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In Pursuit of Justice 2025

Oct 31, 2025 | Battered Women's Support Services

Advancing Feminist Litigation and Survivor-Centred Legal Reform

The Justice Centre at BWSS invites you to our national feminist legal-justice gathering during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. Building on the momentum of last year’s conference, this year’s event brings together legal experts, policymakers, advocates, and survivors to advance bold reforms that centre survivor experience and transform justice systems in Canada. 

Event Details

  • Date: Monday, December 8, 2025
  • Time: 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM
  • Location: My Sister’s Closet – 3958 Main Street, Vancouver
  • Format: Hybrid (In-Person and Livestream)
  • In-Person Registration: $75 (includes lunch)
  • Online Registration: $30
  • Email endingviolence@bwss.org for sliding scale or fee waiver.

Program Highlights

Opening keynote on landmark feminist litigation and precedent-setting case law.

Four expert panels exploring:

  • Immigration, Gender-Based Violence and TRPs
  • Post-Separation Abuse and Vexatious Litigation
  • Femicide and Canadian Law: Where Legal Responsibility Fails
  • #DesignedWithSurvivors: Building Public Safety Around Survivors

Deep dive into issues including bail reform, R. v. Jordan, risk assessment, family-violence torts and red-flag laws

Justice is not automatic. It is built.

Too often in Canada, justice has been built without survivors at the centre.

It is time to redesign what justice looks like, from the courtroom to community safety systems.

BWSS Statement on Federal Investment in Gender Equality

Oct 29, 2025 | Battered Women's Support Services

A Collective Victory Rooted in Organizing, Led by Survivors, Powered by Communities Across These Lands

Today’s announcement of renewed, multi-year federal investment in Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) marks a necessary and hard-won step toward advancing gender justice across Canada.

It signals a recognition that community-based feminist organizations are essential public infrastructure — and that safety, justice, and equality are foundational to the health and future of this country.

This investment begins to repair the instability created by recent reductions in federal funding, which threatened the continuity of critical services for survivors and communities. It arrives at a time when rates of gender-based violence and femicide continue to rise, including here in British Columbia, and when survivors — particularly Indigenous women, Black women, Two-Spirit people, racialized women, migrant women, and women with precarious housing and status — face escalating threats to their safety.

This Commitment Did Not Happen by Chance

It is the result of coordinated advocacy, sustained organizing, and powerful community mobilization across these lands.

From the Atlantic to the North to the West Coast, survivors, Elders, youth leaders, shelters and transition houses, sexual assault centres, Indigenous women-led programs, legal advocates, service providers, feminist economists, grassroots collectives, and national networks spoke with clarity and urgency: gender justice is nation-building work.

We honour the strength, discipline, and persistence of partners and movement leaders across the country who held the line, meeting with parliamentarians, sharing research and lived experience, mobilizing public voices, and refusing to allow gender-based violence to be sidelined or minimized.

We especially acknowledge Indigenous advocates whose leadership continues to ground this movement in sovereignty, safety, self-determination, and the Calls for Justice of the National Inquiry into MMIWG2S+.

BWSS is proud to stay in solidarity and alongside our provincial and national feminist partners in this collective effort and to have brought survivor realities, data, and public-safety analysis directly to federal decision-makers throughout this year. This moment reflects the power of community and the truth that progress comes when survivors and their advocates are organized, strategic, and unified.

This summer BWSS had the privilege to convene leaders from across British Columbia for a provincial roundtable on gender justice and ending violence, including Indigenous women-led organizations, rural and northern advocates, Black and immigrant women’s leaders, anti-violence service providers, legal experts, youth organizers, and representatives from housing, health, and child-care sectors. This gathering ensured that frontline expertise and survivor wisdom from communities across the province were heard directly by federal leadership. Our message was clear: gender-based violence work is public-safety infrastructure, and lasting progress requires sustained, core investment in community-based organizations and the systems that allow survivors not only to be safe, but to thrive.

“Safety is public infrastructure. Gender justice is nation-building work.”

With Celebration Comes Vigilance

This investment is meaningful, and we welcome it.

