Thank you, and good afternoon. I'm Karen Campbell from the Canadian Women's Foundation, joining you today from London, Ontario, on the traditional territories of the Attawandaron, Anishinabe and Haudenosaunee peoples.
The Canadian Women's Foundation is Canada's only national public foundation for women and girls, and one of the 10 largest women's foundations in the world. In partnership with the Department of Women and Gender Equality, we have provided the women's sector with $45 million in pandemic emergency funds as of September 2021, and we're in the process of distributing the next allotment.
Thank you for the invitation to speak to this urgent question.
In 2018, StatsCan reported that every six days a woman is killed by her intimate partner. We know from the excellent work of the Canadian Femicide Observatory that femicide is on the rise, with 160 femicides in 2020, or an average of one woman or girl killed every 2.3 days. They also note that 92 women and girls were killed in the first six months of 2021, 14 more killings than in the same period in 2020, or close to a 20% increase.
This trend is unsurprising to those working with survivors. Whenever communities are under stress, whether from climate-induced disasters, economic downturns or public health crises, GBV rates increase. In our context, this increase has been recognized globally and named “a shadow pandemic”.
Inattention in emergency planning to the predictable increase of GBV has had disastrous consequences, particularly for women and gender-diverse people who are further marginalized by race, indigeneity, sexuality, disability, immigration status or geographic location. The pandemic shines a light on the systemic root causes of all forms of GBV, including intimate partner violence, IPV.
IPV is more than a private or household issue. It is a product of gender inequality, colonization, systemic racism, enableism and the ongoing oppression of marginalized communities in Canada. Indigenous women experience the highest rates of IPV and are killed at nearly seven times the rate of non-indigenous women. Women with a disability are three times more likely to experience violent victimization than those who do not live with a disability. Statistics on these and other populations can be found in our full brief.
There is a significant lack of data on IPV as experienced by Black and racialized women and gender-diverse people, and on how IPV affects women living at the confluence of several groups, such as Black trans women or racialized women with disabilities, presenting important challenges in understanding levels of violence across populations. However, the numbers we do have reveal that IPV and GBV are deeply connected to the systemic violence that confronts women and gender-diverse people every day.
To improve protections for those living in unsafe homes, we must acknowledge the gendered nature of the mental health impacts of the pandemic and its associated restrictions. We need to better understand how job loss, food insecurity, fears of contracting the virus, and social isolation have contributed to the rise of GBV.
Youth-serving organizations report youth spending more time online, where the risk of tech-facilitated violence is a concern. They're witnessing increased suicidality and substance use and the challenges young people face in forming healthy relationships grounded in consent culture in this context.
To eliminate barriers to leaving unsafe environments, we must focus on those bearing the brunt of the economic and social effects of the pandemic: women, trans and non-binary people who are marginalized by race, immigration status, age, ability and socio-economic status. To escape violence, women need an adequate and equitable income, access to housing, affordable child care, and safe and reliable transportation services.
Chronic underfunding of the GBV sector has left survivors at risk. These underfunded and oversubscribed services have seen increased demand and staff burnout. The pandemic shows us that the sector has no surge capacity to deal with crisis impacts and that significant gaps persist in services for the most marginalized. Service providers report that clients are coming to their doors with more complex needs, disclosing more extreme forms of physical and sexual violence. The complexity of cases, combined with barriers to in-person access, is yet another drain on an overtaxed and women-dominated workforce.
To prevent IPV, we need to work on the ground. In addition to the GBV sector's needs, support is required for grassroots groups that are doing the important work of building consent culture and challenging gender norms. Much of this work happens with young people, racialized people, elders, and even men and boys. Many of these groups are ineligible to receive charitable donations under CRA guidelines. Reforming the rules governing the charitable sector to ensure that these groups are resourced is an important step towards ending all forms of GBV.
Importantly, public policy needs to target root causes. Overemphasis on criminal justice responses only scratches the surface and ultimately criminalizes those most in need of relief from the systemic injustices they already face. GBA+ must be embedded in all policy instruments, and they must be grounded in the lived realities of the most marginalized women, trans and non-binary people.
Thank you for your time.