Stopping Family Violence
Steps Along the Road

Researchers and front-line workers discuss the meaning of violence, the struggle to stop it, and the tasks that lie ahead

Bonnie Agnew remembers too well a time when there were no women's shelters, no sexual assault treatment centres, and no movement to stop family violence. A 22-year staff member at the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, her own development as an activist and a professional working against abuse closely parallels the evolution of efforts to stop all kinds of family violence.

Her career is living proof that when people work together for social change, they can make a difference. She enjoys the satisfaction of being able to point to major changes in her lifetime. Like other front-line workers, researchers, and policy analysts, she is proud of how far Canadian society has come with the struggle, but she foresees new obstacles and challenges.

"I came out of the 1960s as a student activist in those early days of women's consciousness-raising," she says. Women came together to discuss the problems that they shared as women, they identified violence against women as a major one. Out of such grassroots efforts grew the women's shelter movement, which has consistently provided the impetus for research and action first on violence against women and, later, on other issues of abuse and domestic violence.

Women's grassroots action led struggle against abuse

"The major impetus was the action of the women's groups at the community level in the '70s," says Elaine Scott, who worked for years in the Family Violence Program at Health and Welfare Canada and is now Executive Director of the National Crime Prevention Council. She says that local action on violence against women led, in turn, to many other events and trends such as recognition of other forms of abuse, calls for political action, new legislation, new methods of policing, and partnerships between social and legal agencies and institutions.

There were many other important influences. A particularly important event, says Ms. Scott, was the publication of the federal government's 1984 "Badgley Report" published by the federal government's Committee on Sexual Offences Against Children and Youth. This federal initiative, prompted by the work of researchers, front-line workers, and community activists, led to changes to the Criminal Code and the Canada Evidence Act, allowing children to give uncorroborated evidence of abuse in court. The federal government appointed Rix Rogers as special advisor to the Minister of Health and Welfare and created the Child Sexual Abuse initiative. This helped to forge partnerships with provincial governments and community groups.

By the late 1980s, programs and initiatives against abuse of all kinds were multiplying at all levels. Ms. Scott says that federal action such as the creation of the Family Violence Prevention Division of Health and Welfare Canada led to widespread dissemination of information across Canada and cross-pollination between groups in different regions. "By about 1988, people were picking up on programs from, say, Saskatchewan, and modifying or using them in British Columbia or New Brunswick."

Books make history

Linda MacLeod is Canada's best-known writer on wife-assault. The publication of two books she wrote on the topic for the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women became historical events in themselves. Wife Battering in Canada: The Vicious Circle (1980) opened a floodgate of public interest, and she spent the next year touring, speaking, and giving media interviews on the subject.

Battered But Not Beaten, her second book (1986), had an equally profound but different impact, spurring and pointing the way to concrete government action on many fronts. The book "helped a range of people see that they could, in fact, work together," says Ms. MacLeod, "that there were things like health issues, justice issues, economic issues all tied up in the subject of abuse."

Partnership has become an important concept for many working in the field. "It's time to look at the roots of the solution, not only the roots of the problem," she says.

Her words are echoed by Reverend Jamie Scott of the Church Council on Justice and Corrections. The Council just completed an 18-month project, on which Ms. MacLeod collaborated, called Fire in the Rose. It gives churches the resources to address family violence in every aspect of their work and their lives as religious communities. He says that churches, schools, health providers, employers, and the justice system are examples of sectors that all must address abuse.

He believes that violence stems from the existence of a "pecking order," a term Council has developed as a substitute for what it formerly called "patriarchy." Simply put, this means that "somebody feels we are not as important as they are. This kind of attitudinal stuff is the nurturing ground for abuse in relationships," says Rev. Scott.

The pecking order becomes incorporated into every aspect of life. "There is still a lot under the surface...for people to understand about how insidious abuse is in terms of some of our institutional behaviours and some of the underlying values that we still accept," he says.