Budget context: The full federal budget will be released on November 4. We will be assessing whether this commitment to gender equality is matched by investments in the broader systems that make safety possible — including housing, legal supports, income security, poverty reduction, health care, and community infrastructure.

Lasting progress requires more than one announcement. It requires long-term core funding, equitable distribution, and a coordinated national strategy to fully implement the National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence so that communities, particularly those most impacted by violence, are not left behind.

BWSS will continue to call for transparency, urgency, and survivor-centred delivery of these funds, and for alignment across federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal jurisdictions.

Our Commitment

BWSS stays ready to work with the federal government and all levels of leadership to:

  • Ensure funding reaches frontline organizations equitably and quickly
  • Strengthen the National Action Plan on GBV with clear timelines and accountability
  • Advance Indigenous-led safety and healing grounded in the Calls for Justice
  • Protect and expand community-based supports, not carceral responses
  • Ensure survivors’ voices guide policy, priorities, and investment

Because as we note through #DesignedWithSurvivors, safety is infrastructure. And gender justice is essential to a future where all people can live with dignity, autonomy, and opportunity.

Forward — Together

We celebrate this win, one built through solidarity, vision, and collective courage. And tomorrow, we continue. We will hold governments accountable to their commitments, and we will keep mobilizing across these lands to ensure every policy, every dollar, and every decision moves us toward a Canada where safety is a right, not a privilege, and where survivors are not asked to do the impossible alone.

Safety changes everything. And together, as communities, as movements, and as survivors, we are reshaping what safety means in this country.

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Public Safety, Power, and Breath

Oct 23, 2025 | Battered Women's Support Services

Public Safety, Power, and Breath

Summary of a keynote address by Angela Marie MacDougall, Battered Women’s Support Services at Shattering the Silence Conference hosted by The Cridge Centre for Family on October 16, 2025 in Victoria, British Columbia

The Design Flaw We Never Talk About

With deep respect to the Lekwungen peoples on whose traditional territory this event is being held, and the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

Many thanks you to The Cridge Centre for the Family for hosting today

We talk about public safety as if it starts when we step outside, as if danger wears a mask and waits on the street. But for millions of women and gender-diverse people, danger doesn’t wait outside the door. It’s already home before dinner.

That’s the design flaw we never talk about.

Our systems were built on a false divide: the public world of law, work, and politics that centres police, and the private world of family and home. That divide is where violence hides, where policy looks away, and where women’s safety becomes “too complicated” for budgets, ministries, and election platforms.

When violence happens in a parking lot, we call it a crime.
When it happens in a bedroom, we call it a tragedy…and then we move on. Each case treated as individual cases and that there is no connection between the cases. After a femicide police will say – there is no risk to the public.

#DesignedWithSurvivors began as a refusal. A refusal to let public safety be defined by policing, patrol cars, or punishment. Because safety isn’t surveillance—it’s infrastructure. It’s housing, income, health care, and justice that don’t stop at the threshold of a home. This effort was fuelled by our collective rage after the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl in an office building near 41st Avenue and Cambie Street in Vancouver, BC.

So we ask: What would it look like if public safety were designed with survivors in mind?

Turning Truth into Evidence – The Kim Stanton Report

In June, Dr. Kim Stanton released her Independent Systemic Review of the BC Legal System’s Treatment of Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence (hyperlink)—the most comprehensive look at how our justice system responds, or fails to respond, to survivors.

Her first recommendation was radical and long overdue – to officially acknowledge how endemic gender-based violence is and the necessity for all levels of government and systems to build accountability and action toward addressing the violence at every point.

For those of us working on the frontline, her report is more than research rather it forms validation, evidence, and gives our advocacy leverage. It puts government language to what survivors have said for decades – that justice is elusive and in British Columbia is a lottery system where the odds are stacked against women – especially for survivors who are Indigenous, Black and immigrant.

At BWSS, we’ve used the report as an advocacy tool in every possible way:

  • To connect femicide, Crown decisions, and systemic impunity in media coverage.
  • To brief the Premier, Attorney General, and mayors across the province.
  • To build entire campaigns around its core truth: the absence of coordination isn’t an accident – it’s design.

Kim Stanton didn’t tell us something new. She told us something undeniable. And sometimes change begins when our truth becomes someone else’s PDF.

