Thank you very much, and thank you to the committee for this opportunity to speak with you today.
My name is Angela Marie MacDougall. I am the executive director of Battered Women's Support Services, also known as BWSS, and I am so honoured to be here on behalf of our wonderful team of volunteers, staff, leadership, board of directors and, most definitely, the 18,000 victims and survivors who access our services annually.
We are an organization focused on ending violence that takes action through community-based interventions. As well, we provide direct services for victims and survivors of a range of gender- and relationship-based violence, including intimate partner violence and sexualized violence. Our work extends into education and training as well as a number of different activities that we do on education and prevention. Our efforts also involve legal advocacy, community legal education and law reform wherever the law intersects with gender-based violence. Our research and policy work examine root causes. We're always looking for solutions to address GBV, gender-based violence, and intimate partner violence.
As a regional organization based here in metro Vancouver, British Columbia, also known as the traditional territory of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh people, BWSS has had the opportunity to hear from our communities about the similarities and disparities in services and supports all across British Columbia and in Canada.
My remarks today are to examine the deeper dimensions of the impacts of intimate partner violence and gender-based violence. As our founding women recognized, intimate partner violence takes place not only between two individuals in isolation but rather in a social context and within a world view that systemically reinforces the power of some people to oppress others.
We echo the most excellent recommendations that have already been put forward to the committee in previous sessions. We want to underline and emphasize that previous witnesses have recognized the need for a whole-of-government, cross-sectoral and cross-jurisdictional approach to addressing gender-based violence. This approach could be accomplished through a national action plan on violence against women and gender-based violence.
We are one of the over 40 organizations and advocates that contributed to the development of the road map for the national action plan, and as co-chair for the “support for survivors and their families pillar”, I want to really emphasize the important work, the road map, which I understand the committee has received from Women’s Shelters Canada. We want to urge the committee to promote timely action on resourcing the implementation of the national action plan and the over 100 recommendations that have already been set out in the report.
While this is an important framework that gives us an opportunity to really tackle the root causes of gender-based violence and to lessen the systemic inequities that allow gender-based violence to continue unabated, I want to emphasize today some crosscutting recommendations and areas in particular that I think we should focus our work on.
As you probably know, today is the day after March 21, which is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. At BWSS, we serve all survivors, including trans and cis survivors. However, today I wish to make visible the experiences of indigenous, Black, newcomer, immigrant/refugee and racialized survivors so that we understand and are thinking about the ways in which anti-violence service provision, advocacy and government policy can centre the very unique realities for survivors.
Every day during the pandemic we have been witness to the escalating racism that indigenous, Black, Asian, Muslim and other racialized communities, especially racialized women and gender-diverse people, experience. We ask the committee to better understand and raise awareness of the experiences of indigenous, Black, newcomer, immigrant/refugee and racialized survivors in order to enable them to access formal and institutional responses to gender-based violence.
What you might not know is that as an organization that's been delivering services for the last 40 years, we have been very careful to focus on specialized supports. As a result, we've heard from survivors that they understand most profoundly that, for us, it's very important to understand that racism exists and that survivors experience it.
I'd like to urge the committee, through your investigation, through your recommendations and through the actions that come out of this work, to respond to gender-based violence through working to end racism. We know it's challenging, but it is necessary.
Thank you.