Thank you.
Lack of communication and contradictions between various social support systems, such as social assistance, social housing and child welfare, may also prevent women from accessing and maintaining social housing. This, in addition to the long wait times for subsidized housing, result in shelters often needing to violate their policies or rules to extend women's stays at the shelter if housing is not yet made available to them.
This plays into the overcapacity and lack of available beds, thereby limiting the number of new women that shelters can accept. Unable to accommodate new residents due to overcapacity and resources, shelters must often turn away women and children.
There is no system in place to track these women to determine whether they have accessed safe housing. There is concern that women will either return to their domestic violence partners, head into invisible homelessness, enter street homelessness, or be forced by circumstance into other precarious situations, such as survival sex work or unsafe housing tenure.
There is a need to recognize that indigenous women are approximately 3.5 times more likely to experience some form of spousal violence than non-indigenous women. Indigenous women often migrate to urban centres to escape violence and poverty, often finding themselves in precarious housing situations either due to the lack of available housing options or systemic discrimination. Precarious housing not only increases indigenous women's risk of experiencing violence, it also contributes to the risk of being trafficked and the high number of missing and murdered indigenous women.
As was written by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in their “Right at home” report:
For Aboriginal women, who experience higher rates of violence compared to non-Aboriginal women, the situation is particularly bleak. The lack of adequate and affordable housing, financial assistance and social supports—coupled with other intersecting grounds—leaves many Aboriginal women with no choice but to return to their abusers.
I will pass it back to Jeff.