The work to support survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) is overwhelming. There is never enough money or time, and there are always more survivors needing support. Government policies – as well as the lack thereof – create new challenges and barriers. Legal responses remain poor. Lack of employment opportunities and affordable, safe housing compound the difficulties for women who make the decision to leave an abusive partner. Women who are marginalized and those with children face even greater hurdles to get away from abuse and keep themselves and those in their care safe.
As a result, the work of what started out as a movement to end violence against women has telescoped in to focus almost exclusively on service delivery. Much of the responsibility for this can be laid at the feet of funding models that do not support prevention advocacy work.
When the first shelters in Canada opened, they didn’t have any government funding. They were staffed by volunteers—often survivors themselves—who fundraised money to pay the rent and relied on donations of food, furniture, clothing, and everything else they needed. They offered a safe space to stay for women and their children, but little else because they lacked the resources to do anything more.
In this sense, the funding of shelters and other services for survivors of gender-based violence has been nothing but good. It has allowed those organizations to operate without constant scrambling for money for the essentials, to pay staff, to offer comfortable housing to women and children at a vulnerable time in their lives, and to provide supports beyond a bed and a meal. These funded services have changed and saved the lives of tens of thousands of women and children.
However, this funding has not come without a price. The past 40 years has seen a mainstreaming and depoliticizing of violence against women work because of the focus on keeping that funding flowing to support finding individual solutions for individual women. This has led to a loss of the social movement focus on structural change, with energy instead being used to build and maintain effective services in order to keep funders happy.
I get it: it’s difficult to prioritize work for somewhat abstract and distant social change when a woman is sitting in front of us needing practical help right now, and we don’t want to jeopardize the funding that allows us to provide that support. But we have to find a way to do both.
Predictable and preventable
Noor Naas was 18 years old when her father killed her mother. In a December 2024 Globe and Mail opinion piece, she writes powerfully about the need to break the silence about IPV if we want to prevent it:
“They [family friends] held a joint funeral and buried my parents right beside each other. . . . I listened to people offer condolences for my father. Others reduced his abuse and the murder of my mother to a single act of insanity. . .
“[I]t was apparent that others saw the murder as an isolated incident, rather than the culmination of years of abuse. The lack of knowledge and discourse around domestic abuse inhibited our ability – theirs and mine – to confront it in any meaningful way. . . .
“I started reading everything I could find on the topic . . . My heart broke as I learned that so much of what my father inflicted on my mother, including her murder, was actually quite predictable – and preventable.
“Ending domestic abuse starts by naming it. This means supporting initiatives to educate school children and communities about domestic abuse, utilizing platforms to raise awareness, normalizing dialogue around it and amplifying survivors’ voices. Together, we must openly address the evil that is so often hidden behind closed doors. . . . [P]erhaps then all these stories of women (and their children) who found out they were being abused far later than anyone ever should will become a thing of the past.”
Taking action
Of course, public education is not the only step we need to take to prevent IPV from happening, but it’s a big one, and it’s been recommended many times by inquest juries, domestic violence death review committees and others.
“develop and implement a new approach to public education campaigns to promote awareness about IPV.”
See It, Name It, Change It and Neighbours, Friends and Families are two effective public education campaigns that I have written about here before. They are models that can be adapted for any community and, of course, there are other good models out there. In other words, we don’t have to dream up something new – we can work with strategies that already exist.
Let’s make 2025 the year that each of us finds a way to increase public awareness about intimate partner violence as part of our commitment to ending that violence.