Good afternoon. Thank you for your invitation.
My name is Geneviève Lessard and I am a professor at Université Laval and director of the RAIV, an acronym referring to applied and interdisciplinary research into intimate, family and structural violence. The RAIV is one of the five members of the Alliance of Canadian Research Centres on Gender-Based Violence.
On December 6, 1989, a young man murdered 14 young women at the École polytechnique de Montréal. That tragic event led to the Canadian government's mobilization to fund infrastructure for research into violence against women. This resulted in the creation of our Canadian alliance, which is still active, 30 years later, and conducts a number of projects in which the RAIV researchers in Quebec are actively involved.
The RAIV was formerly called CRI‑VIFF, the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la violence familiale et la violence faite aux femmes. I mention this for the benefit of those who have been involved in this issue for a long time. We changed the name in 2020 when we received a new infrastructure grant that allowed us to expand our academic programming to study structural violence as well, in addition to violence against women and children, again adopting the same partnership and interdisciplinary research approach.
The RAIV includes about 30 full-time researchers who are attached to six universities in Quebec, some 40 national and international collaborators, and a number of students and practice partners. We have two teams funded by the FRQSC, the Fonds de recherche du Québec pour la société et la culture: one team on spousal violence, which I lead, and another on structural violence and social justice, led by my colleague Catherine Rossi.
Like myself and a number of other experts in the field, you have probably observed that the pandemic has exacerbated and accentuated intimate, familial and structural violence. Nor do we foresee a decline in violence in the post-pandemic period. In fact, we expect to see many more disclosures after the fact by individuals who have tolerated violence for a long time or who have endured more serious violence because of it being more difficult to access resources during the pandemic.
That is why opting to emphasize investment in research into violence seems to us to really be a good solution. It will enable researchers who specialize in the field to continue to support not only practice partners, but also decision-makers like you who want to be part of the solution in order to improve prevention and the way assistance is provided to the people affected. This is, in fact, what we are doing today at this meeting.
These efforts enable us collectively to reduce the social costs, which are enormous. According to the available figures, it costs $6 billion per year, in Canada, to help victims of violence. That valuation actually precedes the pandemic, so that means that the costs are even higher today.
In the last two years, practitioners that specialize in spousal violence have faced a double challenge: first, they have had to respond to the rise in requests for help, and, second, they have had to adapt their resources to comply with public health rules. The history of the research done in the last 30 years in the area of violence shows that given this kind of challenge, researchers and practitioners have to work together to achieve social innovations. So I welcome your initiative. Thank you for the great idea of doing a national study of violence. It will enable us to contribute to this together and continue to make progress toward the dream of greater social justice and more egalitarian social relationships.
In addition to my duties as director of a centre and a team at the centre, the work I undertake in my personal capacity deals with youth: children's exposure to spousal violence, co‑occurrence of spousal violence and familial violence against children, coordination between the help resources concerned, and preventive work with young people.
I have just completed a study of young adults who were exposed to spousal violence in childhood or adolescence. I was saddened to find that despite the seriousness of the violence to which they were exposed, almost none of the young people who participated in our study had had access to specialized assistance in spousal violence when they were children or adolescents. They suffered when they were young, but it was only once they were adults and able to find help themselves that they finally obtained resources. It also takes a lot of effort to find those resources and to find services that are adapted to what they are experiencing now that they have become young adults.
We also know that these young people have fewer resources in their natural network than young people who are not exposed to spousal violence. Often, it is parents who help young people and keep them at home for a long time while they are going to school. In the case of these young people, it is often the opposite: they want to escape the violent home if the parents are still together.
These are major challenges. We decided to transform the results of our research into practical, concrete tools, which we have made available online. We relied on the results of our research to identify the interventions that young people consider to be effective and thus determine what an adult can do when faced with a young person who has been exposed to spousal violence, to help him or her. We designed a website organized by field of activity, so there are sections for young people attending school, living in group homes, and so on.
I see that my speaking time is up.