Violence in the lives of Aboriginal girls and women has received increasing attention in recent years especially in the wake of growing concern about how Canada's social and legal institutions have turned a blind eye to this issue. All across the country, many girls and young women living in Aboriginal communities and urban centers are struggling to cope with violence and its aftermath. According to the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP, 1996), violence is the most important issues facing Aboriginal communities. This fact sheet provides a glimpse of some of the information that is available about violence in the lives of Aboriginal girls and young women in Canada.
This background paper explores how the two drivers of men's violence against women — the unequal distribution of power and resources between women and men, and rigid gender roles and stereotypes — enable violence against women to occur. The resource draws on the internationally recognised ecological approach to understanding violence against women, developed by Dr Lori Heise. This approach conceptualises violence against women as a multifaceted interplay among the individual, organisational, and institutional factors in our sociocultural landscape (VicHealth 2007). An ecological approach acknowledges the reciprocal relationship between behaviours and the environments in which people live, work and play.
This guide has been developed by the Multicultural Centre for Women's Health (MCWH) for anyone who is working to prevent violence against women. The guide is informed by Australia's National Framework for Prevention: Change the Story and assumes the reader has an understanding of violence against women and is already familiar with the recommended key actions and approaches for primary prevention.
What We Know about IPV and HIV in Women
- Intimate partner violence (IPV) includes physical violence, sexual violence, threats of physical or sexual violence, stalking and psychological aggression (including coercive tactics) by a current or former intimate partner.
- Findings from the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate that 35.6% of women in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, and 5.9% or 6.9 million women experienced these forms of violence in the year prior to the survey.
Recent changes to Canadian immigration policies have made intra-family adaptation and interaction more restrictive and stressful, which in turn has implications for intergenerational relations in post-migration contexts. This working paper is a review of the literature on intergenerational violence; specifically on child abuse, conflicts between adolescents/youth and their parents, and elder abuse. Each of these areas are explored using an intersectionality approach as the authors present definitions of violence, risk and protective factors, and barriers to help-seeking. The analysis reveals that gender and gendered manifestations of violence intersect with ageism, racism, sexism, and other factors requiring a complex understanding as well as nuanced solutions to addressing intergenerational violence in the post-migration context. The review also demonstrates a need for further research into the possible role of immigration stress in intergenerational violence and into the cultural and structural factors that may mitigate its effects.
Intersectionality is a way to think about and act upon social inequality and discrimination. It offers a promising approach to these issues within public policy and within public health. This briefing note briefly explains intersectionality and explores the potential of an intersectional approach to reducing health inequalities.
In this article, we explore intimate partner violence (IPV) from an intersectional, feminist perspective. We describe how an updated feminist view guides us to a perspective on IPV that is more strongly grounded in an anti-oppressive, non-violent, socially just feminist stance than a second-wave gender-essential feminist stance that suggests that patriarchy is the cause of IPV. At the time we began to work together it seemed that a researcher had to be identified as a "family violence" researcher or a "feminist" researcher of violence against women, and that it wasn't possible to be a feminist researcher who looked beyond patriarchy as the cause of IPV. We advocate critically thinking about essentialist practices in clinical work so that we can maintain an anti-oppressive, socially just, non-violent approach to working with clients who experience IPV.
This toolkit has been separated into different topic areas so that you can view the section(s) that are most relevant for you.
The topics in this toolkit reflect some of the suggestions and discussions that took place during the intersectionality workshops, including applying an intersectional perspective to policies, services and programs, research and community education. This toolkit is not designed to be a critical reflection piece. This toolkit is designed to be practical and to be accessible to many non profit organizations with varying missions and mandates. To learn more about the history and philosophy regarding intersectionality, we recommend reading some of the resources listed in the Resource section.
Although intersectionality can be hard to apply given limitations with staff, volunteer and financial resources that many non-profit groups experience, this resource is intended to offer concrete and practical suggestions and tools for organizations that are interested in opening their doors wider to the communities they serve.
The Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative with Vulnerable Populations (CDHPIVP) defines safety planning as strategies to protect the woman and individuals close to her (e.g. children). Strategies may include educating women about their level of risk; changing residence, planning a method of escape and relocating elsewhere, an alarm for a higher priority police response, a different work arrangement, and/or readily accessible items needed to leave the home in an emergency including contact information about local/ closest domestic violence resources.
Given the extent to which Canada and the global community have embraced education as a means to increasing gender equality this would suggest that progress on economic and political empowerment should follow such high levels of educational equality. However, this is not the case. Canada's score for economic participation and opportunity is well below its 'A+' for health and education.