Alberta’s Indigenous women face excessive risk of death by domestic violence, researcher says
Improvements continue to be made to help victims of domestic violence in Alberta, but women remain at extreme risk of being killed by their intimate partners, a leading researcher says.
Speaking in Edmonton after an Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) event, Johns Hopkins University’s Jacquelyn Campbell said the province’s Indigenous women face a rate of domestic violence homicide at levels much higher than non-Indigenous women.
Data provided by ACWS shows 66 per cent of women entering emergency shelters in Alberta “face an extreme or severe level of risk of being killed by their intimate partner.”
That number increases to 72 per cent for women entering secondstage women’s shelters in the province.
Second-stage shelters are considered to be longer-term, apartment-style residences, with stays of up to one year.
Campbell said changes and additions to supports are coming fast, “but it’s not fast enough ... (and) it’s not funded enough.”
“There’s always a scarcity of resources to support the work that shelters do and to support more collaboration with the health-care system,” she said.
Campbell was in Edmonton to help provide training to women’s shelter staff on how to use a system she developed to evaluate how much danger abused women face.
The tool has been used by ACWS and other organizations for many years, she said.
Known as the danger assessment tool, the two-tiered system uses a weighted checklist and calendar to guide crisis workers in their evaluation of severity and frequency of attacks against women.
Campbell has developed a complementary system, the danger assessment circle for Indigenous women, and work is underway to tackle the issue of domestic violence within new immigrant communities and those in a same-sex relationship, she said.