Support BWSS

31 Actions for Gender Justice: Day 10

In 1979, a determined team of women founded Battered Women’s Support Services to advocate for gender justice and fight to end violence against women. Today, 42 years later, BWSS is still standing up for women and fighting for women’s right to live free from physical, emotional, verbal, sexual abuse.

The most pervasive form of violence against women is intimate partner violence. Many countries have reported that this form of violence has dramatically increased during COVID-19[1]. And Canada isn’t the exception.

Our staff and volunteers have answered an unprecedented number of calls and service requests during the pandemic. We work tirelessly to help women and their children flee abusive relationships and access critical services to improve the quality of their lives.

But we can’t do this work alone.

How can you help? These are a few ideas: spread the word and share information about our programs and prevention education, organize a birthday fundraiser to support our programs, shop at My Sister’s Closet, volunteer with us, donate –every dollar counts-,

With your help, BWSS can continue working on advancing gender justice by amplifying intersectional feminist voices; promoting decolonization of structures and institutions that oppress marginalized groups; eliminating all forms of violence against women; demanding justice for indigenous women and removing structural barriers to women’s economic empowerment; providing education and training about gender-based violence; supporting survivors and facilitating support groups; providing other programs to help women and their children who are experiencing or have experienced abuse.

Every day, many women turn to BWSS to seek help with creating a plan to leave abusive relationships, finding safe shelter after fleeing violence, access to legal aid, emotional support, counselling, employment.

Every day, we walk alongside women, supporting them on their healing journey, amplifying voices and resilience.

There are different ways you can join our efforts, from sharing about our work with your network to making a donation. Will you join us?

Donate: Give a gift of safety. Every dollar counts.

Volunteer: An opportunity to help women in our community and, at the same time, learn valuable skills.

Shop: My Sister’s Closet is our social enterprise. We have 2 brick-and-mortar shops and an online shop:

East Vancouver- 1830 Commercial Drive- Monday to Sunday | 11am-6pm

Downtown Vancouver- 1092 Seymour Street open for walk-ins Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, & Sunday | 11am-6pm

Online store: https://mysistersclosetvancouver.shop/

Follow us: Our social media

My Sister’s Closet: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter

Battered Women’s’ Support Services: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter

Learn: Browse our resource collection.

Subscribe: Sign up to receive updates

[1]Devastatingly pervasive: 1 in 3 women globally experience violence, 2021. World Health Organization (WHO) Retrieved from https://www.who.int/news/item/09-03-2021-devastatingly-pervasive-1-in-3-women-globally-experience-violence

Recommended Reading

31 Actions for Gender Justice: Day 9

In 2008, a motion to recognize February as Black History Month in Canada was unanimously approved in the Senate. But the contributions of Black people in Canada dates back to the early 17^th century when a free black person, Mathieu da Costa, arrived in what we know today as Canada.

We invite people of all backgrounds to learn about the rich history of Black people in Canada and the importance of seeing colour to understand–not to encourage prejudice-Black people’s experiences and challenges.

We recommend reading:

Making the Invisible, Visible: An Open Invitation by Theresa Thomas MCP, RCC in commemoration of February as Black History Month.

Theresa was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She is committed to helping people achieve freedom from systemic and societal oppression in every capacity. Since moving to Vancouver in 2012, she has been focused on learning the origins and impacts of trauma.

Theresa’s therapeutic focus is on trauma intervention, freedom from abuse, substance misuse, and achieving empowerment using largely narrative therapeutic techniques.

Theresa has an MCP in Counselling Psychology and is currently an STV counsellor at Battered Women’s Support Services, and coordinates the BWSS Black Women’s Program.

Black Women in Canada and Black Women’s Program at BWSS by Angela Marie MacDougall, Executive Director, BWSS.

Through her community-based organizing, frontline work, and activism over three decades, Angela Marie MacDougall has been deeply involved in movements for social justice. Since the nineties, Angela has developed training curricula from an intersectional and anti-oppression framework while her work as a trainer with community-based organizations, systems players, universities and in the larger public sphere has always emphasized the influence of a community-based response toward gender, racial, economic justice.

Angela Marie MacDougall has edited and/or written ten manuals on addressing gender-based violence and violence against women from an intersectional anti-oppression feminist framework and has spoken to hundreds of groups throughout Canada, the United States and in China. An ever-present theme and focus of her work has been the range of social inequities and environmental problems associated with colonialization and the generalized criminalization of communities of colour that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.

