We at Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) will not stop working until all forms of violence against girls and women ends.
“With six to ten women a day seeking crisis support for their first time at Battered Women’s Support Services, increases of women arrests for allegedly perpetrating domestic violence, deportations of women who are in Canada fleeing gender persecution, the denial of Indigenous women’s voices at the BC Missing Women’s Commission of Inquiry, the, seemingly, stalled BC Highway of Tears investigation, the One Billion Rising campaign in tandem with 22nd Annual Feb 14th Women’s Memorial March DTES Vancouver galvanizes us to keep going.” – Angela Marie MacDougall, Executive Director of BWSS
As part of the global movement of One Billion Rising, BWSS will be joining One Billion Rising – Occupy Respect’s walk out, dance, rise up, and demand to end violence. We call on all to join us and we urge boys and men to own their role in ending violence against women and walk with us in active solidarity! Be part of the solution and join forces at the Marker of Change, The Women’s Monument, Main Street and Terminal Ave., Thornton Park , Vancouver from 10:30am to 11:30am on February 14th.
Then walk with us to join the 22nd Annual February 14th Women’s Memorial March at the Carnegie, Main and Hastings in Vancouver, beginning at 12:00pm.
Since 1991 in response to the murder of a Coast Salish woman on Powell Street in Vancouver on Valentine’s Day, we all come together to express compassion, community, and caring for all women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Unceded Coast Salish Territories. 22 years later, the Women’s Memorial March continues to honour the lives of missing and murdered women. With one heart we connect with at least ten other Women’s Memorial Marches being held across the land. Established to remember and mourn women who are missing and women who have been murdered as a result of violence and oppression.
Join us this February 14th to honour the lives of the girls and women who are no longer with us, to support the families who are missing their loved ones, and to make a statement in numbers and collective power that violence against girls and women has to end!
Following the Women’s Memorial March, we will join NEVR (Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships) in “Flashdance in Holland Park (Start a Rising)” at 5pm. Join us in rising & dancing to end gendered violence and have a community where abuse is not tolerated nor accepted.
