Counting to what?
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I discuss the Point in Time Count — a national exercise to get a reasonably accurate picture of homelessness in Canada.
I agree we need solid data. It’s important to know how people end up unhoused, or in precarious housing. It’s also critical to know who they are, and what other issues they have — from drug addiction to trying to escape gender-based violence and finding themselves in shelters or in a friend’s house.
It’s easy to sit comfortably in one’s suburban bungalow and judge people who are on the street, in a tent city or in transitional housing. When you get to know the stories behind the numbers, a different picture emerges.
Like this young person I met a few years ago who’d been kicked out of the house at 16 because his parents thought he was smoking pot. He wasn’t, but after a few months on the street he began using. When I met him he was clean and helping kids on the street find a way to safe housing. But the intervening years had been very rough and the scars were evident on this young man.
Did his parents have the right to do that to him? Yet somehow, this society puts all the blame, all the responsibility of his situation on his shoulders. He got arrested a bunch of times for having mental health breakdowns in public. Well, duh. Who wouldn’t in his situation? And what of the youth on the street, rejected by their families because they’re gay or trans? Why aren’t we arresting their parents?
Nobody ever hauls them in to account for their behaviour that is directly responsible for kids growing into adults who have trouble finding or keeping a job and wind up in chronic homeless.
Same with intimate partner violence. What are you supposed to do when you fear for your life and that of your children? And that the person who swore to love you is the same one making sure you have no money to your name and no work experience or even a group of friends or family who could help you because for years he worked to isolate you from the outside world to control you better? Stay with him until you wind up dead and can be counted in that year’s statistics?
You really ought to read and absorb this piece to understand how in Ottawa (and elsewhere) violent men get a pass. And if you think it’s only stupid women who fall into that trap of abuse, control and deadly violence, you are very much part of the problem.
Gender-based violence impacts everyone. If it hasn’t happened to you (yet), you personally know someone to whom it happened.
Earlier this week I went to the public release of a new report by LEAF called What it Takes, which calls for an independent gender-based violence commissioner.
LEAF has done superb work on this file over the years, under the leadership of the tireless and extraordinary Pam Hrick. Each report is full of excellent data and impeccable references. Each report makes sensible and much-needed recommendations. Yet the violence continues.
By all means, count. But then do, too.
On a completely different note, the newly-renovated and entirely re-thought Quebec City central library, Gabrielle-Roy, just won prizes at a Public Library Gala (only in Quebec, eh) and that pleases me no end. So I thought I’d re-up the piece I wrote after touring the new installations last spring. Gabrielle-Roy is truly a remarkable project and it richly deserves all the praise it’s getting. Bravo.
