Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for inviting the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, which I'll refer to as CIWA. It is a privilege to be here today to share and to gain further insights on this issue. We are very thankful for all the work being done by this committee to end intimate partner violence in Canada.
I'm calling from Calgary, Alberta, located on the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty No. 7 region in southern Alberta. Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta Region 3.
At CIWA, we work with immigrant and refugee families as our target population, and in our 40 years of experience in working in this area, we believe that there is a huge need to increase accessibility and reduce social isolation and barriers to accessing community services for immigrant women/men and their families living in family/domestic intimate partner violence situations.
Intimate partner violence is growing at an alarming pace, and the pandemic only brought a further huge spike globally. At CIWA, we saw a 57% increase in the clients whom we serve. Immigrant women whom we serve are at a higher risk due to language and culture barriers, poverty and lack of information on available resources.
In our experience, violence occurs among immigrant families due to the stressors related to overcoming the barriers related to settlement and integration, an inability to meet basic needs, unique personal circumstances and vulnerabilities, and the barriers related to premigration, migration and resettlement. Cultural barriers, stigma and role reversals only intensify their abuse experience.
This is further deepened when there is pre-existing trauma in the case of refugees, for example, who come with adverse experiences of war zones, have large families, maybe have disabilities, low to zero literacy in their own language, huge cultural barriers and stigma. Intimate partner violence programs and services that we offer should aim to positively impact immigrant families, as they should anywhere, by addressing these grassroots issues and changing the way people perceive and handle stress, gender equality, equity, family conflict, etc., as they are able only then to cope with all of these barriers.
Community education and awareness are also extremely important in reaching out to victims, perpetrators and family members. Our experience shows that the need to extend the services beyond women to encompass men and boys and the community at large is critical. Very often, immigrant men come from cultures of toxic masculinity, with defined gender roles and cultural norms that do not expect them to be part and parcel of the daily routines, of upbringing and of supporting their partners. They find it difficult to understand this expectation. We have learned that the real empowerment for women and children will truly happen when we engage men and boys.
This learning became much more concrete with our engagement with the University of Calgary's violence research, Shift, and the engaging men learning collaborative. For one, we believe that working with men and boys on prevention will only enhance our collective learning to better understand men's needs and issues and their level of a lack of awareness. This will then enable us to offer concrete support for women and children and holistic services for the entire family and will address the grassroots factors that lead to perpetuation of violence and abuse.
At CIWA, we have identified some of the best and promising practices to improve supports and protection for women and girls living in unsafe environments. This includes reaching out to them where they are: when they naturally go out for their daily tasks or congregate naturally in community centres, clinics, English classes and workplaces.
Offering information in a culturally sensitive way and in their first language is critical in regard to the issue itself and to education and awareness, be it tools or resources—everything—as is engaging boys and girls early on in schools through developing and offering a gender-based violence prevention curriculum that we have developed and are offering in some schools.
Also included are healthy relationships; focused education for adults and youth; engaging ethnic communities and faith-based leaders in education and awareness to help reduce the stigma and to talk about healthy gender norms, healthy masculinity, healthy relationships and cross-cultural parenting, and eventually connecting the women and girls with them for accessing cultural supports from within the community because they trust them, and connecting women and girls with the financial resources to make them less dependent, not depending on the partner.
Included as well is having projects like “Find Me a Home”, which we have at CIWA to offer emergency transitional housing and crisis supports so that they can leave the abusive situation, which includes partnering with hotels and motels that we consider safe and having a strong understanding of various intersectionalities with intimate partner violence—the health sector, disabilities, employment—to further address the factors that truly limit the women and girls from leaving the abusive situation and to create customized support services and resources to meet their unique needs.
Having a cross-sector and cross-system coordinated response model is extremely important and efficient. We have an example in Calgary with the police services community-based “Equally Safe” model that CIWA is also a formal partner of. Also important is having in each city and province an initiative based on a collective impact model, such as the Calgary Domestic Violence Collective's Impact Alberta violence prevention framework. Those are some of the examples of cross-system sector collaboration that we have.
I will leave at the end with some of the recommendations that we have come up with. We just wrapped up a WAGE-funded research project called “Employment Security Alliance” and our recommendations are that workplaces should have the culturally sensitive support—