Survivors also told us that when GBV systems fail, they turn to their kinship networks. This includes grandmothers, aunties, sisters, faith groups and Black-led organizations like ours. This is where many survivors found housing, child care, transportation, emotional support and advocacy. In the words of one survivor, “The shelter turned me away. My auntie took me in. The church helped me with groceries and my kids' school. A Black women's organization helped me find a lawyer. None of that would show up in any government data. But that's what kept me alive.”
These are not informal coping strategies. They are culturally grounded approaches to safety and healing that are rooted in Afrocentric values of kinship, collective responsibility and community care.
I'm going to share five recommendations with you now.
First, expand the scope and language from intimate partner violence to gender-based violence to capture the diverse range of survivors in need of emergency shelter.
Second, establish a dedicated funding stream within bilateral agreements for housing that is specifically designed by and for Black survivors. Funding must include capital investment and operational costs.
Third, fund Black-led, indigenous-led and survivor-led organizations as primary providers of safety and support.
Fourth, mandate the collection of race-disaggregated data across shelter, housing and gender-based violence systems.
Last, require all federal GBV policies, bilateral agreements and shelter funding frameworks to explicitly address gendered anti-Black violence and misogynoir.
In closing, and just to reiterate, there's no robust peer-reviewed literature on the experiences of Black women, girls, gender-diverse and trans survivors in the shelter and transitional housing system in Canada. Our research exists in large part because the literature does not.
Thank you.