The Birth of #DesignedWithSurvivors

#DesignedWithSurvivors was born out of exhaustion—and imagination.
We were watching violence escalate during and after the pandemic, while the systems meant to protect survivors were producing risk. So, we flipped the question. Instead of asking, “Why didn’t she leave?” we asked, “Why wasn’t it safe to stay—or to go?”

We mapped the barriers—housing, income, legal aid, transportation, childcare, language access—and discovered survivors were doing all the coordination themselves. They were the system.

What if public safety started from their perspective? What if every ministry, every budget line, every government plan began with this question:

If public safety were designed with survivors in mind, what would it look like?

We posted that question across British Columbia. The response was immediate. Mayors wrote back. Councillors called. Survivors reached out saying, “Finally, someone’s describing my life.”

And yes, there’s humour in the title. Because when governments say, “We’re doing our best,” our response is simple: Do better. Do it with survivors.

And if you can’t then let us take the pen and let us lead.

From Local Action, through Provincial Expectations toward National Policy

Municipal Change

A key first step was local. We built a municipal costing model showing that domestic violence costs cities $11,000 per resident, per year—in policing, emergency response, housing, and lost potential.

That changed the conversation. At the Union of BC Municipalities, mayors were asked to stop seeing gender-based violence as a social issue and started seeing it as your responsibility to leverage resources and action.

Since then, dozens of municipalities have move ahead and toward GBV task forces and data pilots. So why don’t we when it’s their partners?

Provincial Action

At the provincial level, we’ve advanced five emergency actions:

  1. GBV Task Forces in every city and town.
  2. Frontline Stabilization—a 15% funding increase to prevent service collapse.
  3. Mandatory IPV Risk Assessment, including strangulation as a red-flag indicator.
  4. A provincial prevention campaign to end normalization of violence.
  5. A GBV lead within Public Safety and Attorney General office to coordinate across ministries.

Each aligns with Dr. Stanton’s recommendations and what survivors tell us daily.

Federal Advocacy

Federally, we’ve said it plainly: the National Action Plan on GBV cannot survive an 80% cut to WAGE. You cannot end violence while defunding the very sector that prevents it.

We’ve met with federal Minister of Women and Gender Equality Rechie Valdez to call for sustainable core funding, and advanced policies to Gregor Robertson the Minister of Housing and to federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser to reinforce that safety and housing are inseparable.

And right now, we are appreciating the work of BC Attorney General, Niki Sharma first in commissioning Dr. Kim Stanton’s systemic review and now on the legislative reform to add strangulation and “choking” explicitly to Canada’s new Intimate Partner Violence laws – which may land mid-December 2025. Because in the current Criminal Code, strangulation and other risk factors are not fully recognized for their lethal potential in IPV contexts.
To be plain, it shouldn’t take a coroner’s inquest to make suffocation visible.

Strangulation – The Unspoken Epidemic

Let’s talk about what still gets whispered, even in rooms like this: strangulation.
If a woman has been strangled by her partner, even once, her risk of being killed increases sevenfold. Yet across Canada, it’s rarely recorded. Police call it assault. Doctors call it minor injury. Courts call it hard to prove. Society calls it private.

But strangulation is oxygen deprivation.
Ten seconds: consciousness fades.
One minute: brain injury begins.
Five minutes: death.

Half of survivors show no visible marks. Only 15 percent have injuries that can be photographed. That invisibility has allowed us to minimize what is, in truth, attempted homicide.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: strangulation isn’t confined to domestic violence. “Sexual choking” has been normalized in mainstream culture. It’s one of the most-searched terms in pornography, and young people are reenacting it—without understanding that it can cause seizures, memory loss, or stroke.

This isn’t about shame. It’s about consent, safety, and education. When sexual strangulation becomes ordinary, girls grow up believing oxygen is negotiable.

At BWSS, we’ve seen the continuum—from fatal strangulation in domestic violence to non-fatal sexual strangulation that’s presented as “consensual.”

The outcomes overlap: brain injury, cognitive decline, post trauma reactions, and depression.

Research is tracking how repeated oxygen deprivation literally changes brain function—reduced left-hemisphere activity, impaired memory, fatigue, and emotional dysregulation.

