Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak. I appreciate the time you've given me. Thank you so much, each and every one of you from the standing committee, for listening and hearing the voices of the South Asian women I have been trying to represent through many years of work. This is 40 years of service within the South Asian community.
I'm not going to repeat a lot of what has already been said, because so much has been statistically informed and I do not wish to waste my time further on that. Rather, I'll focus on what we have found at the South Asian Women's Centre.
We were founded in 1982, and we have served over 900 women in abusive situations in the past three years. When I say abusive situations, I mean they have come; they have reported, and many of them don't even get out of that situation.
When we talk about intimate family violence or intimate partner violence, we understand that within the South Asian community, it reflects an issue between two spouses. Very often, women in the South Asian community will say that's what they were destined for. There's almost a fatalistic unwillingness to accept this issue or to even try to complain about it.
I have presented my paper, so I'm going to focus more on the impact of this pandemic and what we saw coming out of it.
SAWC would like to focus on the condition of South Asian women during COVID-19. We feel that the issue of recovery cannot be trivialized, as it will take years for women to get over the traumatic consequences of heightened abuse because of isolation and so many other factors. It's across all ages. The barriers that South Asian women across all ages and genders face include racism, language, death, grief, access to housing, health, transportation, income security, child care, immigration status, etc.
We always talk about this, but COVID-19 magnified these issues. This was apparent based on the numbers of women who sought help during this time. Our offices were open all through COVID, because women from the South Asian community have very unique needs. Many of them do not have access to computers and do not know how to read and write English. Therefore, we needed to make sure there was an ability to communicate with them, which is why we stayed open. We also took care of all the public health care needs, including hosting vaccination clinics.
Between April 2020 and December 2021, SAWC's seven counsellors received over 4,000 calls, and approximately 900 of them were related to abuse.
The focus of this brief is to look at the intersectionality between gender, poverty, mental health, trauma and immigration status. SAWC has been struggling with questions related to these issues coming out of COVID.
We know of at least 10 to 15 cases of women where spouses lost their employment and returned to their home country because they didn't know what else to do. Many of them were employed as taxi drivers, restaurant workers or even small business owners. Most of them lost everything during COVID. Men decided to return to their home countries, essentially deserting their spouses and children.
Many women are not fluent in English and have never had a job. SAWC spent hours filling out application forms to get women some financial help. SAWC's food bank saw an increase in clients, but the South Asian community, as well as the Daily Bread Food Bank, helped us to fulfill many needs. A couple of men who went back home even remarried, completely abandoning the women to fend for themselves, along with dependent children.
There is an intergenerational impact to this. Most of the women do not know how to use a computer and have no access to one, so the issue of online schooling was really tough for them.
Isolation did not allow for any kind of personal support system. SAWC received calls from the same women four to five times a day because of desperation.
SAWC also struggled with international students.
There are three main recommendations I want to make. One is for adequate and core funding to organizations that is more permanent—not like a contract agreement—and will be more core for several years so that we can actually look at the needs of BIPOC women to enable them to live free from abuse, have stable financial security and ensure proper housing, child care and employment.
The second is for senior BIPOC women to have access to long-term care support, adequate income support and housing support.
The third is for women who have been deserted by Canadian men in their home countries to be granted some temporary permanent residency status to enable them to seek justice.