[as published in the EWA Newsletter
V.7 #1 - Winter 1996: The Impact of Funding Cutbacks on assaulted Women]
Ever since women first started to break the silence about violence, they've been talking about the way systems repeat and compound the violence
they experience in relationships. The welfare worker who asks a woman why she stayed. The police officer who laughs with an abusive husband. The doctor who...but you get the picture.
Systems--police, social welfare, governments--can embrace or reject values that give men power to control women by violence. Systems can, in changing, change a culture of sexism. Sadly, in Ontario, the Tory
government has not only embraced values of power and control over women--it has acted on them with speed, and a blunt axe. It matters not whether the Tories mean to hurt abused women. They have. They do.
Cuts to services providing for Basic Needs of Abused Women
Their first, and perhaps most significant blow to women leaving violence was the 22% cut to social assistance. Joined with cuts
to child care, housing subsidy and other social supports, cuts to basic needs left many abused women and their children trapped. Women who leave violent partners often need financial support, either because they're
poor, or because they have no access to their money.
Almost as soon as welfare cuts were announced, women began to tell shelters they couldn't leave because they couldn't support their children. Some women already in
shelters returned home. Some who had already become independent returned to the violence. Some named Mike Harris directly as the root of their predicament.
Nothing has changed since. Women are often caught looking
fruitlessly for housing they can afford. Some still consider giving children to abusive partners--even after months of fighting for custody--because their partners have money for food and clothing. Women have talked
about a more intense level of fear for their lives--reminiscent of the after effects of budget cuts in Alberta, where shelter workers tell of women arriving at shelters with more severe physical injury.
While gutting
all the social supports women and children need to finally free themselves from violence, the Province has also eroded the frontline safety and counselling services women use to escape.
Cuts to direct services for assaulted women
In July, David Tsubouchi, Minister of Community and Social Services (MCSS), signalled the deterioration of direct services to abused women by cutting back all
programs funded by MCSS, including first stage emergency shelters for abused women and their children. In October, he followed it up with another series of cuts:
- elimination of all counselling and support programs in second stage shelters (where abused women live temporarily for up to a year)
- elimination of all anti-violence education and prevention funding within MCSS
- elimination of some counselling funding in community agencies, including culturally specific social services
- elimination of funding for MCSS abusers' counselling
- elimination of funds for community coordinating committees working on violence issues.
- elimination of all funding for the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) for coordination work among member shelters around the province.
The impact of all of these cuts has been severe. Programs in some first stage shelters were cut. Some groups for women. Teen groups. Funding for food and basic necessities in communities without food banks. Community
committee work. Some children's programs. Public education projects and school visits in some communities.
In second stage shelters, supports for women and children were decimated. There's no other word for it. In
response to requests for information from OAITH, second stages reported: children's programs eliminated, women's support groups cut, advocacy within systems ended, individual counselling reduced to crisis intervention.
At least one second stage closed down all programs. Second stage residents were in shock--outraged and betrayed by their "public servants." Some women literally put their lives at risk to speak openly to media,
politicians and local community members.
Counsellors and advocates also began to feel the effects, expressing feelings of demoralization, anger and anxiety. They talked of the frustration of having to tell women the
increasing obstacles now facing them, when their job is to provide options for action. Many felt that unless women had independent financial support, options were so limited as to be more depressing than empowering. At
the end of the first Harris year, many shelter workers are reporting increasing fatigue and feelings of failure.
While women's advocates and abused women continue to struggle within increasing restrictions
of their equality rights, most of us are concerned not about achieving cost-cuttings, but about the costs of cutting.
In the long run, continued and condoned violence against
women will cost, not only in financial terms, both publicly and privately, but more significantly, in physical, emotional and social terms. We will all suffer the effects of this kind of violence.
