Thank you for the question.
There are two areas of inequality that aboriginal women experiencing domestic violence experience. One area is the shortfall in actual, direct government spending for services that we just talked about, as in the case of child welfare. The other big gap is in federally funded voluntary sector services, those volunteer services that federal government dollars go to for delivery of services.
In my study in 2003 I found that the average amount each Canadian receives in publicly funded voluntary sector support is about $2,400 off-reserve. The amount going to first nations for children and family services was 35ยข. Think about it for a moment. How many voluntary sector services funded by the federal government did you see on your tours across the country?
That means there's a whole vacuum of services. Imagine here in Ottawa today if I cut every shelter, every food bank, every domestic violence program, and then on top of that, I underfunded child welfare services. How well do you think the citizens of this city would be doing if they're parenting in a few years? Not that well.
The other problem is in the statutes on child welfare. Over the last 15 years in particular, there's been an increasing recognition of the very real harms that domestic violence does to children. Those are legitimate concerns, and I am not underestimating that aspect. However, there is also increasing evidence, particularly out of states like New York, that when you put domestic violence into child welfare statutes as a reason for child welfare to intervene in families, they were actually not getting the reports of the most severe abuse because of women being afraid of their kids being taken away. In fact, they back-stepped on that.
One of the realities is that child welfare is not that good at responding to domestic abuse. We don't have the resources to do that. We could, within first nations agencies, retailor some of those services and reprofile them, but not on the basis of the inequitable funding we currently have.
I would encourage parliamentarians to pay attention to those two factors. Where is the federally funded money for the voluntary sector for services for violence against women going, and to what extent is that benefiting aboriginal women on reserves? The second question is this: be aware of that inclusion of domestic violence in child welfare. Are you confident, as members, that child welfare has the proper responses and supports to women and to men experiencing domestic violence in order to keep children safe? I'm not that confident about that.