Twenty-Five Years Later: Still Holding the Hope  

by Deborah Sinclair and Susan Harris 

When we were asked to write this article, we responded enthusiastically as it provided an opportunity for us to reflect on our journey over the past 25 years. In the early days of work on violence against women (VAW), we were armed with a passion for social justice, a budding feminist awareness, and some personal experience yet to be deconstructed. Fresh out of graduate school, we had not a clue that we were embarking on our life’s work.

We had the good fortune to be mentored by a feminist social worker who was committed to a high standard of practice and keen to make a difference. For the next few years, we immersed ourselves in understanding the daily lives of women exposed to abuse in their intimate relationships, and their hopes and dreams for themselves, their partners, and their children. It was 1978. We were employed in a traditional social-work agency in a sprawling Toronto suburb, and little was written to guide us in our work. We learned from each other through daily discussion, twice-weekly team meetings, long supervision sessions, and ultimately by paying close attention to the women we were serving. We quickly learned that women wanted to end the abuse in their relationships, but not necessarily to end their marriages. This challenged the early belief that if a woman left her abusive partner, she would end the violence and life would be fine.

We invited our early mentors—Kathryn Conroy, Anne Ganley, and David Adams—to Ontario to expand our thinking. Other activists and allies with whom we collaborated closely included the women at Interval House (one of the first five shelters in Canada) and the volunteers at EWA. It became painfully apparent that we could spend 24 hours a day for the rest of our lives behind closed doors counselling women and their families to deal with their internal barriers, but it would make little difference in addressing the external barriers they faced when they left our offices. (Randall, 2002)  In part as an antidote to our own despair and to prevent early burnout, we developed a community intervention model [that provided a visual map of effective intervention ~Editor] aimed at both micro and macro levels. (Harris and Sinclair, 1981) 

Over the last 25 years, there has been much to celebrate at each of these levels. Many communities across Canada now have the ability to identify the prevalence of woman abuse. Wide varieties of screening tools have been developed in most sectors (i.e. health-care settings, policing services, and counselling agencies). These tools often include best practices to guide staff in facilitating effective disclosure interviews.

Many communities across Canada have the ability to provide around-the-clock crisis capacity through women’s shelters, help-lines, hospital emergency rooms, and local police services. Crisis-intervention counselling, focused first and foremost on the safety of women and children, is commonplace. Counselling programs exist for batterers, woman-abuse survivors, and children exposed to woman abuse. Both individual and group programs are widespread and only those with a feminist analysis focused on the ‘misuse of power and control’ rather than ‘anger management’ are supported by government funding. (For an example, see Pence and Paymar, 1993.) Most sectors that provide direct service to women and their families have developed excellent, feminist-oriented training materials and curricula, such as the VAW/CAS curriculum, which is mandatory for police officers in Ontario. (Ministry of Public Safety and Security)

Many communities have made the effort to coordinate services for women affected by woman abuse. For example, in Ontario there are approximately 50 coordinating committees. We have many examples of excellent prevention and public-education campaigns, such as those created by the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, Education Wife Assault, and the Ontario Women’s Directorate. Political lobbying by the VAW movement was successful in influencing government’s conceptualization of woman-abuse issues. These beliefs informed all government-funded programs across Ontario. The power of our influence led us to believe that the financial support needed to sustain our work would continue to be available.

Even though VAW efforts have been transformational in the lives of individual women and institutions, these efforts became hampered by changing political priorities. The foundational work in the 1980s and early ‘90s was stalled by diminishing funds and the rise of a right-wing agenda in many parts of the country. The focus on the criminal aspects of woman abuse has led the government to over-emphasize criminal-justice system responses and ignore the reality that woman abuse is much more than a crime. It is clear that, until all women in all their diversity have true access to affordable housing, adequate income support, accessible daycare, and equal pay for work of equal value,  all women will continue to be vulnerable to male violence.

