Antecedentes de la investigación

Not surprisingly, experiences of intimate and personal violence were harder for women to talk about than the economic and social concerns, which can more easily be externalized. Some talked about the issue as it affects their relatives or friends, while others called the facilitator between meetings to talk privately about their own problems with partners and husbands.

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Women did talk extensively about how poverty leaves them vulnerable to abuse, and makes it difficult for them to make proactive decisions to protect themselves and their children. And community workers were quite forthcoming.

From the conversations that took place, it was evident that women know little or nothing about services and supports available to them. And the lack of discussions within neighbourhoods on issues of woman abuse privatizes and buries the issue even deeper.

Despite the many gains of the women's movement in opening up the public discourse on violence, the issue remains personally difficult and largely taboo for women of all backgrounds. Women of colour are very afraid of losing face and relationships within their communities. And their own experiences of racism have taught them that they are unlikely to be well received outside in the mainstream. A more sustained initiative, which could take place over a longer period of time to allow for the required level of trust to be built, is needed to encourage women to open up on these issues. There is a clear vacuum of resources and work at this level in the neighbourhoods.

Ethno-specific women's groups told us that they get little or no funding to provide services to abused women. In a few cases they have been able to get short-term project grants but this means having to hire short-term, low-paying, part-time staff that turn over at the end of each project cycle. They are keenly aware that the work requires training, consistency, persistence and the ability to be there for women over the long-term but don't have the funds

to support it.

Most women's groups in communities of colour are limited to providing emergency support and referrals for survivors of violence on an ad hoc basis, with volunteers who do the best they can. Lack of resources means that too often 'gut instincts' stand in for trained responses and analyses of woman abuse. This was alarmingly evident in a conversation with a senior staff member of a local organization: she recounted to us that she had recently counseled an abused woman by reassuring her that the husband was only likely to do this when he is drunk.

On the other hand, women of colour also reported that they have been referred to women's anti-violence services where they had bad experiences with staff who act out of racist attitudes and assumptions about them. This is just one of the many barriers stopping them from using women's shelters. A shelter worker pointed out that women of colour who end up at battered women's

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shelters have often endured years of repeated and escalating abuse before they make the move - a reality not always understood by shelter staff.

Abused women of colour are falling into a dangerous gap created by lack of information, overstretched and still largely Eurocentric women's anti-violence services on the one hand, and local women's groups and women of colour advocates trying to help women with

informal and intermittent programming on the other.

Each sector has important strengths. Ethno-specific women's groups are much closer to the specific realities and pressures facing abused women of colour, while violence against women agencies and services have an

accumulated wealth of knowledge and wisdom on the issue of violence against women. But the safety of thousands of racialized women in Toronto who are living with violence depends on resources for increased communication, mutual training and joint efforts to overcome their respective weaknesses.

The situation is made more difficult by the trend among funders to

support gender-neutral multi-service agencies to deliver anti-violence programs. This threatens to compromise well proven understandings of violence against women as systemic abuses of power by men. The resulting misconceptions can lead to strategies aimed at family mediation and reconciliation which, when used as formulaic prescriptions, only serve to further compromise women's safety.

There are many powerful reasons why women of colour are unable to leave abusive situations. Mothers fear losing custody of their children, because they cannot show enough independent income to demonstrate their ability to provide for them. Some have neither the financial means nor the social capacity to live alone and survive outside of family and community supports. Others have no idea what their rights, what supports are available for them are and where they can go.

In a cruel twist of irony, police forces have begun laying charges against abused women in situations where there are visible signs of struggle. Poor and racialized women are disproportionately more likely to be affected by this

gender-neutral application of laws intended to protect women.34

The husband of an abused woman who had started volunteering with a women's group called the police on her to pre-empt her from reporting his violent behaviour. The woman was arrested and charged with assaulting her partner and, when she became enraged at being removed from her home and children, she was written up as crazy.

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