I can't state it strongly enough: it begins with recognizing that the resources simply aren't there.
The work we're doing through our current project on legislation, policy, and service responses affirms what we've known for a long time at DAWN Canada, and further affirms what women told us in the research we did from 2011 to 2014, that the systemic problems are part of how you can begin to address it, because women with disabilities will continue to experience violence at higher rates than any other women. That's a given. That's not going to change, in all likelihood, ever.
Given that they experience it at higher rates, I'm really urging you to understand that it must be a priority to assign resources to addressing this, and to addressing it at a systemic level back to the discussion we had at the beginning of the question period, about the fact that disability is this huge tsunami underlying what we're talking about in terms of violence against women.
In a study in 2014 on sex work in British Columbia, a qualitative research of 3,500 women sex workers who participated in this research, 35% of them self-identified as having a long-term disability before they became sex workers.
Again, I don't want to over-focus on one cohort or another. To be really clear, young women with intellectual disabilities, young women who are in institutions, are extremely vulnerable to abuse, through their caregivers or the fact that they're in transportation, or there are so many other things I could have covered. I tried really hard to focus today on what needs to be heard, which is how large in scale this problem is, to make clear that we are the largest minority group in the world.
In this country, disability is finally hitting the radar of everyone, but to be really clear, it has been a huge problem for a very long time, and there has been only one organization, my organization, focused on this work. You have seen us over and over again on this panel, and in all the years that I've come here, I haven't seen a single change. My funding has been reduced, year over year, since 2007. Year over year, my funding has been reduced, not increased.
I am here only because women with disabilities, despite our vulnerability, are the most resilient women in this country. I urge you all to hear me and to hear what I'm asking you to do, to be our champion, because we can't continue to do it alone.