What’s the return on hope for women and children fleeing intimate partner violence?
Hope can flip the script; it can break the cycle. It can make the world feel safe, and create a healthier future for girls and boys who have witnessed violence in their homes. Hope can create a more prosperous community for all.
Hope can mean survival. It can mean safety. It can mean second chances.
At York Region Centre for Community Safety, we invest in hope every day. How? By wrapping survivors in care — whatever care they need. By answering questions and creating connections.
By seeing. By listening. By believing.
Explore below all the ways hope can help survivors of intimate partner violence. And invest in hope today.
When someone repeatedly tells you you’re worthless, that nobody else will ever love you, that you’re a bad mom, that you’re crazy, eventually, you begin to believe it. Your self-confidence and self-worth are decimated. If you really are unlovable, you think, if you really are “crazy,” or a bad mom, or unworthy of anything better, then why leave?
When a woman arrives at York Region Centre for Community Safety and is repeatedly told she is worthy, she is lovable, she is a good mom, that she is not imagining things really are as bad as they seem, when she is given validation and care and options, suddenly, she has hope.
By flipping a very powerful and consequential script, an investment in hope can support a woman in leaving an abusive relationship.
Disrupting violence in the home not only creates a brighter future for the woman; it creates a brighter future for her kids, too.
Children are incredibly intuitive. A mother’s fear becomes her children’s fears. Her mother’s anxiety becomes a children’s anxieties. This may lead to emotional, behavioural, developmental, and physical health problems that present in the classroom, on the sports field, or elsewhere in society, both when the children are young and after they’ve grown into adults.
What’s more, research has shown that about one in ten spousal assaults against women also involve a child being threatened or harmed. If the woman is being abused, her children are at risk, too. (Statistics Canada, 2001)
The majority of children who witness violence in the home are also physically or sexually assaulted as children. (Statistics Canada, 2015)
Children in violent homes witness an estimated 80% of assaults. In addition to the long-term psychological harm this may cause, it also puts them at an increased risk of being assaulted by the abuser. (Children’s Legal Rights Journal, 2021)
What’s more, children who are abused are far more likely to be victimized by violent crime — including assault, sexual assault, and robbery — and to experience addiction, anxiety, depression, and homelessness as they grow older. (Statistics Canada, 2015).
An investment in hope can disrupt violence in the home, paying dividends immediately and in the years and generations to come.
Because of the way trauma impacts the brain, many victims and survivors of intimate partner violence feel unsafe, even when their abusive partner is not nearby.
In a healthy situation, a person’s stress response will activate in a time of perceived danger, then deactivate once the threat has passed. But for trauma survivors, this stress response can become hypersensitive, making everyday, safe situations feel unsafe.
Not only might a woman feel unsafe walking down the street, but she may also find it extremely difficult to trust people, including family members, friends and coworkers.
She may be anxious and hypervigilant at work or parent-teacher conferences.
By investing in hope, you can create a world that is more productive, where children can be more relaxed and thrive, where shadows are replaced by opportunities.
While girls who are exposed to violence in the home are more likely to hold their feelings inside, boys are more likely to react with hostility and aggression. (Statistics Canada, 2001)
A boy who sees his mother being abused is 10 times more likely to abuse his own partner as an adult. (Children’s Legal Rights Journal, 2021)
Research shows that boys who witness intimate partner violence are more likely to approve of violence, to believe that violence reflects well on them, and to justify their own violent behaviour. (National Institutes of Health, 2011)
They are also more likely, as adults, to show symptoms on the Trauma Symptom Checklist than men who did not witness violence in the home as children. (Journal of Family Violence, 1995)
An investment in hope can mean a healthier future for boys and their future partners.
While boys are more likely to express the trauma of witnessing violence in the home externally, the harm to girls who witness violence in their homes is often more covert.
Research shows that girls who witness violence are more likely to suffer from depression and low self-esteem as adults. (Journal of Family Violence, 1995)
A girl who grows up with a father who abuses her mother is six times more likely to be sexually assaulted than a girl who grows up in a non-violent home. (Children’s Legal Rights Journal, 2021)
An investment in hope can give a young girl the chance to identify with healthy relationships and experience healthy relationships as an adult.
A study by the federal government estimated the total economic impact of spousal violence in Canada, in the span of one year, was $7.4 billion, amounting to $220 per Canadian. This was considered a conservative estimate. (Justice Canada, 2012).
Most of that $7.4 billion was in the form of intangible costs borne by victims and their family members — for example, compensation that might be paid out by the courts for pain and suffering following an assault, sexual violence, or homicide.
Reported rates of intimate partner violence are higher today than they were then. (Statistics Canada, 2024)
Intimate partner violence costs victims and survivors who need to find childcare so they can attend court; who miss work because of their physical and psychological injuries; who need to pay moving costs for separation and legal costs for divorce.
It costs taxpayers who foot the bill for the criminal and civil courts systems, healthcare bills, and social services.
And it costs the private sector through lost productivity, due to a victim or survivor being late or distracted, along with associated administrative costs.
Intimate partner violence doesn’t just cost you money. It doesn’t just cost victims and employers money.
It’s costing lives.
Women and their children are dying in this country and the cost of that pain, that suffering, as it ripples through communities, is immeasurable.
It’s costing safety — actual safety and the perceptions of safety.
It’s costing healthy childhoods, healthy adolescent years, and healthy adult years for those who witness violence in the home as children.
Intimate partner violence comes with tangible and intangible costs for victims and survivors, for taxpayers, and for the private sector. An investment in hope can mean a more prosperous community for us all.
Know someone who could benefit from this campaign? Please share. Post a link, send a text, flag this page in an email. Have conversations — at the water cooler, on social media, with your neighbours, your friends, your family members, your elected officials.
For victims and survivors of intimate partner violence, an investment in hope can mean survival, safety, and second chances. Invest in hope today.
