Political Commentary and Opinion
You will note that there are no Shelters for Men and Children that are funded by government. Basically the government is violating the Charter by discriminating against Men and their Children who are victims of women's violence. Government sexism and bigoted outlook, as in Double Standard on the male gender, is only to gain favor of those who support their National Socialist Agenda in making sure one sided laws are in place that harm everyone.
The truth can not be silenced any more, by political potato heads in office, or their feminist friends.
Web Posted | Dec 15 2004 06:35 PM CST
Mass resignation at Osborne House
WINNIPEG - Eleven of 14 women on the board of Winnipeg's largest women's shelter handed in their resignations Wednesday. The mass resignation comes after the province conducted a review and audit of the shelter. Government officials say the investigation showed evidence of continuing, serious concerns with management, labour relations and programming.
Marlene Bertrand, director of the province's family violence protection branch, says the resignations followed a decision by the province to step in and co-manage Osborne House. "Given the number of conversations we had with staff and with women who had used the services, we had some concerns about the quality of services – not about the capability of staff to deliver the quality of services, but some concerns about the quality of services," she says.
"We had some concerns about the finances, and we had some concerns about labour-relations issues." Representatives of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents workers at Osborne House, say they're happy to see the board members go. "Labour relations was a real problem," says CUPE spokesman Mark Kernaghan. "We had grievances that were going unaddressed, and there was actually a termination that really concerned us." Bertrand says she's already had calls from people in the community who want to sit on the board of Osborne House.
Osborne House provides shelter and crisis support to about 3,000 women and children each year. Officials say services to women should not be affected by the changes.
Other women's shelters Stories
November 1999, Shelter in a Storm National Post, p. E1.
14 November 1998, National Post, p. B1.
21 November 1998, National Post, p. A8.
23 November 1998, National Post, p. D1.
For too long, says an authority on violence against women, society has ignored the fact that women can be violent, too
Shelters Used In War On Men
Women's shelters have become bunkers in a war against men, says a lecturer on family violence. Feminists have "hijacked the whole subject of domestic violence and made it their own," said Erin Pizzey, billed as the founder of the world's first refuge for battered women, in Chiswick, England in 1971. Men should be allowed to work in shelters to show abused women and children that not all men are violent, she said. "It's a human problem. It's not just a man problem,"
Billions spent on Establishing Shelters for Battered Women
Billions have now been spent establishing shelters for battered women. Such shelters can presently be found in virtually all metropolitan areas. However, there are increasing questions about their effectiveness both in terms of cost, results, and credibility.
Under the equality rights provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
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"Mr. Ellis had discovered an anomaly in the law under the equality rights provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ("Charter") More specifically, he has found that subsection 15(2) of the charter with respect to the prohibited ground of 'sex' conflicts with subsection 28 of the Charter. It does not appear as though the issue of the conflict between the two provisions of the Charter has been litigated. In that respect, this would be a test case. What might be required is an authorizations to do a Constitutional Reference on this point to the Supreme Court of Canada."
"Section 28 of the Charter, provides that, "Notwithstanding anything in this charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons." Whether this provision supersedes subs.15(2) of the charter is an issue. The override clause of the Charter, section 33, does not apply to section 28 but does apply to section 15. This is further evidence of the anomaly."
"It appears to us that the gender bias argument of Mr. Ellis has merit, and is of considerable importance to about half the population of this country, who happen to be male, and have been or are likely to be subjected to the gender bias in the various laws of Canada, which may conflict with the supreme law of the land."
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Women's shelters & rape crisis centres
Funded by governments and supported by massive public goodwill, these facilities are supposed to assist women and children in distress. But there is growing evidence the people who run these centres are devoted to furthering a political agenda first and foremost. The needs of female clients often go unmet, these facilities unfairly take sides in divorce cases, and vulnerable children aren't protected from unfit parents.
The following articles describe the disgraceful state of feminist social services in Canada
Saturday, November 14, 1998
Donna Laframboise
National Post
[ http://web.archive.org/web/20050211153549/http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?f=981114/2017769 ]
Last week, following an investigation by Ontario's Alcohol and Gaming Commission, Barrie police charged Anne Marie Aikins, the former executive director of the Barrie and District Rape Crisis Line, with criminal breach of trust, fraud over $5,000, and theft over $5,000. Four members of the crisis line's board of directors as well as the organization's office administrator face identical charges.