And when survivors can’t recall details because of brain injury, the system calls them unreliable witnesses. The very symptom of harm becomes the reason they’re not believed.

During the 16 Days of Activism this year, BWSS will launch a national prevention initiative on non-fatal strangulation—connecting education, consent, and safety. Because prevention isn’t a campaign. It’s culture change.

Reframing Power, Breath, and Safety

What is the message a man sending to a victim in a sexualize violence or domestic violence or in an intimate context when he applies pressure to her neck?
How do we reconcile the need to strangle while sexual gratification? That is a gendered question right there… this is an activity that in a heterosexual context is done by men to women – essentially exclusively.

People don’t think there is any risk and that in intimate relationship there is a myth that it can be performed safely.

Was it consensual – we don’t believe consent solves anything – fear is in the room there is no consent – strangulation has exploded in the culture
What women and girls say when given the opportunity to do is that they did not have a chance to consent that their intimate partner strangled without seeking prior consent.

Sexual choking – erotic choking – we call strangulation.

Imagine a system where every strangulation report triggers a mandatory risk protocol?

Where every emergency department screens for neck trauma.
Where every police officer knows “choking” is a homicide predictor, not a dispute.
Where every court recognizes that loss of oxygen is loss of autonomy.

Safety should not depend on which door a survivor walks through. It should be built into how we govern. Because safety isn’t charity. It isn’t awareness. Safety is infrastructure – that we are working to create through #DesignedWithSurvivors

Breath as a Measure of Justice

Strangulation is the moment when someone says, I decide if you breathe.
Our collective work must answer back: You will breathe. You will live. You will be believed.

As anti-violence workers as feminists and as survivors we have spent decades adapting to systems never designed for us. Now we design back—with survivors, with evidence, and with breath as our measure of justice.

So, as you read this, ask yourself:

What would it look like if public safety were designed with survivors in mind?

Because when it is, everyone breathes easier.

60 Barriers to Leaving: Why Survivors Stay and What Systems Must Change

Oct 9, 2025 | Battered Women's Support Services

60 Barriers to Leaving: Why Survivors Stay and What Systems Must Change

Adapted and expanded from Sarah M. Buel’s “Fifty Obstacles to Leaving, a.k.a. Why Abuse Victims Stay,” updated through a BWSS feminist, decolonial, and trauma- and violence-informed lens – 2025.

I. Structural & Systemic  | 
II. Social & Relational  | 
III. Cultural & Institutional  | 
IV. Intersectional & Environmental  | 
V. Geographic & Political  | 
VI. Systemic & Global

I. Structural and Systemic Barriers

1. Lack of Advocacy and Navigation Support
Without strong, informed advocates, survivors navigate legal, housing, income, child protection, and immigration systems alone—complex and retraumatizing.

2. Abuser’s Power and Influence
When abusive partners hold wealth, status, or community power, they manipulate institutions and intimidate survivors and advocates.

3. Credible Threats and Fear of Lethal Violence
Leaving increases danger. Fear is not weakness; it’s an accurate risk assessment where most femicides occur during or after separation.

4. Concern for Children’s Well-Being
Survivors may stay believing two-parent homes are safer. Witnessing violence is itself harm.

5. Children’s Pressure and Emotional Manipulation
Abusive partners use children as leverage—turning them into messengers or emotional hostages to force reconciliation.

6. Cultural, Racial, and Community Pressures
Survivors of colour, Indigenous women, and migrants face racism in systems and pressure not to “betray” community by reporting to colonial or white-dominated institutions.

7. Minimization and Denial
Gaslighting, cultural conditioning, and systemic disbelief cause survivors to question danger or downplay violence.

8. Disability and Accessibility Barriers
Inaccessible housing, shelters, and transit—plus ableism in health and justice systems—block safety.

9. Older Age and Dependency
Elders may fear institutionalization, poverty, or isolation more than continued abuse where ageism intersects with dependency.

10. Acceptance of Excuses
When communities excuse violence as stress, substance use, or “anger issues,” survivors internalize those narratives.

