Looking Back, Looking Forward

Keynote address presented at the Kingston Interval House Annual General Meeting, November 24, 2009.

December 1, 1975: Kingston Interval House first opens its doors.

The need for a shelter for abused women had first been raised some months earlier by the Kingston Women’s Centre. A group of women from the Centre approached Judge George Thompson, at the time Kingston’s family court judge, for support. He agreed, and provided a student working for him to research the need for emergency housing and possible funding sources.

When the shelter opened, it had 6 months of funding from a Local Initiatives Project grant. No one really knew what might happen when that ran out.

The same story was unfolding across Canada. Women were coming together to fight against male violence. In some communities, women were housing battered women in their own homes and relying on private donations to feed them. In others, as in Kingston, the first shelters were opening.

Partner abuse and sexual violence were both well under the radar in those days, and we talked about them as one thing – violence against women. We saw our task as two-fold: to protect and support abused women and to advocate an end to violence.

As we, many of us survivors of male violence ourselves, housed and supported other survivors, we began to talk and we began to agitate. It was not long before we took to the streets in Take Back the Night marches throughout the country. We demanded the right of women to live lives free from violence – at home, at work, at school, in the streets, in our places of worship.

And so was born the women’s equality movement in Canada – second wave feminism, women’s liberation – not in a law school, a lawyer’s office or on Parliament Hill, but in battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centres and women’s kitchens across the country.

The role of the grassroots women’s movement in identifying violence against women as a social problem that needed recognition cannot be overstated. Whether sexual violence or intimate partner violence – or, more often, the two together – women have raised our voices to say “No more:”

 to demand appropriate laws to keep us and our children safe;
 to insist on proper funding for services to support women who experience violence;
 to develop education to prevent violence;
 to call for an anti-oppression/anti-racist framework within which to work for solutions to violence against women.

We have learned a lot as we have led the way in the fight against male violence. We have learned about our own racism, about internalized oppression, about vicarious trauma and class privilege. We have also struggled with and learned from our own power issues within the movement. And, we have kept on learning about the many kinds of violence against women, some of them hidden even from us.

In fact, we have not stopped learning or taking action since the first shelter was opened (in someone’s home) and the first rape crisis line was established (in someone’s home).

(Imagine how much easier those first crisis lines would have been if we had had cell phones or even cordless phones!)

And we have an impressive list of successes for which we can take credit. A few highlights include:

 the creation of the criminal harassment law to respond to stalking, which is a crime largely committed by men against their former partners;
 the establishment of a large national network of reasonably well funded shelters for battered women and their children;
 changes to custody and access law that recognize the impact of violence on the children who are exposed to it;
 the elimination of the use of religious laws in family law arbitration;
 the establishment of programs like the Victim Witness Assistance Program and the Bail Safety Project;
 the criminalization of marital rape in 1983;
 changes to the rape law about consent so that only yes means yes;
 increased privacy for women’s personal records;
 training for police officers, Crowns and judges to raise awareness about both partner assault and sexual violence.

Women, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, have done a lot of good work. As a result, violence against women is not the dirty little secret it once was.

What has happened in Kingston over the 34 years since Kingston Interval House first opened its doors?

Well, obviously, the shelter got more funding. From a start with a 6-month grant, through times of heavy reliance on private donations, through a time when most of the money came from the municipalities the shelter served by way of per diems (which meant the amount of money we received went up and down on a daily basis, depending on how many women were living in the shelter – made budget planning kind of difficult!) to today when provincial funding, while not extravagant, is reasonable and secure.

Over those 34 years, the shelter has moved 5 times.

Organizational structure has changed, with the collective making way for a participatory hierarchy. Staff have been able to enjoy increased job security and better compensation for the very challenging work they do.