Police allege the crisis line, which provided counselling at a centre in the city, misappropriated funds when it used charity bingo money to pay for Aikins' legal defence in an earlier criminal matter.
In February of this year, Aikins was convicted of fraud over $1,000 after a three-week trial. A jury heard that she used the crisis line's credit card to pay for approximately $14,000 in personal items such as clothing, furniture, airline tickets, exercise equipment, and restaurant meals.
Following her conviction, Aikins, as well as the crisis line's board of directors, continued to insist she had done nothing wrong. They say she reimbursed the organization and only used the credit card because she wasn't able to qualify for a personal one after the breakdown of her marriage.
But at the trial, the Crown said reimbursements to the centre totaled less than $1,000. And Justice Peter Howden later noted that the existence of the credit card "became a little secret, completely unrecorded in the minutes of the
organization, known to some but not all of the board."
In July, the Ontario government withdrew more than $400,000 in annual funding from the crisis line, forcing its closure a month ago.
The events in Barrie are not isolated. They are part of a long history of financial disarray, weak accountability, criminal charges, lawsuits, mass resignations, and vicious infighting that have plagued crisis centres and battered women's shelters across the country.
Underlying all of it is the political context in which these services operate. They are supposed to be safe harbors in the storm. And the fact that they are run by feminists is supposed to mean that victimized women receive top priority.
But a growing chorus of critics say the highly politicized character of many facilities means that the clients' needs take second place to the agenda of the people in charge. In some cases, the critics say, these services are being run by zealots concerned with dogma who are overtly hostile to men, male children, and heterosexual relationships.
"I can't say what it's like now; I've kept my distance," says Madelyn Iler, a former shelter worker in Kingston, Ontario. "But in my experience, there was a very militant political agenda that came first. The interests of the client were way down there."
In 1991, when the author June Callwood resigned from Nellie's, the Toronto women's hostel and shelter she founded in 1974, the nation caught glimpses of the noxious political squabbles that almost destroyed that facility. Differences of opinion deteriorated into allegations of racism and homophobia, funds that should have been used to help unfortunate women were consumed by mediators, and many longtime supporters withdrew in disgust.
In 1993, a victim of an attempted abduction complained to the media that staffers at the Hamilton rape crisis centre were anti-police and anti-male. "They strongly discourage trust and respect in the police and there is no desire to help a woman continue dealing with men, not even her partner," said the woman, who questioned the propriety of counsellors expressing "such strong opinions" to vulnerable people.
After other women came forward with similar concerns, an independent review was conducted that identified a litany of problems at the centre. According to the report, the centre had a reputation among other community organizations for being "defensive, insular and 'on the fringe.'"
During the review, four members of the centre's board resigned. They claimed staff did not believe in accountability and were refusing to answer questions or take direction from the board.
A half-hour drive away, the Niagara Region Sexual Assault Centre was also in turmoil. During a closed-door meeting in May 1993, the old board was replaced by a new slate of 12 people who changed the locks and dismissed the executive director. The province threatened to cut off funding if stability wasn't restored, and the fired executive director filed a lawsuit.
And the list of troubled centres kept growing. In Calgary, the board of the sexual assault centre laid off the staff, closed down the agency, and resigned in 1993. The centre went into receivership, was investigated by city auditors, had its insurance cancelled, and was closed for 16 months. Among the outstanding controversies were allegations of breaches of client confidentiality, lawsuits filed by three former employees, and the improper use of funds earmarked for other purposes.
In 1994, the women's shelter in Kingston, Ontario, was in an uproar. After three damning reviews in as many years, the Ontario government withdrew $180,000 in annual funding designated for counselling and employment programs, and put the shelter on notice that another $314,000 for general services was in jeopardy if changes were not made.
A letter signed by ten shelter staffers, including Madelyn Iler, alleged that "the workplace [was] used to further extreme militant feminist philosophy" and that lesbian employees received preferential treatment while heterosexual ones were told not to "discuss their wedding plans or their wedding days with their co-workers."