11. Family or Community Pressure
Families may urge reconciliation for appearances, cultural reputation, or finances.

12. Fear of Retaliation
Threats to harm, stalk, or kill survivors or children are credible. Leaving without protection can be fatal.

13. Fear of Losing Children
Abusive partners weaponize custody. Courts often mislabel violence as “conflict,” granting access to abusers.

14. Economic and Financial Control
Withholding money, sabotaging work, or coercing debt maintains power and control.

15. Economic Insecurity After Leaving
Separation brings housing shortages, job loss, and inadequate income support—pushing many back.

16. Feelings of Obligation or Gratitude
Abusive partners pose as rescuers or providers, creating guilt and obligation.

17. Guilt and Self-Blame
Systemic victim-blaming reinforces messages that violence is provoked or deserved.

18. Homelessness and Housing Scarcity
Without safe, affordable housing, survivors face homelessness, couch-surfing, or returning to abuse.

19. Hope and the Cycle of Promises
Apologies, gifts, and promises in the “honeymoon phase” sustain false hope and confusion.

20. Isolation from Support Networks
Abusive partners sever social and professional ties, blocking access to help and housing.

II. Social and Relational Pressures

21. Pressure to Preserve the Family
Expectations of being a “good partner” or “good mother” pressure survivors to stay for appearances or stability.

22. Barriers to Literacy or Information Access
Limited literacy or digital access blocks understanding of rights and options.

23. Criminalization and Systemic Entrapment
Survivors are arrested for self-defense, poverty-related offenses, or coercion—eroding trust in protection systems.

24. Law Enforcement Collusion or Impunity
When abusers work in law enforcement or the military, survivors face retaliation, disbelief, and cover-ups.

25. 2SLGBTQIA+ Survivors and Systemic Erasure
Queer, trans, and non-binary survivors encounter discrimination, outing, denial of services, and police hostility.

26. Erosion of Self-Worth
Verbal and psychological abuse degrade confidence and autonomy.

27. Emotional Attachment and Love
Love, shared history, and children make leaving emotionally complex.

28. Unsafe Mediation or “Couples Counselling”
Mandated mediation or joint counselling ignores power imbalance and increases risk.

29. Health and Care Dependence
Reliance on abusive partners for medical care, insurance, or physical assistance creates impossible trade-offs.

30. Mental Health Stigma and Institutional Harm
Trauma, depression, or anxiety are weaponized to discredit survivors; punitive systems deepen harm.

III. Cultural and Institutional Entrapment

31. Cognitive or Communication Differences
Survivors with cognitive, developmental, or communication differences face exclusion and lack tailored safety planning.

32. Military and Paramilitary Systems
Institutional loyalty protects abusive partners; reporting risks retaliation or economic loss.

33. No Safe Housing Options
Shelter shortages, discrimination, and restrictive eligibility leave no viable escape routes.

34. Limited Employment Opportunities
Lack of education, training, or childcare locks survivors in low-wage or unsafe jobs.

35. Lack of Information About Resources
Public education on GBV is fragmented and underfunded; many don’t know help exists or fear hidden costs.

36. Criminal Record or Legal Barriers
Coerced offenses or existing records block housing, jobs, and victim services.

37. History of Prior Abuse
Repeated trauma can normalize violence and internalize blame.

38. Distrust of the Legal System
Past failures—being ignored, blamed, or retraumatized—create rational distrust of police and courts.

39. Repeated Promises of Change
Remorse and declarations of reform perpetuate cycles of hope and harm.

40. Religious or Spiritual Pressure
Some leaders prioritize forgiveness over safety, pressuring reconciliation.

IV. Intersectional and Environmental Barriers

41. Rural and Remote Isolation
Limited anonymity, scarce services, and long travel distances increase risk.

42. Strategic Staying for Safety
Remaining can be a deliberate survival strategy to monitor risk or protect children.

43. Educational Institutional Failure
Schools and universities often fail to address dating violence, leaving survivors exposed.

44. Shame and Social Stigma
Blaming narratives sustain silence and isolation.

45. Trauma Bonding
Intermittent kindness amidst abuse creates powerful bonds that mimic attachment and hope.

46. Substance Use and Systemic Exclusion
Coping through use is a trauma response; punitive policies exclude survivors from housing or custody.

