The holiday season is usually associated with love, family, and togetherness, but for some people in B.C., the risk of violence may escalate during the holidays.
According to the Battered Women’s Support Services, in just the past week, two women have been killed, while another is recovering from life-threatening injuries due to gender-based violence.
“The recent deaths in West Vancouver and Surrey, as well as the serious assault in Delta, underscore the urgency of addressing violence against women and femicide,” the BWSS shared in a statement. “For every woman killed, thousands more live in fear, often suffering in silence. Gender-based violence continues to plague communities across BC.”
The organization is calling for an expansion of community-based victim support services, with executive director Angela Marie MacDougall saying the recent violence underscores the urgency.
She explains that the provincial government is in the second year of its Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence, with a goal of getting at the root causes of violence.
MacDougall is urging for meaningful and sustained support toward prevention and intervention.
“We’re just really pushing for that, because there’s just too much violence against women, and there’s absolutely not enough intervention that’s supported by the provincial and federal governments,” she explained.
MacDougall adds one of the key barriers for victims is that they often have no safe place to go, so a housing plan that includes an investment in support services such as second-stage transition housing is crucial.
“This expansion is really important, because we’ve had an increase in the killings of women over the last five years, and 2024 is going to be another one of those years,” she explained.
Despite no decrease in deaths of women stemming from intimate-partner or domestic violence, MacDougall says it “hasn’t really resulted in any kind of urgency, except maybe those that are on the front line, trying to address this plague.”
“These recent tragedies are stark reminders that gender-based violence doesn’t pause for the holidays,” said MacDougall. “We must act now to protect victims-survivors and dismantle the systems that allow violence to continue.”