Also in 1994, the atmosphere at Nelson House, a Nepean, Ontario, battered women's shelter, became so acrimonious that police were called in after a staffer tried to prevent the chair of the board from entering the building. Residents witnessed some pushing and shoving.
An independent consultant reported "numerous incidents of yelling, put-downs [and] disrespect for differences of viewpoints" among staffers. A second report noted that while the primary purpose of such a facility should be to help victimized women, Nelson's mission statement "begins and ends with an emphasis on striving to fulfill the needs of staff and protecting the 'personal power' of staff."
By late 1996, two factions at Nelson House were asking a judge to decide who was in charge, and for a time it was shut down.
Meanwhile, Ottawa's Interval House shelter was also in trouble. A 1994 report concluded that that facility was so dysfunctional it should be closed down. In 1995, police were called after a staffer accused a director of assaulting her. One woman was charged with assault while a stalking charge was laid against another. In June 1995, the board resigned. The following January, the entire staff was fired.
In Toronto, Shirley Samaroo House -- meant to help immigrant women -- collapsed in 1994. Resignations, mediators, and concern from provincial funders were elements there too, as racial squabbles, intolerance, and extremism tore the shelter apart.
In April 1996, the province of Nova Scotia yanked funding and temporarily shut down Yarmouth's Juniper House shelter after its board resigned -- citing tension between staffers and the board. Ruth Ann Deveau, the former executive director, had been convicted of fraud under $1,000, after her successor found funds were unaccounted for.
At Kingston's Sexual Assault Crisis Centre, 15 volunteers quit in protest in 1996. One concern was the fact that the directors had decided to stop using a local auctioneer for charity events. The reason, in the words of one board member: "She is married to a Tory and the ramifications of that are unavoidable." The centre also began to decline free food from a local Domino's Pizza, because the American founder and then-owner of the chain is a pro-life supporter.
Five days after a summer student revealed these board decisions to the media, she was fired from her job and told she would not be welcome as a volunteer.
The havoc at two shelters in Edmonton, both run by the Women in Need organization, stretches back to the beginning of the decade. In 1992, one faction sought a court injunction over the results of a board election. Amid allegations of voting irregularities, eight board members resigned. A month later, the provincial auditor was called in to investigate. Between 1993 and 1995, the organization had three different executive directors.
Earlier this year, during a bitter labour dispute, a representative of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (to which staff now belong) alleged that "53 employees over the past three years have resigned or been dismissed" out of a "permanent complement of 28." The union has characterized management as "oppressive and controlling," while workers have told the media that shelter clients are leaving the facility because services aren't available.
While accountability is a buzzword in the women's movement where male behaviour is concerned, report after report has stressed that accountability is sorely lacking in feminist-run social services. Tens of millions of public and charitable dollars are handed over every year to organizations with long records of financial and managerial scandal. Rather than attracting people who can put aside differences and comfort the afflicted, these organizations have become magnets for militants who seem instead to view such services as an opportunity to proselytize.
Barbara MacQuarrie, president of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, says that a client using these services will be urged to "put her experience as an individual into a larger socio-economic political context where women experience violence systematically. We try to tell somebody, this isn't just about you. This is about the way women are treated, and we have a whole bunch of institutions and systems that reinforce that kind of treatment."
But Jeannette McEachern, who ran the Calgary Distress Centre for 17 years and who stepped into the breach when that city's rape crisis centre closed temporarily, believes it's inappropriate to mix politics and counselling.
"What tends to happen is that they politicize clients that are really supposed to be into healing," she says. "I have no problem with political action, but I think it should be done by other people not working with clients."
McEachern read the rape crisis centre's volunteer manual in the early '90s and found that "three-quarters of it was [devoted to] strong feminist philosophy."
Pauline Green is a lawyer who helped set up Toronto's rape crisis centre in the early '70s, and says, "Every feminist organization that I've been involved in, there's been a lot of infighting." Green has resigned more than once because the male-bashing got too blatant and the attacks from colleagues too personal. "I'm sure women who go for help get this philosophy: that you have to hate men or you're lost."
As a Toronto social worker in the '70s, Raymond Selbie worked closely with a women's hostel. Today, two decades after he began practising law in Haliburton, Ontario, Selbie says things are different.