Her parents met in the Black community known as Hogan’s Alley that in the seventies was razed by Vancouver City Hall, so her work grows directly from her own experiences as a bi-racial Black woman who grew up amongst violent racist misogyny both at home, at school and in the larger community while and she became politicized to end violence against women after her high school friend was raped and murdered while on a date. She also has conducted extensive participatory action research on numerous aspects relating to gender, race, and violence.

Angela Marie MacDougall is a founding member of Feminists Deliver a provincial organization dedicated to shedding a light on the urgent issues facing marginalized communities in British Columbia and the grassroots struggles leading the way for transformative change while build transnational connections between grassroots intersectional feminist movements; and re-envisioning the global women’s agenda as one that centers a diversity of grassroots intersectional feminist voices. She is a long-standing member of Vancouver’s February 14^th Women’s Memorial March, the first women’s memorial march was held in 1992 in response to the murder of a woman in the Vancouver neighbourhood named the Downtown Eastside. Angela is a founding member of Intersectional Feminist Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative that brings together researchers, academics, data and policy analysts, students and community organizers to provide critical research, data, policy and strategic support for ending violence, gender equity and social justice movements. Ms. MacDougall was named a Remarkable Woman by the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Magazine named her one of Vancouver’s most powerful people.

IWD Action for Gender Justice

31 Actions for Gender Justice: March 8^thToday, on International Women’s Day (IWD), we celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women around the world.

We honour the courage and determination of women who came before us and women today who are working hard during the pandemic at home handling work and family responsibilities; in the healthcare system; in workplaces that provide essential services like farms, grocery stores and transportation; in not-for-profit organizations volunteering and/or providing direct services to the most vulnerable; all women in our communities helping other women and people in general.

We thank you and honour you.

At the same time, we make a call to action for gender justice, as women continue to face challenges and inequities.

Today on IWD and beyond, we invite you to:

• Dismantle oppressive structures like patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia
• Question and resist the colonial system
• Recognize intersectionality, the existence unique forms of discrimination and oppression
• Keep fighting against misogyny, gender bias, discrimination, violence against women, and all attitudes and behaviours that oppress women.

Together, we are a force for gender justice.

Know the Signs of Domestic Abuse

31 Actions for Gender Justice: Day 7

This is by no means an exhaustive list! There’s so much more that we can do to advocate for political, economic and social changes.

March 7th Action 7. Know the Signs of Domestic Abuse

Domestic violence doesn’t always look the same. If you are experiencing abuse or you are not sure, contact BWSS:

Call: 604.687.1867 (Toll-Free 1.855.687.1868)⁠
Text: 604.652.1867 ⁠
Email: intake@bwss.org⁠

We provide a secure environment in which women are free to express themselves without being judged or threatened.

Some of the signs of domestic abuse:

Your intimate partner…

• Tells you that you never do anything right
• Criticizes your appearance
• Insults, diminishes, or shames you, especially in front of other people
• Monitors your phone, social media, computer, or car GPS
• Controls your finances, takes your money without permission, refuses to pay money loaned from you
• Blackmails you
• Is trying to isolate you from family and friends
• Twists the story when discussing something that happened in the past. You may hear: “I didn’t do that”, “I was joking”, “I didn’t push you”, “you’re crazy”, “you are lying”, “you are overreacting”, “you’re imagining things”, “you made me angry”. This is gaslighting and it’s a form of manipulation.
• Prevents you from making your own decisions
• Shows extreme jealousy of friends and family
• Pressures or forces you to have sex or perform sexual acts you’re not comfortable with
•  Threatens to leave you or take your children and/or pets
• Is verbally and/or physically abusive
• Accuses you of having an affair
• Is controlling
• Other: yells, calls you names, patronizes you, lectures you §  Belittles your accomplishments

Some signs are more obvious than other ones. Mental and emotional abuse may be harder to spot, but it certainly feels ‘like death by a thousand cuts’.

We are here to talk with you, provide emotional support, and safety plans: Support Survivors.

Community-Based Responses that Advance Healing.

Interventions that Transform.

Through keynote and panel presentations we will identify and address the structural pathologies that oppress diverse communities who access our support while sharing interventions that transform. These community-based responses position our communities at the center. Our approaches provide safe healing spaces for participants to stand in their own power while working to redress harm.

