Pilot program has abusers move out of family home
An emergency shelter that offers domestic violence support throughout southern Alberta is taking on the challenge issued by Women and Gender Equality Canada for organizations across the country to innovate approaches to handling domestic abuse.
“Rowan House has been working on this particular issue of domestic abuse in our community for 21 years and nothing's changed,” the organization's CEO Timmi Shorr said. “We thought, how can we create change by approaching the problem and the issue from a different way … What we came up with was to work with the perpetrators, to work with the abusers, and create a holistic approach to the issue.”
From there, Safe at Home was born. The four-year pilot project in Claresholm will invite men to voluntarily enter an eight-week housing program, allowing the women and any children to stay in their homes while the abuser gets help.
By working closely with community stakeholders — including RCMP, addiction and mental-health counsellors, and victims services — Shorr said the hope is that this first-of-its-kind project flips the concept on its head.
“It's not just going to be an intensive eight weeks and you're done,” she said. “We're going to work with the partners for a year.
The first phase is the eight weeks in the house, then they would go to an outpatient process where they'd still be actively involved in the (therapy) sessions, and then we would also provide aftercare for the rest of the year and make sure everything is going OK.”
The project aims to begin with abusive partners on the “lower end of the spectrum in terms of severity, people who recognize they have a problem that they want to explore and want to change.”
Shorr said by giving supports to all members of the family, the goal is to create lasting change that deals with the source of the issue.
“I just can't say enough about the innovativeness and the willingness of the community, of Claresholm, to be open to a program like this,” she said. “There's a lot of not-inmy-backyard stuff but we can't resolve or work toward a resolution to this issue until we're open to talk about it and, yes, it starts with the individuals that are going to go and participate in our program, but it also starts within our communities and for us to be able to recognize that it's happening everywhere.”
Rowan House is working with an evaluator to monitor the success of the program and will create a blueprint that can hopefully be taken into other communities across the country, Shorr said. Registration for space in the first phase of the program begins Monday.