"There's been a drastic change in the mentality that's controlling shelters. Now what I see with [the local shelter], and what I hear from other lawyers, is they don't even want you in there to help a client. They won't let you physically in the shelter. Even if I get signed releases from my client, they simply will not talk to me."
Yet despite all this strife and disgrace, the people now operating shelters and crisis centres don't admit their vision might be flawed. In the words of Vilma Rossi, executive director of the Hamilton sexual assault centre, separating feminism from sex assault counselling is like "separating Catholicism from a church service." She believes "it's the feminist philosophy that makes the service a good one."
Alberta shelter spokesperson Arlene Chapman blames the difficulties feminist social services have encountered in recent years on government indifference and poor wages: "There's not a lot of support for women's services in the province of Alberta, and women's work is terribly undervalued." Chapman says this "creates some morale problems in the agencies."
Nor does MacQuarrie [president of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres] accept that mistakes have been made. Her organization has been known to demand that government officials step aside until allegations of sexual harassment against them have been resolved. But the fraud charges laid in 1992 against Anne Marie Aikins, the Barrie crisis line's executive director, did not stop her from serving two terms, from 1992-1996, as the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centre's president.
"Bodies make their own decisions," MacQuarrie told the National Post. "And it doesn't really matter, most times, what external people think about that." In her view, the charges against Aikins were "politically motivated."
"I think she has been targeted as a high-profile feminist. I think she was seen as a woman who has a certain amount of power and influence, and given her strong feminist perspective I think that was not appreciated by elements of the male-dominated establishment."
MacQuarrie believes Aikins is innocent and that she was convicted of fraud because she lives in a small town. "I don't know if you know Barrie. I don't know if you know what Barrie thinks of rape crisis centres," says MacQuarrie. "People in Barrie don't like feminists, or the jury didn't like feminists."
SHELTER STORIES
Battered women's shelters are supposed to be caring, and supportive facilities. But women who seek refuge in them often tell a different story. Those below all requested anonymity. Some fear personal or professional reprisals, others wish to protect their own privacy and that of their children.
Winnipeg
In May 1996, Shirley knocked on the door of a Winnipeg battered women's shelter with her two teenage daughters. The then 34-year-old aboriginal woman says she turned to the facility not because her common-law husband had been violent, but because they'd had a fight, it was late, and she had nowhere else to go. "He didn't beat me up or nothing, we just had an argument," she says. "It was just a time out. I needed a place for my kids to stay and sleep and eat."
Because the shelter serves battered women, it would have been understandable if Shirley had been re-directed to a hostel. Instead, she says, the workers who took her in ignored her actual situation and pressured her to conform to their stereotypes.
"They asked me if I was abused, and I said, 'No.' They wanted me to get a lawyer, and I said, 'For what?'"
Shirley says shelter employees tried to "trick" her into making incriminating statements about her husband. Everything negative about him, they wrote it down. If I said something nice about him, they wouldn't write it down. I kept telling them, 'No, he didn't hit me.'"
She says she was offered incentives such as housing and furniture to leave her husband. "They said, 'If you leave him, we can help you find a place right away.' But I said, 'I don't want to leave him.'"
Two years later, Shirley is adamant she wouldn't turn to a shelter again. "For me to leave my common-law, they wanted that so bad. They were trying to break up a family, and I didn't want that."
Halifax
In fear of her violent ex-husband, Judy stayed in a Halifax shelter six years ago before fleeing the province. She describes it as "an experience from hell. I couldn't wait to get out of there." The workers in the shelter, she says, attempted to browbeat residents whose views differed from theirs. "Many of these women had come from situations where there was inappropriate control of them by somebody else in the household. And what I saw was that they were now being controlled by a feminist ideology. [The message was:] 'You believe what we believe, you do what we say, or get out of here.'"
Brantford
Laura received counselling at a Southern Ontario shelter in 1989. "The counsellor I had was convinced I had suffered some kind of sexual abuse as a child," she says. She was told that she had repressed the memories and that she would heal if she could remember the identity of her abuser. "That was a really dark year. If I had kept with her I don't know what would have happened. This woman was bound and bent that she was going to convince me I'd been abused. It was a dangerous, dangerous thing to do."