Day One: Tuesday, March 30, 2021

10 AM – Keynote: Travis Heath (he/him), Metropolitan State University of Denver– Community Care and Abolition Inspired Approaches to Psychotherapy

11 AM – Panel: Theresa Thomas, Rosa Elena Arteaga and Travis Heath

1 PM – Workshop with Theresa Thomas (she/her) – Compassionate Currency: A Person-Centered Perspective on Addictive Behaviors and Other “Disordered” Coping

About the presentation: A Medical Model of Health and Wellness or Dysfunction and Disorder is inherently racist, xenophobic, and discriminatory. “Typical” and “mainstream” standards only apply to a very specific type of privileged minority. And yet, these are the standards utilized to assess mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being. The use of substances for example has been politicized and weaponized to target those who would be denied any other methods of coping and survival. As conscientious citizens, support people, front-line workers, or even open-minded individuals, we are not exempt from having internalized these largely discriminatory messages. Failure to identify and analyze how these messages impact our thinking, our empathy and our ideas will limit our ability to empathize and provide useful, valuable, and life-changing supports.

Let’s explore together these uncomfortable concepts together and learn how to be more effective in our support work.

2:30 PM – Presentation by Rosa Elena Arteaga (she/her) – We are Multi-storied: Resistance that Heals

About the presentation: An anti-racist intersectional feminist framework where Rosa collaborates with girls and women survivors of sexualized and intimate partner violence to deconstruct the societal expectations that both oppress them and limit their right to stand in their own power, and ultimately denying them the right to live free from violence.

Speakers:

Travis Heath (he/him), Metropolitan State University of Denver

Travis is a licensed psychologist and has served as a professor of psychology at Metropolitan State University of Denver for the last 12 years. In July, he will become an Associate Professor at the University of Denver and assume co-directorship of the International Disaster Psychology: Trauma and Global Mental Health graduate program as well as serve as Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Graduate School of Professional Psychology.

Past work he’s been involved with looked at shifting from a multicultural approach to counseling to one of cultural democracy that invites people to heal in mediums that are culturally near. His most recent work involves incorporating the work of Black abolitionist scholars into psychotherapy, community healing, and uprising. His writing has focused on the use of rap music in narrative therapy, working with persons entangled in the criminal injustice system in ways that maintain their dignity, narrative practice stories as pedagogy, a co-created questioning practice called reunion questions, and community healing strategies. He is currently co-authoring the first book on Contemporary Narrative Therapy with David Epston and Tom Carlson. He has been fortunate to run workshops and speak in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Norway, United Kingdom, and United States.

Theresa Thomas (she/her), Women’s Counsellor, Battered Women’s Support Services

Theresa is committed to helping people achieve freedom from systemic and societal oppression in every capacity. Since moving to Vancouver in 2012 Theresa has been focused on learning the origins and impacts of trauma. Theresa’s therapeutic focus is on trauma intervention, freedom from abuse, substance misuse, and achieving empowerment using largely narrative therapeutic techniques. Theresa has an MCP in Counselling Psychology and is currently an STV counsellor at Battered Women’s Support Services, and coordinates the BWSS Black Women’s Program. Theresa was born and raised in Houston, Texas.

Rosa Elena Arteaga (she/her), Manager of Direct Service and Clinical Practice, Battered Women’s Support Services

Rosa Elena Arteaga has been working in the anti-violence field for over twenty years delivering workshops on violence against self-identified girls and women and providing training to service providers at the national and international level. In her role as Manager of Direct Services and Clinical Practice, she oversees a number of programs within BWSS. Since 2008, Rosa Elena has researched and addressed the issue of battered women being wrongfully arrested and has been successful with a number of police complaints. Rosa Elena holds a Master’s degree on Narrative Therapy and Community Work and she works from a decolonizing, feminist, anti-oppression, practice.

