Women’s police stations considered as a way to reduce domestic violence
WENDY GILLIS AND ALYSHAH HASHAM
From the outside, they are often bright and welcoming. Inside, there are typically playrooms for children and interview spaces decorated with flowers and murals. There are no holding cells — these stations are designed to receive victims, not offenders.
They are women’s police stations, an innovation developed in Brazil in the 1980s to address male violence against women. As the model has been adopted in communities across Africa and Central and South America, research suggests it is preventing violence against girls and women.
Whether it could do the same in Canada — where a woman or girl was killed every 2.5 days in 2018, according to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability — is now under review by a leading expert on violence against women.
“It’s clear that we need to change our current models of responding to women’s experiences of male violence,” said University of Guelph sociology professor Myrna Dawson, who is the director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Legal Responses to Violence. “Policing is a first step.” The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright spotlight on the issue of violence against women and calls to police have spiked in some communities, according to service providers who have described COVID-19 and abuse in the home as “two pandemics.”
According to the B.C.-based Battered Women’s Support Services, nine women and girls have been killed in domestic homicides in Canada since the beginning of April alone.
In response, the federal and provincial governments have provided emergency funding for shelters and other services. But advocates say longer-term changes are needed. And when Canadian society emerges from COVID-19, women’s police stations may be one solution. Dawson, who is studying alongside Kerry Carrington of Queensland University of Technology, believes they could offer greater access to justice by overcoming some of the problems within the current policing structure.
“We need to build something from the ground up — rather than in the typical top-down, patriarchal manner,” Dawson said.
Too often, women and girls experiencing sexual and domestic violence face a lack of empathy, or even victim-blaming, she said. Or, officers don’t take threats or harassment seriously. This can discourage female victims from coming forward; domestic violence is known to be significantly under-reported over fears of the abuser or of the police and court process, lack of safe and affordable housing options, among other reasons.
Although the models vary, women police stations are generally centred around helping victims not receiving offenders, and can include social workers, lawyers and psychologists alongside officers. The stations are for women, but they are not necessarily staffed only by women, Dawson noted — “you cannot just ‘add women’ and hope to transform a masculine, patriarchal institutions,” she said.
A central difference is that officers have specialized training in responding to gender violence and, vitally, they “do not prioritize a criminal justice response over the wishes of a victim,” reads Carrington’s recent research examining women’s police stations in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province.
Services include policing, legal support, counselling, housing and financial help, which address the variety of problems facing survivors of domestic and sexual violence, reads a paper by Carrington and colleagues, recently published in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.
“Access to support does not depend on whether victims decide to formally report or pursue a criminal conviction.”
Carrington notes a lack of detailed homicide data prevents a direct comparison between the areas with and without women’s police stations. But Buenos Aires province had a femicide rate of 1.16 per 100,000, one of the lowest rates in Latin America, according to Carrington’s report.
A separate study of women’s police stations in Brazil found that, where they existed, the female homicide rate dropped by 17 per cent between 2004 to 2009.
“There is a growing body of evidence indicating that specialized police forces that are designed to respond to genderbased violence will ameliorate some of the systemic problems in traditional policing models,” Carrington writes.
Dawson thinks women’s police stations may be particularly helpful in Indigenous communities. With the high rates of femicide among Indigenous women and girls, she said, it’s “crucial” to explore an alternative model that is “Indigenous, feminist, and women-led.” Many Indigenous women have been working in their communities to develop grassroots, community responses in lieu of a system “that continues to fail them and miserably so,” Dawson said. Women’s police stations could therefore be “a natural outcome” of work they have already been undertaking, she said.
Fay Blaney, lead matriarch of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, is cautiously optimistic about the concept, which she said addresses many of the recommendations that came out of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Blaney said it would be crucial for the stations to be developed by Indigenous women, with a recognition of the impact of both racism and misogyny in violence against Indigenous women and girls — including in their own communities.
“Peer support is crucial for anything like this to be successful,” she said. “It has to be a model that places women at centre of the conversation.”
Funded properly, the stations could be useful to women in remote communities, where there has been a lack of resources in the past, Blaney said.
Dawn Lavell-Harvard, the president of the Ontario Native Women’s Association, questioned whether developing a new space is necessary, when many of the services are already provided in places specifically designed to be safe for and meet needs of Indigenous women.
Rather than duplicating services — especially in remote areas where there is already a lack of police resources — police forces should implement specialized training and work on building equal, respectful partnerships with Indigenous women’s organizations, she said. Police could, for example, come take a statement in a community space rather than trying to re-create that same environment in a police station. That would allow Indigenous women to set the tone of the interaction and address the significant power imbalance that exists, she said.
There is a long history of negative relationships between Indigenous communities and institutions including the police and child welfare organizations, Lavell-Harvard said. Women are not going to seek support where they feel like their children will be taken away or they feel unsafe.
“Trying to create supportive spaces within that institution is going to be a really uphill battle when there’s better ways of doing this,” she said.
“It’s clear that we need to change our current models of responding to women’s experiences of male violence.”
MYRNA DAWSON DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIAL AND LEGAL RESPONSES TO VIOLENCE