Programming has expanded dramatically. Like most shelters, KIH initially offered a warm, safe bed and meals and not much more. Additions came gradually as funding permitted:
 Counseling for women
 Counseling for children
 Clothing for women and children
 Supplies to assist women when they moved into their new homes
 Money for taxi chits, movies etc.
 A quilting program
 Collaborative work in the community at both the individual and systemic levels through the development of protocols and other community responses to VAW
 A shelter vehicle

And, now the shelter is on the brink of one of yet another significant new project – the establishment of second stage housing units in the north end of the city, scheduled to open next spring. This exciting undertaking will allow women who have stayed at KIH to move into their own apartments but continue to have access to the important supports they have used at the shelter while they establish themselves back in the community.
All of this is positive and means that more women and children have access to a safe, supportive resource in the community when they are living with or leaving an abusive situation.

But the focus on service delivery, the mainstreaming, if you will, of VAW services also carries a price tag with it, and that is the loss of focus on working for radical social change.

We all say we want to end violence against women, and we mean it, but really our days are taken up with providing services to victims. I don’t say this as any kind of criticism – god knows there is more than enough work to do just providing services. We never have enough funding, resources, staff, time. . . The work of those of us in the anti-violence movement really is never done. And it is never easy.

Surely it is enough that we get through each day, help this one find housing, that one make a report to the police, yet another one get the counseling she needs to deal with the fact that her father has raped her. . . .

Except it is not, because without a feminist analysis and a commitment to advocating for social justice, we will never end the violence, and that is what we all want. To be out of work, not because we lost our funding but because there are no more women being raped, no more women being beaten, no children witnessing the abuse of their mothers, no children being abused.

Lydia Walker is a longtime activist in the violence against women movement in the United States, starting her work in the shelter movement in rural Arkansas in 1981. She shared some interesting reflections on the VAW movement in an interview with Off Our Backs magazine a few years ago:

“It’s easy to slip into social work instead of social change. The needs of battered women around safety and advocacy are very real and very pressing. You can’t let off that one iota. You have to drive yourself to do both pieces of work and to do the work with battered women in a way that means empowerment and change rather than “service provision.” This is hard when you’re exhausted. As hard as it is, it has got to be done. Forgetting what the hell we’re doing can destroy this movement. Giving shelter might save a woman’s life, but our main goal is to end all types of oppression that are part of the network supporting sexism and classism and racism. Giving shelter will never end violence against women. Social change will end violence against women.”

Just as I am here tonight to congratulate KIH on its 34 years of service to this community, let me also challenge you to reflect on Lydia Walker’s words and consider the importance of what she has to say about our work.

I am going to close by reading you a poem, written by Jacqueline St. Joan, who is an American judge.

I offer it to you tonight as my way of honouring the work done by all of you associated with Kingston Interval House.

The Drama of the Long Distance Runners

I watch you in the courthouse
coffee shop, sitting next to
the angry young woman
the one with a newborn
tied to her chest,
fear and despair
criss-cross her back. You
listen to her insults.
She storms away. You
chase after her,
touch her cold shoulder,
her tears on the brink. You
hand her a card, your
home number on it. Her
link to hope on
some other day
some
other day she calls you,
the lawyer, and tells you her
story, she sets a date for your
meeting, and later you rant about her:
she didn’t show up, she
didn’t even call. At night you
sip bourbon and seven you
empty your pockets, you
search for change, you
have to know:
Is she safe?
Is she still alive?
On your way home you
check the backseat, look over your
shoulder from your car to your
door. At midnight you
search for keys, you
rattle the kitchen lock one
more time before you
climb the stairs weary
to bed.

I watch you,
her therapist, prepare your
testimony your
expert psychological testimony, you
review all the research, you
draft the report with your
clinical observations, you
substantiate your opinions
bear witness to corroborate her
reality with your colder, calmer
objectivity. You balance her
accounts, reconcile your
perceptions with those of your
science and those of the law.
Sometimes you stare
at the wall and you cry. You
sit there cradling her fate
so carefully in your learned, aging hands.

I swallow the Sunday news
with my coffee: Yet another woman
killed by her husband-who-shot-himself-too.
But
this one,
this client might have been mine,
this one,
had I not been booked up
and had to say no
this one,
had she had the money on Thursday
instead of on Monday,
this one.
I see her dead body
dressed like a bride in a box,
this familiar stranger I
talked to over the phone
once.
This one,
whose Monday appointment I
could now scratch from my book.

We sign the book at the funeral
home for this one,
this precious one.