Day Two: Wednesday, March 31, 2021

10 AM – Keynote: Kim Hawkins (she/her), Executive Director at Rise Women’s Legal Centre – “Why Can’t Everyone Just Get Along? How BC’s Family Law System Puts Survivors in Danger”

11:30 AM – Panel

River Shannon (they/them), Staff Lawyer, YWCA Metro Vancouver

Kim Hawkins (she/her), Executive Director at Rise Women’s Legal Centre

Lisa Rupert (she/her), Vice President (she/her), Housing Services and Violence Prevention, YWCA Metro Vancouver, 

Moderated by Angela Marie MacDougall (she/her), Executive Director, Battered Women’s Support Services

Speakers:

River Shannon (they/them), Staff Lawyer, YWCA Metro Vancouver

River Shannon is a staff lawyer and legal educator with the YWCA Metro Vancouver, where they provide free legal services to women living in YWCA Housing who have experienced violence from an intimate partner. River also facilitates free workshops for the general public on a broad range of legal issues, advocates for positive change in the community, and supports YWCA outreach and support staff in navigating BC’s courts and institutions.

Kim Hawkins (she/her), Executive Director at Rise Women’s Legal Centre

Kim Hawkins is the founding Executive Director at Rise Women’s Legal Centre which opened its doors in 2016. She came to Vancouver via Whitehorse, Yukon Territory where she worked for many years as a staff lawyer at a busy legal aid clinic, practising mainly in the areas of family, criminal and child protection law. While in Whitehorse she also spent two years as a judicial clerk, worked as an investigator at the Yukon Human Rights Commission, and served as President of the Board of Yukon Women’s Transition Home Society. From 2007 to 2008, Kim worked on strategic constitutional and human rights litigation at the Legal Resources Centre in Grahamstown, South Africa. She holds a J.D. in Law from the University of Victoria, and a Masters in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford. When she isn’t in the office, Kim enjoys baking bread, yoga, and puttering around her community garden plot.

Kim was born and raised in Victoria BC, in the unceded territory of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich) Nation and is grateful to now live, learn, work and play on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Tsleil-Waututh (Burrard) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nations. She is also deeply thankful to her many teachers from Yukon’s First Nations.

Lisa Rupert (she/her), Vice President, Housing Services and Violence Prevention, YWCA Metro Vancouver

With over 27 years of front-line experience working with women who have experienced violence from an intimate relationship, Lisa Rupert is currently the Vice President of Housing and Violence Prevention for the YWCA Metro Vancouver. She oversees ten housing communities for women and their children, 3 second-stage transition houses, and the YWCA’s PEACE, Legal Education, and Outreach programs. Throughout her career, Lisa has worked on projects that have influenced policies to support women leaving abuse. Through a collaborative approach and ongoing advocacy for the clients she serves, Lisa has created and implemented programs facilitated workshops, been an active media spokesperson and a dedicated volunteer on housing and violence prevention services across Metro Vancouver. She is a current member of the Board of Directors for the BC Society of Transition Houses, sits on the Vancouver Police Domestic Violence and Criminal Harassment Unit Community Advisory Committee and the FREDA Community Advisory Committee.

Moderator: Angela Marie MacDougall (she/her), Executive Director, Battered Women’s Support Services

Through her community-based organizing, frontline work and activism over three decades, Angela Marie MacDougall has been deeply involved in movements for social justice. Since the nineties, Angela has developed training curricula from an intersectional and anti-oppression framework while her work as a trainer with community-based organizations, systems players, universities and in the larger public sphere has always emphasized the influence of a community-based response toward gender, racial, economic justice. Angela’s impact includes the development of empowerment and advocacy-based program and service delivery models that address gender-based violence and violence against women that are grounded in strong theoretical frameworks that include feminist trauma-informed analysis that integrate the role of substance use and mental wellness.

Angela Marie MacDougall is a founding member of Feminists Deliver a provincial organization dedicated to shedding a light on the urgent issues facing marginalized communities in British Columbia and the grassroots struggles leading the way for transformative change while build transnational connections between grassroots intersectional feminist movements; and re-envisioning the global women’s agenda as one that centers a diversity of grassroots intersectional feminist voices. She is a long-standing member of Vancouver’s February 14th Women’s Memorial March, the first women’s memorial march was held in 1992 in response to the murder of a woman in the Vancouver neighbourhood named the Downtown Eastside. Angela is a founding member of Intersectional Feminist Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative that brings together researchers, academics, data and policy analysts, students and community organizers to provide critical research, data, policy and strategic support for ending violence, gender equity and social justice movements. Ms. MacDougall was named a Remarkable Woman by the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Magazine named her one of Vancouver’s most powerful people.

Day Three: Thursday, April 1, 2021

TBA