Good morning, Madam Chair and honourable members. Thank you for this opportunity.
I am Nneka MacGregor, co-founder and executive director of the Women's Centre for Social Justice, better known as Women at the Centre. I'm appearing today with my colleague Sonya Boyce.
We're a survivor-led organization of diverse women, gender-diverse and trans survivors. Our community shapes our priorities, our research and our policy recommendations. Over the past five years, Women at the Centre led a groundbreaking initiative entitled “Truth & Transformation: Advancing Gender Equity For Black Women, Girls And Gender Diverse, and Trans Peoples In Canada”. It was funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada, and we engaged over 700 participants from across every province and territory. It is, to our knowledge, the first pan-Canadian study to centre Black survivors' and advocates' experiences of gender-based violence in their own words. The peer-reviewed literature on this specific population and their experiences of the shelter system is very thin, and this study, in significant part, begins to fill that gap.
Black survivors are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Their experiences reveal the structural gaps within the shelter and transitional housing systems that might otherwise go unnoticed—gaps that affect many survivors across Canada but are experienced differently across populations. We know that you've heard that women and children are turned away from shelters every day, and Women at the Centre's evidence is on the survivors who never reach the door. We're going to share three key findings from our research.
Canadian scholar Patrina Duhaney found that Black women who sought institutional help for intimate partner violence frequently experienced increased scrutiny, monitoring and criminalization as a direct result of disclosure. Our research confirms this pattern at scale, with survivors describing encountering the trope of “angry Black woman” when seeking safety. Expressions of fear, distress and self-advocacy were viewed as aggression. They described having to adjust their tone, body language and facial expressions, all while in crisis and trying to find support. Survivors also described avoiding shelters entirely, because entering a shelter meant contact with police and child welfare and immigration systems, which are sites that research has shown to be embedded with gendered anti-Black violence.
When they did access shelters, Black survivors described spaces without culturally appropriate food or products for black skin or black hair, and with staff not equipped to recognize violence that was both gendered and racialized. In the north, survivors described a Black woman who was fleeing violence and was turned away from the only shelter in the community.
I'll pass it over to Sonya.