Toronto
Lisa, an unemployed social worker, sought refuge at a Toronto shelter earlier this year. "It was awful," she says. I lasted two days. I will never do it again." She says she needed assistance putting her life back together, but that shelter staff wasn't much help. "If you wanted to talk, you had to stand in line and buttonhole them. Staff stayed in the office and residents stayed in the living area. If this is supportive housing, they've got a lot to learn about the word 'support.'"
Winnipeg
Samantha says the RCMP had to break down the front door to pull her abusive husband off her so often that "it got to the point where you couldn't even close the door any more." But after fleeing to a Winnipeg shelter in 1994, Samantha says she returned to her abusive husband rather than remain at the facility.
"My experience was it was a horrible place. It's such a cold atmosphere in there; you're treated like cattle."
She says shelter staff were unhelpful, inattentive, and inexperienced. "They don't assist you at all. Once they allow you into the shelter, as far as they're concerned, they've done their job."
Copyright © Southam Inc.
[Donna Laframboise is the author of The Princess at the Window, an account of the narrow-minded views and sex politics of the feminist sector of society]
See also:
More Shelter Stories
By KAREN UNLAND, JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
Edmonton (appeared in the Edmonton Journal 1998 09 29)
Women's shelters have become bunkers in a war against men, says a lecturer on family violence. Feminists have "hijacked the whole subject of domestic violence and made it their own," said Erin Pizzey, billed as the founder of the world's first refuge for battered women, in Chiswick, England in 1971. Men should be allowed to work in shelters to show abused women and children that not all men are violent, she said. "It's a human problem. It's not just a man problem," Pizzey told a news conference before joining a small protest Monday outside the Family Centre, a downtown counselling service. The protest and Pizzey's visit to Edmonton were organized by the Movement to Establish Real Gender Equality, an anti-feminist group founded by Ferrel Christensen, a University of Alberta philosophy professor.
Christensen is angry at the Family Centre for a pamphlet on family violence that he says promotes the idea that only men are abusive. "In five seconds, anyone can see that this is not fair literature," said Christensen, who has filed a complaint against the Family Centre with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission. About a dozen men and women carried placards with such messages as "Stereotypes Hurt Everyone" and "Don't Fund Gender Bias." Officials from the Family Centre refused to comment.
Pizzey, who carried a sign reading "False Charges Are Also Abuse," said people have a responsibility to protest when social service organizations suggest that only men are violent. Most women who ended up at her shelter were "as violent as the men they left," she said. Reacting to abuse they suffered as children, these women often abuse their own children and tend to return again and again to dangerous relationships, she said. "It isn't a question of just saying it's only the man's fault. It's her responsibility as well," Pizzey said.
Arlene Chapman [see follow-up, below], provincial coordinator of the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters, said Pizzey's views are ludicrous. "She's obviously out of step with the sheltering movement...It was the feminist movement that started the shelters, and thank God," Chapman said. Last year, Alberta shelters housed 5,212 women and 6,232 children [At least 25% of which, according to shelter directors, were no battered women but rather women looking for hostels --WHS].
Chapman said it is "absolutely preposterous" to suggest women and men are equally abusive. "There is a gross power imbalance between women and men," she said. An abused woman tends to go back to her partner at least three times before she leaves for good. But it's poverty, not a tendency to seek violent relationships, that sends the women back home, Chapman said.
"This woman needs to be educated," Chapman said of Pizzey.
================================
Spreading the Word.
Erin Pizzey, an author and lecturer on the subject of family violence, is on a six-week tour of Canada. Her 1974 book, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, was based on her experience at a battered women's shelter she founded in Chiswick, England, in 1971. In her 1982 book, Prone to Violence, she turned her attention to violent women. She has also written a number of novels and short stories. She is a friend of Anne Cools, the controversial senator who has spoken out in favour of men's rights. Cools prompted the formation of a joint Senate-Commons committee on child custody and access which toured Canada seeking input on changes to the Divorce Act. According to a draft report leaked last week, the committee proposes to make it a criminal offence to make false accusations of abuse in a custody battle and [it] advocates giving grandparents a say in custody matters. Pizzey supports both proposals.
