women often in the communities without shelters have to go a local social service worker to get their trip to a shelter paid for. And often this person can be related to the partner that the women is trying to escape.
Violence starts early in their relationships and continues through child-bearing years. We see very young women with a number of children already who repeatedly come to our shelter. By the time they can really think about how they want to change that violence in their lives, they're tied down with child rearing and see no way out. They are busy caring for their children, the housing options are limited, and there are really significant community sanctions for disclosure of abuse. That's often a barrier to seeking meaningful help.
Women use the shelters as respite for periods of time, to regroup and go back. Elders use the shelter in this way too. We have seen women in their sixties and seventies, with multiple healed fractures, who get dumped out into snowbanks and come into the shelter.
Women often don't think change is possible because the abuse is endemic. It's often what they have known and grown up with. And women have sympathy for their partners, because their partners have been abused as well. When you look at the root causes around cultural disruption, and residential schools, everybody in the community is suffering. A lot of times women don't see the larger system as offering helpful support. They want to heal as a community.
The women who come to us say that it's primarily physical and emotional abuse, but we see a wide range of all the types of abuse. We see women beaten severely who then miscarry while they're at the shelter. We see women who can hardly walk due to beatings. We see women who end up leaving the shelter and are beaten to death. We see women who are held against their will and then physically abused over periods of time, who give notes to their children to take to school asking for help. We see women who jump out of vehicles in the liquor store parking lot and hop into taxicabs to come to the shelter.
We see a lot of young women from Nunavut communities who access shelter services here in Yellowknife. As isolated as you can be in this territory, you can be even more so in Nunavut. Transportation is very costly, so often we are the cheapest alternative.
Resources in Nunavut are scarce. I'd like to make a real plea, on behalf of Nunavut, for better support to those shelters there, because they really do need that. Women often go back to bleak circumstances. We have women in from the small communities in Nunavut who might have a child with a disability. They're struggling. They've come to the shelter, and the partner has moved another woman into their home. So what do they go back to? These women have no economic independence and sometimes few alternatives because of that.
Recently a woman come to us from a Nunavut community. She and her five kids were put into cells in the Nunavut community because that was the safest place there until they could arrange for a flight to get her and the five kids to come out. Partners, however, it seems to us, have no trouble following the women to the communities with shelter and will often drive by the shelter to make sure that we see them, and that the women see them. That becomes a threat in itself. It's interesting, because when you talk to the communities and the referral agents, they say “She's coming for counselling. This is her problem and she's coming for help.”
We have been facilitating emergency protection orders. That's been really helpful except in the small communities without RCMP, because there is no way for that to be followed up. We have received phone calls from women who have obtained emergency protection orders and then they're left without food, baby food, and diapers. We take supplies out to them because they're economically tied to that partner and he's now gone from the home.
Women who are at high risk often have few supports long-term. We try to keep them safe in our transitional housing, but if that partner is known to the other tenants and they're scared of him—watch out. We had emergency protection orders granted and that has been helpful
The last thing I want to end on is the work we're doing with the other women's groups in the eleven small communities without RCMP, which I think is a key to what we want to do. Communities need community healing and community development.