Thank you and good afternoon, honourable members of Parliament and distinguished colleagues.
Thank you for the invitation to present to this committee today.
My name is Lorie English, and I am the executive director at the West Central Women's Resource Centre.
Our centre is located in downtown Winnipeg, and we've been providing supports to women and gender-diverse people throughout the city for more than 20 years. One of the critical services we provide is supporting people who have experienced gender-based violence.
Gender-based violence is one of the most pervasive health risks to women and gender-diverse people in Canada. It also has one of the most underfunded responses to a health risk. Evidence has demonstrated that intimate partner violence is dramatically under-reported in Canada. Only about a third of women report violence to police. As a result, our ability to gather data and to respond to the enormity of this problem has been limited, but here is what we do know.
On average, it takes seven times to successfully leave a violent situation. This is due in large part to the lack of a sustained response to experiences of violence. The lack of resources, once the crisis is over, often leads women back to violence.
We need supports that both respond to the immediate crisis and assist women and gender-diverse people to rebuild their lives once they've exited violence.
The impacts of gender-based violence are tremendous. Victims often experience chronic illness, stress, increased problematic substance use and increased mental health conditions. Children who are victims of violence can see negative impacts with their health and development and are increasingly likely to become involved in violent relationships later in life. Men who are perpetrators of violence have often previously been victims of violence and therefore need to heal their own trauma as part of the work to break the cycle.
In addition, gender-based violence contributes negatively to the social determinants of health, including increased levels of poverty, housing insecurity, food insecurity, job loss and unemployment. It is one of the leading pathways for women and gender-diverse people into homelessness, and that homelessness is one of the key reasons that women return to violent situations.
When violence and housing insecurity intersect, our systems are woefully inadequate. Our homelessness sector is not equipped to deal with GBV. Much of our GBV sector is not equipped to deal with the complications of homelessness or of working with people who use substances or have complex mental health issues. Neither sector is adequately supporting members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community. The result is that those who are most vulnerable are often the most underserved and left with literally no safe options.
We also know that COVID-19 added further barriers to women accessing safe and appropriate supports. The important and critical public health measures of restriction and isolation have exacerbated the stressors facing those at risk of violence. This increased stress has resulted in an increased likelihood of violence within relationships at home and within intimate partnerships.
For many years, Manitoba's rates of violence against women have been the highest in the country, and they are twice the national average. We are in urgent need of significant and sustained investments in addressing gender-based violence. In order to be effective, we need intersectional approaches to violence prevention and recovery.
Currently in Manitoba, populations that are particularly underserved are indigenous people, newcomers, people with disabilities, 2SLGBTQ+ women and gender-diverse people. These are the greatest areas of need, because indigenous women are two and a half times more likely to be victims of violence than non-indigenous women. Newcomer women are more vulnerable to domestic violence due to economic dependence, language barriers and lack of knowledge about community resources. People who identify as lesbian, bisexual, trans or gender-diverse are three to four times more likely to experience intimate partner violence.
Almost all of the women we work with tell us that one of their greatest barriers in accessing supports, as well as in their desire to report, is a lack of cultural safety, yet our gender-based violence sector nationally, and especially here in Manitoba, remains woefully underfunded and has been for decades.
We urgently need to implement critical principles of harm reduction in our shelter system, but we can't until our shelters are adequately funded to have more than one or two staff working at a time to ensure safety. We need to be able to respond to the demanding need for violence recovery supports, but we can't when caseloads of GBV workers creep higher while their wages remain lower than any other essential service. We desperately need responses that go beyond the 30-day shelter stay, because when women exit without a plan that includes income and housing, returning to the cycle is often their only option.
We need to treat gender-based violence as the critical health crisis that it is and work to eradicate it with the commitment we would to any other health crisis.
Thank you.