===<end of article>===
The article mentions that the Joint Senate/House of Commons Committee on the Review of Child Custody and Access intends to propose to make false accusations of abuse a criminal offence. What that conveniently ignores is that false allegations of abuse constitute perjury and that perjury is currently a criminal offence that is punishable by incarceration. The problem with false abuse allegations is that the perjury associated with them is routinely ignored in the courts. For a prime example of how that is done check a description of a false abuse allegation in the Manhatten Family Court.
Follow-up
I was told by a friend who watched the Rutherford Show a couple of days later that a funny thing happened.
The topic was Gun Control. The guests included people from the gun lobby, and Arlene Chapman.
You must realize that Erin Pizzey, Sen. Cools and Theresa Petkau were guests on the Rutherford Show Friday, 1998 09 25 in Calgary http://web.archive.org/web/20050211153549/http://www.fathersforlife.org/fv/calgary.htm
Dave Rutherford also moderated the morning session of the Family Violence Workshop in Calgary, September 25. He was therefore well-prepared to recognize feminist propaganda when he heard it from Chapman.
Chapman's overbearing behaviour on the Rutherford Show on gun control became so extreme that it compelled Dave Rutherford to literally get up and stuff a sock into her mouth.
Now, how do you like that!
--Walter
Additional reading:
Check a more comprehensive link library to find out the truth about false abuse allegations
More Shelter Stories
16 November 1999, Shelter in a Storm National Post, p. E1. - Sandra Cliffe thought she was doing her job as a women's shelter worker when she reported a suspected child abuser. Her co-workers disagreed
14 November 1998, National Post, p. B1. - Criminal charges, mismanagement, infighting and sexual politics have left many women's shelters as bruised as the people they serve
21 November 1998, National Post, p. A8. - A letter of support from a shelter is proven to be enough to win custody battles
23 November 1998, National Post, p. D1. - For too long, says an authority on violence against women, society has ignored the fact that women can be violent, too
On the BC Shelters run by mustachioed Radcial man hating feminist who are spreading hate against men
Billions spent on Establishing Shelters for Battered Women
Billions have now been spent establishing shelters for battered women. Such shelters can presently be found in virtually all metropolitan areas. However, there are increasing questions about their effectiveness both in terms of cost, results, and credibility.
Shelters Used In War On Men
Women's shelters have become bunkers in a war against men, says a lecturer on family violence. Feminists have "hijacked the whole subject of domestic violence and made it their own," said Erin Pizzey, billed as the founder of the world's first refuge for battered women, in Chiswick, England in 1971. Men should be allowed to work in shelters to show abused women and children that not all men are violent, she said. "It's a human problem. It's not just a man problem,"
NATIONAL POST - Thursday, December 16, 1999
Shelter in a storm Sandra Cliffe thought she was doing her job as a women's shelter worker when she reported a suspected child abuser. Her co-workers disagreed Donna Laframboise National Post Jeff Vinnick, National Post Sandra Cliffe recently quit her job at Yew Transition House:
"I've been treated like a skunk at a picnic." A year ago this week, Sandra Cliffe, an employee of a British Columbia women's shelter, followed her conscience. She contacted child protection authorities with concerns that a nine-year-old girl staying at Yew Transition House was being emotionally neglected and abused by her mother. On medical leave since then, Cliffe recently submitted her resignation. "I've been treated like a skunk at a picnic," she says, "even though, by law, if I believe a child is being abused I'm obligated to report it." The shelter, which receives nearly $300,000 a year from the B.C. government, distributes flyers describing itself as a "safe place for women and children."
Among the list of services provided by the shelter, according to these flyers, is "support and advocacy for children." But Cliffe, who worked 20 hours a week at Yew House for more than four years, says this is little more than lip service. Because many of her co-workers were hard-line feminists, she says, a child's needs took a back seat. This isn't the only time the quality of care children receive in women's shelters has been in the news. In 1997, five-week-old Jordan Heikamp died of starvation despite the fact that his mother, Renee, was then a resident of Anduhyaun, a Toronto shelter.
