Violence against women and girls includes domestic violence (intimate partner violence, or IPV, and family violence), sexual assault, sexual harassment, rape, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and sex trafficking.
Spousal violence is consistently the most common form of violence against women in Canada.
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March 20, 2019
In the last week, we have witnessed and experienced an increase of transphobic, transmisogynistic hate speech online and backlash in response to a recent funding decision made by the City of Vancouver. As a trans-inclusive anti-violence organization, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide a counter-narrative to this trans-exclusionary radical feminism. It's no secret that there is a long, difficult history between feminism and trans people.
Preventing gender-based violence and supporting survivors requires leadership and investment from all levels of government, coordinated work by a variety of stakeholders, a robust human rights framework, and meaningful grassroots community engagement. In Canada, initiatives to prevent gender-based violence and support survivors have been historically shaped around the needs of white, settler, English-speaking, cisgender, heterosexual and able-bodied women who are Canadian citizens and who have and some degree of economic and class privilege. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift and new frameworks in order to centre the needs of Black, racialized, immigrant, refugee, migrant worker, international student, and non-status survivors of violence (henceforth referred to as "migrant and racialized survivors of violence"), and highlight the need to carry out this work in solidarity with Indigenous peoples.
Shelter service provision to immigrant women impacted by family violence is explored by presenting findings from a qualitative research study. Semi-structured interviews were employed with four front-line workers of shelters for abused women and children in the Southern Ontario region. The training and experiences of participants were explored and workers were asked for recommendations that would improve shelter service delivery to immigrant women. Findings indicated that service delivery issues continue to exist when supporting immigrant women in shelters including lack of sufficient training, language barriers, and cultural barriers. Participants discussed a wide range of recommendations for one-to-one support, shelters, and larger systems that they believed would allow for better shelter service delivery to immigrant women.
More recently, promoting wellbeing and healthy relationship communication in ethno-cultural families has become a growing interest among clinical and community workers. In this context, engaging ethno-cultural communities in creating an effective response to address family violence was identified as an essential step (Ekuwa, 2004; Bent-Goodley, 2005). Despite the fact that domestic abuse is still a taboo topic in many cultures, there has been considerable progress in raising awareness about the profound implications of this social problem in various ethnic groups in North America (Grossman & Lundy, 2007).
Immigrants represent 28% of the Canadian population over 65, and older immigrants – more of them are women – now comprise the majority of the aging population in Canada's large metropolitan cities. Despite ample research about abuse of older adults in general, few Canadian studies have focused on abuse of older immigrant women. This paper reports policy-relevant findings from a project that aimed to develop a shared program of research to prevent abuse of older immigrant women in Canada. The project involved a review of the literature on elder abuse and immigrant women, local meetings with key stakeholders in seven provinces, a public event in Toronto, and a two-day interdisciplinary symposium with provincial stakeholders.