Inadequate shelter services in Arctic Canada imprison Inuit women in cycle of violence: study

RCI / By Eilís Quinn, Eye on the Arctic | english@rcinet.ca

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The lack of women’s shelters, transition lodging and second-stage housing services is keeping Inuit women trapped in an ongoing cycle of violence, says a report from Canada’s national Inuit women’s organization Pauktuutit.

“With the housing crisis in Inuit Nunangat and the increasing rates of violence, one of the important issues that emerged from the research was the lack of second-stage housing available in Inuit communities,” said the report. (Inuit Nunangat is a term used to refer to Canada’s four Inuit regions: The Inuvialuit Settlement Region in Canada’s Northwest Territories; Canada’s eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut; Nunavik in northern Quebec; and Nunatsiavut, in the Atlantic Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.)

The majority of Canada’s 51 Inuit communities are isolated from Canada’s road network and can only be reached by airplane. The majority have few services.  Legal tools used in the South like restraining orders are also useless in small Arctic communities, usually numbering only a few hundred people.

The report says the 15 shelters in operation in the Arctic are simply not enough to respond to the great need of the Inuit population which numbers 65,000.

“For Inuit women who live in more remote communities without shelters, accessing this form of support remains an even greater challenge. The few available shelters in the larger communities may be operating at full capacity and, even when spaces are available travel between communities requires significant time and financial resources.”

The report “Study of Gender-based Violence and Shelter Service Needs across Inuit Nunangat”  makes several recommendations for improving shelter services in the North including calls for government to ensure stable ongoing funding of shelters in the Arctic on par with that provided for shelters on First Nations reserves through the federal government’s Family Violence Prevention Plan (FVPP).

Inuit do not live on reserves and are currently not eligible for the financing.

The study also calls for more crisis shelters that can take in women and children immediately,  as well as the creation of second-stage housing for domestic violence victims that require long-term support and safe lodging.

The report also recommends the creation of Inuit-specific emergency shelters and transitional housing in urban centres in southern Canada.

Data for the report was gathered from interviews and discussion circles in Inuit regions across Canada: Inuvik and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories; Cape Dorset, Clyde River and Iqaluit in the eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut, Kuujjuaq in Nunavik, the Inuit region of northern Quebec, and in Nain and Happy Valley-Goose Bay in the Atlantic province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

There were 164 participants in the study in all.

Direct and indirect costs associated with gender-based violence

Besides the huge emotional and social costs of violence against Inuit women, the financial costs are also enormous, the report said.

“The study findings suggest that the direct and indirect costs associated with gender-based violence across Inuit Nunangat include: medevac services; hospitalization and direct medical costs; long-term mental and physical health costs; economic costs of lost wages and productivity; and, policing and justice services,” the report said.

“While adequate data is not available to calculate the current total economic cost of violence against women and girls in Inuit Nunangat, the data that is available suggest that this figure is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.”

The report also highlighted the roots of violence against Inuit women including overcrowded  housing, colonialism, substance abuse and the normalization of violence in Arctic communities.

In all, the report makes 14 recommendations including the need to better train non-Inuit justice, social services, and health workers on Inuit culture and reality before they come up to work in the North.

The report, dated March 2019, was released June 3, the same day as the final report from Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Write to Eilís Quinn at eilis.quinn(at)cbc.ca

Related stories from around the North:

Canada: Report on violence against Indigenous women a ‘wake-up call’ for Canada, says Pauktuutit president, Eye on the Arctic