In the B.C. case, a woman, who by law cannot be named in order to protect the privacy of her child, arrived at Yew House in Sechelt, a community on the Sunshine Coast, on Oct. 9, 1998. She gave the shelter fake names for her and her daughter. Cliffe says the pair turned up after another shelter, Nanaimo's Haven House, called to see if Yew House had any openings. She says shelter staff learned that the woman and her daughter had stayed at Haven House for an extended period, and before that had been housed by Rape Relief, a Vancouver agency. Unlike the women-support workers who were the majority of her colleagues, Cliffe's job as a child-support worker was to observe, interact with and counsel children who have witnessed or experienced abuse. As the mother of a son the same age as the woman's daughter, Cliffe says her concerns developed early. "We made cookies one day. We got out the cookbook, and I said, 'Here's the recipe right here,' and I ran my finger down it. She couldn't read the word 'egg.' " Indeed, the girl had never been to school. Although her mother claimed to be home-schooling her, a child protection social worker would later tell a B.C. judge, "The child is unable to read and write." The social worker reported that the child had rarely seen a doctor, had been compelled to adopt four different aliases since leaving California and was highly anxious. "If she feels she gives out too much information, she freezes and stops talking." Despite the fact that Yew House has a 30-day maximum-stay policy, the woman -- who claimed her daughter had been sexually abused by her former husband -- remained in residence well into December, 1998. Cliffe's written statement to child protection authorities notes that, during those two months, the woman prohibited staff from even taking her daughter for a walk.
The girl has "no independence, no voice," reads the report. Her mother "has denied her child the opportunity and means to develop at an age appropriate level ... She has demonstrated to me a defensive, hostile attitude when confronted with [the girl's] unmet needs. I have never witnessed her hug, touch or have any physical contact or display any outward affection towards her child." Cliffe says she discussed her concerns with her supervisor and repeatedly raised them at weekly staff meetings. It was during these discussions, she says, that she learned the woman was on the run from the law after kidnapping her child in California. (An Orange County arrest warrant was issued in 1994.)
Yew House did not return calls from the National Post. When asked why the shelter would assist a fugitive, Cliffe replies: "They are staunch feminists who believe what a woman says with no questions asked. So this woman says one sentence -- she claims the father was sexually abusing this child -- and they believe it." The RCMP's Missing Children's Registry later said there was no basis to the sex abuse allegation, adding this was the second occasion on which the woman had kidnapped her daughter in the midst of an acrimonious custody battle. The woman has also had her problems with Canadian Immigration. Arrested in March, 1998, following the expiration of her visitor's visa, a warrant was issued for her arrest when she failed to show up for a hearing. After coming to the attention of authorities last December, she applied for refugee status, forfeited a $4,000 bond, and went AWOL once again. At the moment, she is the subject of yet another immigration warrant. By early December of last year, Cliffe says she had seen enough at the shelter. Even if the child had been molested, she says, there was no excuse for how she was being treated. Many of Cliffe's co-workers held a different view.
When she told them she was going to alert child protection authorities, the shelter convened an emergency staff meeting on the morning of Dec. 14 in an attempt to dissuade Cliffe from making the call she placed that afternoon. "They got me in on Monday morning and spent three and a half hours taking the skin off my bones." According to Cliffe, they shouted, banged on the table, swore at her and declared their intention to help the woman escape. "I was asked, 'How dare you pass judgment on this woman? This woman is saying she's educating this child. Who are you to put your middle-class values on her?' "They were saying: 'If you make this child protection report you're going to send this woman to jail and you're going to send this child back to be sexually abused. Who in the f--- do you think you are?' " Cliffe left the meeting (which occurred off-site), returned to the shelter and made her report. "I phoned Child Protection and I was sobbing at that point," she remembers. When three of her co-workers arrived back at the shelter, she felt it was best to leave. "I didn't feel safe. My knees were knocking. I felt physically unsafe after what they did to me. "They were all sitting by the door. When I walked through them, my boss said to me: 'What have you done?' I did my job. I don't feel I did anything that any one of them shouldn't have done."
When the authorities arrived at the shelter shortly afterward, the woman and her daughter were indeed gone. At that point, the RCMP became involved, catching up with the pair at a bus station. Immediately taken into foster care, the girl was returned to California soon afterward. Despite having told the shelter she had no ID and therefore needed help cashing money orders, nine fake IDs were found in the woman's possession. Cliffe says that although the woman was sent $10,000 (US) by a relative during her Yew House stay, she wrote letters to local churches asking for financial help so she could flee to New Zealand. Cliffe says a number of churches wrote cheques for hundreds of dollars to Yew House, which then turned the money over to the woman. "She got around 12 or 15 hundred bucks from the churches in this community." Despite the fact that it distributes millions to the province's 85 women's shelters each year, the B.C. Ministry of Women's Equality remains untroubled by the behavior of the Yew House staff in this instance.
