Domestic abuse on rise as families try to cope with recession

Since the recession took hold, social service organizations say, there has been a significant spike in the number of Canadians seeking counselling for family violence and the level of abuse has taken a disturbing turn for the worse.

A young woman, cuddling her eight-week-old infant, comes seeking help for physical abuse by her spouse: her eye is blackened and the baby has a broken arm. Another woman has also reached out in desperation: an argument over a dental bill ended with her enraged husband stuffing the invoice, literally, down her throat.

"In all of our programs where we're seeing new people come in, we're finding that they are talking more about the economic impact that has caused them to come forward," said Lisa Falkowsky, executive director of the Calgary Women's Emergency Shelter.

"But we're also finding that for the women coming forward, the complexity and severity of what they're demonstrating is much more severe than we've seen in a long time," she said. "I've got counsellors who have worked in the field 20-plus years and they've never seen what they're seeing now."

Falkowsky said calls to the agency's 24-hour family violence help line in mid-March to Easter jumped 200 per cent compared with the same period last year. The previous 30-day period saw a 300 per cent rise from the same time in 2008.

Alberta already had one of the highest rates of domestic abuse in the country but the job-busting downturn in the once-booming oilpatch appears to be fuelling the problem of family violence even more.

"Domestic violence is about power and control," explained Falkowsky. "So if a man feels he has a lot of control over his workplace and then suddenly loses his job, he would transfer that over to the family and try to use that power and control there in a variety of ways."

Counselling requests up

Mary Wells, executive director of Catholic Family Services for Durham Region east of Toronto, said referrals for domestic violence were up 24 per cent in the last three months of 2008. The organization is currently compiling statistics for the first three months of 2009.

Requests for family and individual counselling have also risen, she said. Two programs for couples aimed at helping families weather the economic downturn are full and now have waiting lists.

"We know that it's rising," Wells said of domestic violence in the region, where thousands of job cuts at the Oshawa General Motors plant and related businesses have affected many families.

"We're seeing both sides of a couple laid off and then domestic violence erupts or substance abuse erupts. That's why we've been developing these preventive programs to try to deal with this before the problem gets really horrendous."

Four shelters for battered women in the area have been full to capacity, said Wells, and what counsellors are seeing mirrors the Calgary experience.

"We're having to extend the counselling period for many of the women that we're seeing because the level of violence seems greater than what we've seen in recent years."

"We see some very serious, very shocking abuse."

Donna Harris, co-ordinator for the Northumberland Domestic Abuse Monitoring Committee, said communities in the eastern Ontario region were hit with a recessionary double-whammy when a Kraft Foods plant shut its doors last fall, followed by the GM layoffs in nearby Oshawa.

She said the resulting financial uncertainty can set off a complex web of emotions, which can lead to violence in the family.

Support available

"We know that abuse is about power and control, and that very frequently during recession times, we have less power and less control," Harris said from Cobourg, Ont.

"We have no control whether our job's going to be there tomorrow. We have less power over our ability to spend money because we've had to take a cutback or a layoff. So those two issues in themselves create an enormous effect on people's self-esteem, their self-worth."

Wells said losing one's job, with little prospect of one to replace it, can lead to feeling embarrassed, degraded and ashamed about not being able to support the family.

"And those kind of emotions ricochet into the relationships," she said. "And if there are many fracture lines in the relationship, they can widen, sort of like an earthquake."

But before that happens, say the experts, families should call crisis lines or contact social service organizations, which are set up across the country.

"If you're a man and you're seeing yourself escalate into what could potentially be violent behaviour or abusive behaviour, what we really want is for people to seek support," said Falkowsky of Calgary. "And likewise women and children."

"And so people need to know that they're not alone, that whether you're a child or a woman being abused or if you're a man who's an abuser, there's support and just get some help."