47. Youth and Early Relationships
Adolescents are vulnerable to coercion and grooming with few trusted adults to intervene.

48. Transportation and Mobility Barriers
Without safe, affordable transit, survivors cannot reach courts, shelters, or childcare.

49. Lack of Public Awareness that Abuse Is a Crime
Communities still treat IPV as private or mutual—rather than a public-safety issue.

50. Immigration Status and State Control
Abusers weaponize immigration—threatening deportation, withholding documents, exploiting sponsorship dependence.

V. Geographic and Political Barriers

51. State Harm and Institutional Retaliation
Survivors face surveillance, punishment, and child removal through systems that reproduce patriarchal and colonial control.

52. Digital Surveillance and Technology-Facilitated Abuse
Spyware, GPS, smart devices, and online harassment erode privacy and safety.

53. Climate and Housing Displacement
Wildfires, floods, and displacement increase exposure to violence in temporary or precarious housing.

54. Colonial Violence and Loss of Land-Based Safety
Indigenous survivors face overlapping harms from partners and the colonial state that dismantled kinship protections.

55. Service Scarcity and Funding Injustice
Chronic underfunding of women’s and community-based services leaves survivors without consistent supports.

56. Structural Stigma in Health and Substance-Use Systems
Institutions pathologize survivors instead of addressing violence—leading to coerced treatment and loss of autonomy.

57. Migrant and Refugee Precarity
Exploitative labour, precarious status, and international custody barriers tie safety to immigration outcomes.

58. Cultural Gaslighting and Public Disbelief
A culture that doubts survivors and excuses abusive partners keeps violence invisible.

59. Community Complicity and Bystander Inaction
Friends, employers, neighbours, and professionals may see warning signs but fail to intervene due to fear, stigma, or normalization.

60. Resistance, Survival, and the Cost of Safety
Even acts of self-protection are punished. Surviving becomes political labour in systems that treat safety as conditional.

“Survivors don’t fail to leave — systems fail to create the conditions where safety is possible.”

From Individual Choice to Collective Responsibility

Every barrier reflects structural neglect, economic inequality, colonial violence, and gendered power—not survivors’ choices.

Safety is not achieved by escape alone; it is built through public investment, cultural transformation, and accountability at every level.

Ending gender-based violence requires dismantling the conditions that make surviving the only option.

BWSS Brings Five Urgent Actions to UBCM: Calls for Government to Stop the Next Femicide

Sep 26, 2025 | Battered Women's Support Services

When the Courts Fail to Understand Trauma: A Chilling Verdict for Survivors of Sexual Assault

This week, Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) attended the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) conference in Victoria to push forward five urgent actions needed to end femicide in British Columbia. In meetings with mayors, councillors, provincial ministers, and senior staff across key ministries, BWSS presented its five emergency asks:

  1. Mandate Municipal Gender-Based Violence Task Force – Every city must convene survivor-centred task forces to coordinate safety across policing, housing, and justice.
  2. Stabilize Frontline Services – Provide a 15% emergency funding increase so community-based victim services, Stopping the Violence (STV) outreach, and transition house workers can meet demand.
  3. Standardize Risk Assessment – Make intimate partner violence risk assessment tools mandatory across police, Crown, child protection, and other systems, with oversight and enforcement.
  4. Launch a Province-Wide Prevention Campaign – Use government communications infrastructure to educate the public and prevent violence.
  5. Appoint a Gender-Based Violence Lead – Establish a provincial lead in the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General to coordinate across ministries and municipalities.

“We came out of UBCM encouraged,” said Angela Marie MacDougall, Executive Director of BWSS. “Municipal leaders across the province are picking up this work and are taking action in their communities. The opportunity now is for every level of government to act – not with declarations, but with the coordinated, resourced interventions that will save lives.

BWSS also raised the pressing issue of the cost of doing nothing: “We estimate the cost of inaction on intimate partner violence at $11,000 per person, per year,” said MacDougall. “That figure reflects Justice Canada’s national estimate of $7.4 billion annually, spread across policing, health care, housing, and justice. When applied locally and accounting for BC’s emergency shelter costs, court delays, and the pressure on municipal services, the true cost is likely even higher. Cities are already paying this price, and they are paying it reactively, inefficiently, and without a coordinated plan.”