"It isn't all about abuse," he says. "It's an interactive issue." He shifts to parenting for another example.

"One of the women who initiated the project said, 'When I grew up and our parents wanted to discipline us, they spanked us. That's all they knew. That was the only tool in their toolbox. Now I have learned many other skills that give us ways to deal with problems.'"

Marlies Suderman works with the London Family Court Clinic, a children's mental health centre in London, Ontario. A major project of hers is a school-based prevention program, and she taught and thought long and hard about the roots of abuse.

"Violence is multi-determined. One of the underlying factors is that we tolerate and condone a fair amount of violence in the family and in society. Sexism and racism are ways in which violence is perpetuated. If you can disregard certain groups as less valuable, it becomes acceptable to do violence to them and exploit them."

Linda MacLeod identifies three factors that contribute to abuse: isolation, fragmentation, and power/control. Isolation, she says, occurs on many levels: geographical, physical, emotional and social. Fragmentation is "a disease of looking only at a narrow part of the problem, looking at a label on the person."

Working as she does with women, Bonnie Agnew is acutely aware of the power dynamic in abuse. "Violence," she says, "is a result of women's inequality and also a symtptom of women's inequality."

Evolving doors

Strategies to stop family violence have evolved over the past 25 years. As grassroots activists, professionals and the public have gained experience and grown more aware, they have developed new approaches.

Initially, the shelter movement worked to protect women and their children from abuse. "Twenty years ago, there weren't transition houses and rape crisis centres in every municipality across the country, now there are," says Bonnie Agnew. "That's a major accomplishment, in that transition houses are probably the most successful strategy to save women's lives." From the first stage of protection it was a short step to legal advocacy. The shelter movement lobbied for zero tolerance of abuse and mandatory charging of abusers, which has become police policy in virtually all jurisdictions since 1982, when Canada's Attorney General urged police chiefs to lay charges in all cases of suspected wife abuse.

Yet most people who work with abuse believe that the justice system can only be one component of a strategy to stop abuse. And many question whether the adversarial process of the justice system can possibly result in the kind of change that will make our homes and society safer for everyone in the long run.

Jamie Scott says that many people have long been concerned that "criminalizing social problems wouldn't affect the root causes of family violence, that putting people in jail was not an adequate response. That was a difficult discussion. The evolution of political correctness made it politically incorrect not to support automatic charging. When we suggested that a criminal justice response was not effective, we were accused of being soft on abusers."

He describes an "evolution" that included a "recognition that what was needed was an initial, very visible declaration by society that family violence was wrong," followed and complemented by a range of remedial and preventive steps, working with all sectors in the community.

Bonnie Agnew echoes these sentiments. "Our assessment is that prison is a brutal experience. Men are brutalized and brutalize each other. There's no logic, if you're trying to deal with a man who's already brutal, in putting him in a brutal situation. You're not going to come out with someone more peaceful." She favours mandatory charging and alternative sentencing methods.

Research indicates that "If a man is held to account for his violent behaviour and held to account right away by somebody that matters -- it doesn't have to be the court, it can be his friends or his co-workers -- then he is less likely to repeat. We're still urging men to deal with the men they know, to tell them it's not OK to do that, to sanction them socially."

"Victimization" a problem?

Linda MacLeod says that this evolution from protection and punishment to recognition, prevention and education is being reflected by people working with all kinds of abuse. "Something I see as very influential is the poignant voice of Aboriginal women and ethnic women."

"They don't see it as an exclusively gender issue, which is not to say that they deny that women are hurt and abused more than men. They really see much of the reason being the abuse and hurt that their men experienced through the inequities and power dynamics of our society."

She has come to feel increasingly uneasy about the tendency of some groups to emphasize "victimization," which promotes adversarial responses, labeling, and the pitting of "victim" groups against one another.

