Good afternoon.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
I apologize to the English speakers, but because of time, my opening remarks today will be in French only.
My name is Marion Turmine, and I'm the director of Quebec operations for the Veterans Transition Network, I joined the VTN team in April 2018.
I'm an anthropologist, and I have over 30 years of solid management experience in international cooperation for several major international organizations, including nearly 20 years in the field in a variety of contexts, including conflict zones and fragile countries.
For the past five years, I have been working with the Veterans Transition Network. My role with VTNV led me to become a peer supporter for women veterans' programs. My direct involvement with these women's programs has given me a better understanding of the challenges and complexity of the issues faced by women who have worn the uniform and the challenges of transition to civilian life.
The programs we deliver at the Veterans Transition Network, were initially developed in 1998 at the University of British Columbia, and refined over 15 years of development and research.
In 2012, our charity was established to expand these programs to veterans across Canada free of charge, while reducing the barriers of geography, gender, and language.
In 2022, 40% of our programs delivered across Canada were for women, and 25% of our programs were delivered in French.
My testimony today will focus on our recommendations for the development and delivery of mental health services for women veterans. These recommendations are based on the VTN's past 10 years of experience in delivering and evaluating our counselling programs in order to meet the needs of women veterans.
The first recommendation may be summarized as: unique experience, unique needs. Women are a minority in the Canadian Armed Forces and among veterans. This social and cultural reality affects the challenges they experience in service and in transition afterwards.
In our experience working with women veterans, we often hear that to exist as a minority in the Canadian Armed Forces, they work to blend into the larger population of their male colleagues, and they avoid building connections with female peers. As a result, they often lack social and peer support.
Finally, women in our society still perform the majority of family labour such as child care and housework. This places an additional burden on their mental health, and affects their ability to access services and supporters.
Our first recommendation is that mental health services for women veterans must be developed with their unique service, mental health, and accessibility challenges in mind. Services for women veterans should involve social engagement and support, and they must be equipped to deal with the reality of female sexual trauma.
Now for our second recommendation. There is an important difference between a traumatic injury caused by serving an institution, and an injury caused by the institution itself.
In counselling, this is called sanctuary trauma, a traumatic injury caused by a person or a place that was believed to be safe.
Women in the Canadian Armed Forces frequently experience sanctuary trauma. They experience it when they suffer military sexual misconduct, and many experience it again when they attempt to report the misconduct.
This is especially true if they must ask for help from the same institution or system that caused their injury and are disregarded or silenced.
That's why our second recommendation is that mental health services for women veterans must be aware and equipped to address sanctuary trauma. Further, it is important that independent services external to the military system and the government are available for women who have experienced sanctuary trauma.
The third recommendation concerns research and lived experience. In the 1980s, the Canadian Armed Forces opened the majority of occupations to women, thus beginning to expand the participation of women in the Canadian military.
However, the military has been slow to adapt its practices to the participation of women, and as a veterans service provider, we see first-hand the negative impacts of this problem.
We see physical impacts such as chronic injuries experienced by women who have been issued gear designed for men's bodies. We see the mental health impacts of women having to navigate male military culture.
So our third recommendation is that we need continued research to understand the specific challenges that women face in service and in transition. The findings of this research and the perspective of women service members should be integrated in a meaningful way into the planning and decision-making practices of the Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Canada.
We believe that incorporating this lived experience into decision making can create meaningful change, which will in future help prevent many of the issues that women veterans currently face because of their service to Canada.
Before concluding, I'd like to thank women veterans for their service to our country.
Thank you for your time. I welcome your questions.