BWSS emphasized that these measures are not optional, but necessary. Thirty-six women and girls have been killed in the past thirteen months in BC alone, a devastating pattern with no coordinated emergency response.

In the weeks and months ahead, BWSS will continue working alongside municipalities, provincial ministries, federal departments, and community organizations to advance these urgent actions and demand governments move from words to action before more lives are lost.

Statement on the IIO Report into the RCMP Killing of Vanessa Rentería

Sep 26, 2025 | Battered Women's Support Services

When the Courts Fail to Understand Trauma: A Chilling Verdict for Survivors of Sexual Assault

Today, the IIO has published its findings into the fatal police shooting of Vanessa Rentería in Surrey, BC. As an anti-violence and mental health advocate organization, we issue the following response:

This report highlights the narrow focus of the Independent Investigations Office in BC. It treats Vanessa’s pain as pathology rather than as the predictable outcome of violence, marginalization, and systemic neglect.

First, to the extent that mental distress was present, it was inseparable from a deeper crisis of genderbased violence and housing insecurity. Vanessa was a newcomer, a mother, and someone who had already sought refuge from an abusive environment. BWSS has documented that her history of leaving a home with abuse and her status as a Spanish speaker in a city with inadequate interpretation built structural risk into her encounter with RCMP. There is evidence that she left the transition house she was staying due to the house being defunded by the province of British Columbia and she eventually returned to a place she had previously fled.

Sandra (Vanessa’s sister) at the 34th Annual February 14th Women’s Memorial March Downtown Eastside Vancouver honouring all missing and murdered women, girls and 2S.

Second, the report confirms that core pillars of safe crisis response were absent: There was no meaningful risk assessment, no linguistically competent intervention, and no trauma-informed de-escalation. By ignoring these, the system failed her before armed officers even arrived.

Third, rather than calming the moment, policing escalated it. Armed formations, repeated shouted commands, and a tactical posture turned vulnerability into justification for force, rather than offering genuine sanctuary.

Fourth, the fact that the Subject Officer declined to give a statement is deeply troubling. It underscores the structural impunity built into policing and oversight: the one person who could directly explain why the shots were fired remained silent, while the final narrative privileges police perceptions over community voices and
lived context.

Fifth, the IIO’s framing reinforces the police story instead of interrogating it. Rather than exposing structural failure — the absence of translation, risk tools, trauma-informed teams, or alternative crisis pathways — the report treats lethal force as the inevitable resolution. That is not accountability.

Sixth, Language access is a matter of life and death. Vanessa was a Spanish-speaking woman in crisis, yet no Spanish-speaking officers were deployed. Instead, RCMP relied on Google Translate, a free app, to communicate in a moment where every word mattered. Vanessa didn’t need Google Translate; she needed safety. That the RCMP relied on a free app in a life-or death crisis shows how little value is placed on the lives of immigrant women.

Sandra (Vanessa’s sister) speaking to media

The RCMP treated Google Translate like a life-saving intervention. It isn’t, it is an app and relying on it in a moment like this speaks volumes about systemic disregard for Immigrant women’s lives.

Machine translation cannot provide nuance, reassurance, or trust. It cannot replace the role of a qualified interpreter, let alone the culturally informed care that should have been deployed. Miscommunication through the app even produced the most explosive claim of the night that Vanessa said she would harm her baby, a claim later walked back by witnesses. That single mistranslated moment may have escalated the encounter toward her death.

Using Google Translate in a crisis is not a neutral act. It is systemic negligence. It reflects an institution that is comfortable improvising with women’s lives rather than investing in basic, life-saving language access.

Finally, the outcome, a child left without her mother, was not an act of fate, it was preventable. It is a stark example of state-inflicted femicide, when survivors of violence are met not with protection but with bullets.

Vanessa’s death demands more than condolences or procedural reform. It demands a reckoning with how policing, accountability, transparency, oversight, and crisis systems fail survivors. We stand united with her sister, friends and family in Colombia, with her child, and with all those suffering in invisible crisis. The public deserves nothing less than accountability, honesty, transparency, and justice.