Marlies Sudermann says that her seven years of experience in London schools show that education can successfully help both to prevent students from entering abusive relationships and to prepare tomorrow's professionals to treat abuse with more understanding and sensitivity. Her program affects more than just students. Teachers, parents, administrators, and school trustees all learn from the experience.

In similar fashion, those working to combat elder abuse are finding that public education is their most powerful tool. From children to middle-aged adults to seniors, people can change their attitudes, acquire new responses, and learn to avoid abusive situations.

Obstacles to progress

Despite -- and in some cases because of -- the progress of the past two decades, many obstacles remain in the work to stop abuse. They include:

	active resistance of those who are threatened by change;
	funding and resource shortages as governments cut spending;
	institutional barriers that perpetuate historical inequities; and
	social attitudes and traditions that are resistant to change.

And many of the professionals interviewed cited territoriality, institutionalization and other problems within the various movements and agencies that were set up to fight abuse.

Jamie Scott feels that many institutions and individualss are threatened by change. When an analysis "challenges the fundamental way that we structure ourselves -- our values, our belief systems - - there's going to be fundamental resistance to that." He is concerned that evangelical movements have promoted the notion of "traditional family values" to resist change to traditional power relationships."It's frustrating for a church person," he says, "that they use not only the Bible, but they use the endorsement of God to give this [backlash] clout and legitimacy."

Like other forms of social action, the struggle against elder abuse is running up against funding shortages due to government cutbacks. "It boils down to having more resources," says elder abuse researcher Elizabeth Podnieks. "Here in Toronto, we're trying to get a shelter going, but it's really hard because of the money situation. There are very few places where the victims of elder abuse can go, and there's no place for men. The victims of abuse shouldn't be the ones to have to leave their own homes, but a shelter is great for an emergency." She also says that funding cuts are creating greater stress for caregivers, leading, at times, to abuse within institutions.

Bonnie Agnew is quite alarmed over the impact of social service cuts on the struggle against woman abuse. Cutting funding to women's shelters, for instance, would be "undoing what works." But she views cuts to other social programs as equally threatening.

"Everything that supports the improvement of the status of women will reduce violence against women," she says, because without these supports, "women will be vulnerable because women are poorer and more disadvantaged." She also fears that many people are jumping on the "bandwagon" of concern over abuse with little real understanding or commitment.

Marlies Sudermann knows that there is a long way to go. There are still many areas, particularly rural ones, where resources do not exist to protect abuse victims or to do preventive work. Old attitudes, she says, die hard, and she tells of recent instances where judges have made unenlightened comments in abuse cases. Perhaps as dangerous, she says, is resistance from "well-intentioned" professionals who feel that admitting now that abuse is a problem implies that they have failed in the past to recognize the dimensions of abuse within their respective fields.

Shake it up again ... and keep on keeping on

Linda MacLeod says that new strategies are emerging and must emerge -- to deal with these kinds of obstacles. Like others, she is impressed with what she sees emerging at the community level. She sees people "focusing less on violence per se and more on building healthy communities."

"More and more people, in their search for something that will just get us through this dark tunnel, are coming up with good old-fashioned community development. It appears to me that for us to move beyond the fragmentation and power dynamics that seem to happen when you start creating a new stream of institutionalized services, people almost have to shake it up again."

So, like those who work against elder abuse and child abuse, Bonnie Agnew continues her work on the front lines. As she has for the past 20 years, she works directly with abused women. She trains new staff. She talks in the community and gives media interviews. She networks with organizations that do similar things and with allied organizations doing related work.

She is frustrated by problems but encouraged by progress. She remembers when MP Margaret Mitchell spoke out against wife assault in the House of Commons in 1981 and was laughed at by male MPs. "That wasn't that long ago. We're not there now. We're in a completely different place. They don't laugh with impunity anymore."

This article first appeared in Transition, September 1995, published by the Vanier Institute of the Family.

Posted by the Vanier Institute of the Family, October 8/96.

---