Along with the rise of the influence of the right, we also began to feel the weight of the backlash. This was evidenced as the language of woman abuse fell into the morass of gender-neutral, victim-of-crime terminology. The focus on criminalization obscured the reality that only one in four abused women gets involved in the criminal-justice system.

After years of VAW activists documenting the serious effects of exposure to violence on children, several provinces have made exposure of children to woman abuse a reportable offence under child-welfare legislation. Historically, the response of the child-welfare system to woman-abuse cases has been highly criticized by the VAW community. Criticisms have ranged from ignoring the problem to colluding with the abuser, blaming the mother by pathologizing her trauma, and charging the mother with failure to protect the child.

An over-emphasis by the child-welfare sector on victim safety planning, without corresponding attention to containing the abuser, runs the risk of another form of victim-blaming: holding the woman, rather than the abuser and the community, responsible for her safety and the safety of her children. Future efforts in child welfare need to incorporate accountability, containment, risk reduction, and a focus on responsible fathering.

As frontline services expand and diversify, the issue of staff training and re-training remains significant. We believe specialized training programs are more effective than professional degrees as most degrees offer only minimal training, if any, in this area. The VAW movement needs to hold a place for women with life experience, political passion, and strong advocacy skills. The present movement is built on the shoulders of such early feminist activists. Shelters should not be pressured into becoming social-work agencies burdened with government red tape and requiring professional credentials. Battered women need free space just to be—a place to find their voice and their freedom. All of us need to support the independence of women’s shelters in order to maintain that space. Shelters do their best work when they can provide independent advocacy for women.

The greatest challenge to the continued relevancy of the VAW movement will lie in our ability to address the differential impact of abuse on diverse groups of women. Vijay Agnew rightly critiques our early analysis as too narrow in perspective. (1988) We now know that, while gender provides an essential window into understanding woman abuse, it should not be the only one. Depending on social location, greater harm and fewer paths to freedom are available to women on the margins: women of colour, Aboriginal women, immigrant and refugee women, lesbians, rural women, differently abled women, and Deaf women.

All of our work is political. Knowing where VAW fits in the larger work of world peace will assist us in linking to global political activity, ever mindful that feminism is essentially a politic of HOPE. We must continue to construct a shared understanding, develop clarity of focus, create opportunities for collective strategies, open space for new leaders to emerge, and seek opportunities for replenishment, while shouting out our victories. We move forward holding the belief that an end to oppression is not only possible, but is essential to our survival. u

Susan Harris is the Clinical Program Manager at Catholic Family Services in Peel-Dufferin, Ontario. Susan has a long history of VAW work within family-service settings, and she and Deborah have been colleagues since 1978.

Deborah Sinclair has been in social-work practice and consultancy for the past 26 years and has an independent counselling practice in Toronto. She is a leading member of VAW work in Canada and has been working closely with EWA since its early years.

References

Adams, David (1980) Personal Communication, founding member of EMERGE, a men’s collective in Boston MA.

Agnew, Vijay (1998) In Search of a Safe Place: Abused Women and Culturally Sensitive Services, Toronto: U of T Press Inc.

Conroy, Kathryn (1982) “Long-term Treatment Issues with Battered Women,” in S Flanza (Ed) The Many Faces of Family Violence, Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas.

Ganley, Anne (1982) Court-Mandated Counselling for Men Who Batter: A Three-Day Workshop For Mental Health Professionals, Washington DC: Center for Women Policy Studies.

Harris, S, and Sinclair, D (1981) Domestic Violence Project: A Comprehensive Model for Intervention into the Issue of Domestic Violence, Family Services Association of
Metropolitan Toronto.

Ministry of Public Safety and Security (xxxx) Routine Comprehensive Screening (RUCS) Protocol, London ON: Middlesex-London Health Unit.

Pence, Ellen, and Paymar, Michael (1993) Education Groups for Men who Batter: the Duluth Model, New York: Springer.

Randall, Melanie (2002) Understanding Woman Abuse: Social and Political Challenges, Toronto ON: EWA.