Step It Up Ontario!

These women’s spaces (physically and politically) were not created from the vision of politicians, policy wonks, academic authorities or professional experts.  They were formed out of OUR vision—the vision of women working with and for women.

Shelters, rape crisis centres, second stage programs, women’s centres and neighbourhood women’s groups may be part of the social program network, but they are also part of the larger women’s movement to achieve women’s equality. They have a role and responsibility to speak out on systemic issues and to draw links between individual women’s experiences and the material conditions of women’s lives that give rise to violence against them in all its forms.

Right now, the amazing and creative work that has led so many women out of violence and into safety is under stress in a number of ways:

• Women’s grassroots frontline services and groups are poorly funded everywhere in Ontario and much of the work that women see as critical must be supported by fundraising, if a service or group can find it.

• Women’s services are not funded within an equity framework: Aboriginal women’s shelters on reserve do not receive the same funding as other shelters; there are funding discrepancies between Northern and Southern Ontario, rural and urban services, French language services and other services, etc.

• Women’s provincial anti-violence policy and program networks organized by shelters, rape crisis centres, second stage programs, Francophone women’s agencies, women with disabilities, women’s centres and women’s equity groups are provided only with occasional project grants, or nothing at all.  The DisAbled Women’s Network of Ontario, for example, has no funding and no staff.

• Governments have provided funding (however inadequate) for managing the damage done by violence against women, but refuse to fund the public advocacy and social justice work necessary to stop it.

• Funding to make services accessible for women who have children living with disabilities, and for women with disabilities and Deaf women, is not readily available. When it is, it is often seen as an ‘add on’ instead of being integrated into the beginning of a project.  Often, agencies are expected to provide accommodations with existing grant funds. This affects resources actually available to do the work. 

• Despite no funding supports to do this work, provincial, regional and local women’s advocates provide many hours of input and effort for government training and development projects.

• Successive governments have not valued the unique role grassroots women’s groups play in ending violence against women. This has resulted is misguided policy and missed opportunities to be effective in working with women and their children.

• Current policy is focused on dispersing resources into systems and away from women-controlled programs as part of the principle of “shared responsibility”.  Women’s advocates report, however, that many of these “service providers” have little real understanding or expertise on issues of violence against women and even less knowledge of providing anti-racist, anti-oppressive inclusive service.

• Growing support for gender neutral language and policy (despite lip service to “women’s equality”) is undermining the work of grassroots women’s groups.
• Local service system coordination and management mechanisms are funded while women’s efforts to work with each other are largely denied resources.
• Government refuses to acknowledge responsibility to pay increases in pay equity for women’s agencies, so wages in women’s services remain low or frozen at inadequate levels.  Women’s services wages have also been traditionally lower (often much lower) than wages for workers doing similar work within community systems.

It is time for the Province to stop diminishing the importance of women’s shelters, rape crisis centres, second stage programs, neighbourhood women’s groups, second stage housing programs, women’s centres and women’s provincial policy organizations in the fight to end violence against women.

Yes, it is the responsibility of the whole community to respond to violence against women, but it is the expertise and leadership of the women’s movement working with survivors that guides the community to effective action.

Governments have a social responsibility to fund women’s grassroots policy groups and women’s services with ongoing, stable and adequate resources to support their work on behalf all Ontarians. Governments have a social responsibility to include women’s advocates and survivors in all policy and program planning and development.

Some facts:

• Community rape crisis and sexual assault centres in Ontario have had only a 3% increase in base funding since 1995.  Since the cost of living has increased about 25% since then, this actually means a cut in real budget terms of about 22%.

• Although over half of women are estimated to have experienced sexual assault and less than 10% will report it to police, there are only 34 community-based rape crisis/sexual assault centres in all of Ontario.

• Women’s emergency shelter core budgets—always inadequate—were cut 5% in 1995 and then frozen. Some increases have been given since 2004, but they fall far short of what is needed just to keep pace with the cost of living since 1995.  And in some areas—for example utilities—costs have risen much more than that. Two inquest juries have recommended review and increase of women’s shelter core funding, but government has so far ignored these directives.

• Second stage anti-violence women’s programs had 100% of their program funding cut in 1995.  Those second stage programs that survived did so by cutting services, laying off most staff and scraping by on fundraising for a decade. Despite promises to restore funding to second stages prior to the election, the current government has instead chosen to offer piecemeal and partial funding to second stage programs.

• In 2004, out of 96 women’s shelters in Ontario, only four were French language services; of 34 sexual assault centres, only 3 were French language services for and by Francophone women.

• Some women centres and women’s community groups (especially those working with marginalized women) may have no stable funding at all.

• Most women frontline services are still not fully responsive to women with a range of disabilities, and Deaf women. Many still fail to fully meet the needs of marginalized women’s communities.

More Resources:

Doing so much with so little…Overview and profile of French-language violence against women services (1994-2004), Action ontarienne contre la violence faite aux femmes, 2004.

Locked In, Left Out: Impacts of the Progressive conservative budget cuts and policy initiatives on abused women and their children in Ontario, Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH). 1996.

Falling Through the Gender Gap: How Ontario government policy continues to fail abused women and their children.  Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH). 1998.

Experiences of Frontline Shelter Workers in Providing Services to Immigrant Women Impacted by Family Violence, Angie Arora, 2003/04.

Implications of the Shrinking Space for Feminist Anti-Violence Advocacy. Mandy

Bonisteel and Linda Green, 2005.