The head of the Tri-County Women’s Centre in Yarmouth says it is too early to tell if the province is heading in the right direction when it comes to preventing intimate partner violence and supporting survivors.
Interim Executive Director Shannon Watkins says the province has begun the work, but when asked if she was confident in the direction, she said she was not.
“Are we heading in the right direction? I mean, potentially. Am I confident? No,” Watkins said.
“I think the province is making small steps, but I definitely think that that there needs to be more done. But what that is right now, I’m really not sure,” said Watkins.
She said there are a lot of changes coming down the pipeline, but it’s unclear yet if it will be enough.
Mass shooting showed change needed
This comes after a report last month that showed Nova Scotia had made the least amount of progress on gender-based violence compared to other recommendations from the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC).
The MCC looked at how the RCMP and the government could improve after the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia.
Four years ago, on April 19 and 20, Gabriel Wortman began a murderous rampage which began after assaulting his common law partner, it ended with the death of 22 people and became the largest mass shooting in our country’s history.
The report from last month was written by the Progress Monitoring Committee, a group who tracks how well police and government are implementing the recommendations from the MCC.
The scale has seven levels. The first level is “initiated,” meaning work has begun to implement recommendations from the MCC, and the seventh level is “complete.”
Changes to victim supports through the federal Department of Justice were at level one, “initiated,” while changes to survivor supports and gender-based violence prevention, through the Nova Scotia Department of Emergency Management, were at the second level, “solidly initiated.”
Housing a key issue in southwest
Watkins says one of the major issues for people visiting the women’s centre is housing.
“What we’re seeing, you know, is a multitude of reasons why they may be seeking housing or needing better housing accommodations, or they don’t even have housing and are in need,” said Watkins.
But when people try and use the existing framework in the province to get the support they need, “they’re still facing several, several barriers that we should have already been able to overcome,” she said.
She says they will try and connect people to whatever resources are available in the community.
But in general, there are not enough family units or single person units, not just in the Tri-County area but in the whole province.
The centre also helps women and their children fleeing intimate partner violence, but in the Tri-Counties, there is only one second-stage shelter for those women, and it has limited capacity. The next closest one is in the Annapolis Valley.
There is a youth transition home in the area, but it can only accommodate so many people and for a certain amount of time.
Many are forced to choose between leaving the area or returning to a dangerous situation, she says.
“Communities are coming together to try to break those barriers and see how we can come up with solutions. But unfortunately, it takes time.”