Although this woman is hardly the first on the run from the law to seek refuge in a women's shelter, the province has no explicit policy on this matter. Terry Harrison, a women's ministry spokeswoman, says, "That kind of level of detail is not the kind of thing you would see in policies or protocols." Shelters are merely told to obey all the laws of the land, she says. The ministry says it does not need to conduct its own investigation -- it has never interviewed Cliffe regarding her experiences. Even the fact that the employees of Yew House refused to talk to the RCMP leaves the women's ministry unconcerned. "That is not something that's our responsibility," says Harrison. "That's between the police and Yew House." Corporal Danny Willis of the Sechelt RCMP detachment says that while a decision was made during the past month not to pursue charges, he says this doesn't mean Yew House's behavior is acceptable. "Charges aren't always the best way to deal with some [matters]," he says. The fact that a group of people were involved (thus making it more difficult to determine individual responsibility), in addition to the dollars required to fly U.S. authorities up for a court case, influenced the decision. "It was probably more to the cost factor than anything else that it was not carried through," he says.
A criminal prosecution shouldn't be necessary, says Willis, for the women's ministry "to recognize that there was a problem with what happened and it needs to be corrected." As a taxpayer, never mind a police officer, he says, he expects the women's ministry to be "stepping in and saying, 'Whoa, there's a problem here. We're going to have to review [Yew House's] contract and decide whether we're going to renew it.' " Cliffe says that, after placing the fateful call, it became impossible for her to return to Yew House. "I loved my job, and I was good at my job. But the bottom line is I can't work for such an organization. These women are educated in abuse issues. How come no other transition house did anything to help this child?" Cliffe says she doesn't want to be viewed as a victim. But a year later, her family is struggling financially while everything's apparently business as usual at Yew House. "I teach my children to stand up and tell the truth," says Cliffe. "But they're going without because I haven't had an income. "What message is this sending? You stand up and be honest and you'll be punished?" Copyright © Southam Inc. All rights reserved. Optimized for browser versions 3.0 and higher.
"Foot Note from Dick Freeman"
Could it be that these shelters are being misused by Women and Government while falsely using their stats? To further getting custody of there children, and what is the percentage of Men who were falsely accused of abuse, but where still charged, and of those men, who where charged by police because of this policy of "Violence against Women", were found not guilty in a court of Law
More women, children sought shelter from abuse in 1999-2000, says Stats Can
OTTAWA (CP) - More women and children sought refuge from abuse in shelters in 1999-2000, Statistics Canada says. Some 96,359 women and dependant children sought help at 448 shelters compared with 90,792 at 413 shelters in 1997-98, the agency reported Wednesday.
The agency did a one-day snapshot of 508 shelters on April 17, 2000 and 467 responded.
It found some facilities could not accommodate all women who needed shelter because they were full.
"Eighty-nine shelters turned away 254 women and 222 children on the snapshot day alone," the agency said.
Eight of 10 women and nine of 10 children were in shelters to escape psychological, physical or sexual abuse and threats.
Others were admitted for reasons other than abuse, such as housing problems.
"Seventeen shelters reported admitting adult men," Statistics Canada said.
Of those, 13 admitted 258 men, but it was not known how many were admitted because of abuse.
About 69 per cent of these 13 shelters served Indian reserves, which are more likely to admit men because they serve entire families.
Of women seeking help across the country, 85 per cent sought shelter from someone with whom they had an intimate relationship. Two-thirds reported abuse by a spouse or common-law partner.
Of all women admitted to shelters, 55 per cent came with children.
"Women in the 25-to-34 age group were most likely to use shelters, " the agency said.
On the snapshot day, 163 women and 77 children left shelters and only one in six returned to their spouse.
"Of women in shelters for reasons of abuse on the snapshot day, 28 per cent had reported the most recent incident of abuse to the police. In 62 per cent of these case, either the woman, the police or the Crown laid charges."
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