I appreciate that you've taken the time to look carefully at that study. It's a very important piece of work, and I'm glad you've asked these questions.
To be really clear, we are criminalizing women with disabilities. We are doing this in terms of the homeless population. Again, the same researcher who did that study, Dr. Angela Colantonio, did an interesting study on the homeless population in Toronto. In terms of recent work done by Dr. Colantonio and her colleagues, I think it's important to share another statistic with you, because I think it plays into the same questions. Between 35% and 80% of women who are going into shelters and transition houses have a traumatic brain injury. That's right: between 35% and 80% of all women. It's not diagnosed and it's not screened. A lot of women are walking around with brain injuries without a diagnosis.
I think when we go right back to where the source is, it's to understand that the rates of violence against women speak to why this is so. Women are choked. They are slapped. They are beaten. They sustain injuries. Again, these are not injuries that they get screened for. They go to the hospital. Screening for a traumatic brain injury is expensive. It's not something they're going to do as a standard of practice unless the government and Parliament support the idea that we need to get much more proactive, not just around sports brain injuries but around the kinds of brain injuries that women are experiencing because of the high rates of violence against women in this country. It's an epidemic in terms of what we're talking about.
If I were to show you the data around brain injury versus every other disability.... Again, DAWN is cross-disability; I am not advocating more for brain injury. However, in the very context of what we're talking about here, specifically women in prisons, women who are homeless, and indeed women who are in the sex trade, we are often talking about women with an undiagnosed brain injury.
I see my colleague Julie nodding her head, because I know she sees this in the people who are coming through her wonderful resource.
In terms of what needs to happen, we need to get right at the core issue. We need to make sure that some of the funding that's now going to brain injury around sports and so on is redirected, or that additional funding is put forward. Again, the largest problem we have in this country is violence against women. Upwards of 50% of women going through transition houses and shelters are going through that system without the supports they need.
I am not pointing to the transition houses and shelters. I'm talking about a failed system at the very highest level. We have not understood how big this problem is. I would say further that one of the things we really begin to see—and this is something revealed through Dr. Colantonio's research—is that there are correlations between the high incidence of Alzheimer's in women and violence.
This is the kind of research that's going to require longitudinal studies that begin to follow women with brain injuries throughout their life course. I understand there's been research done in other countries. There's certainly other research that I can point to. I would be happy to provide the committee with additional research and formal recommendations, and with a panel of experts, who should be part of this discussion.
I thank you very much for raising this question. It's extremely important that we focus on where the systemic issues are and where the systemic solutions lie.