Every so often, an idea is so on the mark, everyone wonders why it wasn’t thought of sooner.
A proposal to build a women’s transition home to allow people an escape route from domestic violence is one such idea.
Transition and support housing is sorely needed in Inuvik. Looking back over the year in police reports to council, to date in 2021 there have been 110 complaints to RCMP about family and/or domestic violence, resulting in 70 criminal charges. That averages out to 11 calls and seven charges per month, which is a lot for a town of roughly 3,000 people.
To put it another way, there are 1,280 housing units in Inuvik, including single family homes, apartments, row houses and so forth. At the current rate, statistically speaking, every household in Inuvik could potentially be subject to domestic violence once over a 12-year period — which is the time it takes to raise one child through their most important developmental years.
It’s not exactly a state-secret that domestic violence can frequently pass from generation to generation. Children who observe people successfully using violence to get what they want will emulate the behaviour as effectively as they would people successfully using kindness to get what they want.
So a transition home to help people get out from under the thumb of abuse is a vital tool for the community to heal itself. However, while a transition house provides a means to break the cycle of violence, it can’t do it alone.
Giving people a secure place while they plan their new lives elsewhere is important. However, that space needs to provide education for people striking out on their own. While we can usually see the physical side of domestic violence, the finer points of it tend to remain hidden under the surface. A frequently observed behaviour of abusive people is to seek out partners of low education, because ignorance is easier to exploit.
Many times, abusive partners will force complete control over finances, relationship decisions, friends, even place of employment. Many people fall into this trap simply because they aren’t confrontational and don’t realize their independence is being taken away until its too late — or in the worst case they move from an abusive family to an abusive relationship and never realize they’re trapped.
To counter this, we need programs to teach financial literacy, budgeting, career management, home management and other essential skills for women escaping domestic violence. In many cases, these are people who are on their own for the first time in their lives and that can be pretty overwhelming, whether starting fresh here in the Delta or a new life elsewhere in Canada.
Naturally, the first question arising from this is who should pay for said education and the answer is obvious — Ottawa. The majority of the domestic violence happening in the North is a byproduct of the Residential School System and Canada’s attempted genocide of the people of Turtle Island. People were taken away from their families — often violently — then taken to institutions where they were subject to more violence and other horrors children should never have to endure. Many people alive today never had a chance.
Domestic violence in the north is Ottawa’s mess. Canada should pay for the clean up.