Our exciting new project to help women reclaim their lives Escaping an abusive situation and learning how to survive and even thrive isn’t a quick process, nor one that happens on a definite timeline. Although women and their children find safety and support at our shelter, Victoria’s, that’s only the first stage of rebuilding [...]
Watch for this sign that someone needs help: It’s simple, and it could save a life. The Canadian Women’s Foundation developed the Violence at Home Signal for Help as a way for women or girls isolated during the pandemic to silently indicate while on a video call that they feared abuse. The idea was [...]
It’s always easiest when the people we look up to are perfect, isn’t it? When they live with integrity, demonstrate moral behaviour at every turn and never say anything ill-considered or thoughtless. The problem, of course, is that nobody is actually like that. Certainly the Famous Five weren’t. Those were the courageous women whose [...]
Victoria’s is a refuge for women and their children When women arrive at Victoria’s Women’s Shelter and realize that they are now truly safe, they disappear for the first few days. Not because they’re scared — quite the opposite. “They just sleep. Their bodies need to recover,” says Penny Chatson, Residential Services Manager. For [...]
“It’s safe, it’s quiet, it’s welcoming and it’s supportive.” That’s how Women’s Resources client intake worker Bozena Hall — hers is the lovely voice at the end of the phone when you call our offices — describes the newly renovated and reopened library. And while yes, there’s a full wall of books on subjects [...]
June is National Indigenous History Month, and June 21 is National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, so this month is a particularly good time to set the platitudes aside and think about what we can actually do to address the tragic reality of widespread violence against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people. We already [...]
As we’ve noted in this space before, sex trafficking does happen here in Kawartha Lakes. Some of those who end up having to perform sex acts for money against their will have been brought here from other cities in hopes of avoiding detection. Others have been recruited from within our very midst. For a [...]
The idea that someone could force another person to undergo sexual acts for money against their will is so appalling that most of us just don’t want to think about it. But the reality is that sex trafficking does happen right here in Kawartha Lakes, and a lot of it victimizes young people, whether [...]
The story of Women’s Resources starts with the story of our shelter for women looking to escape abuse. Although we’ve grown much bigger and offer many more services now, we’d like to take a few moments to go back even before the opening of Victoria’s Shelter three decades ago. Women have experienced abuse from [...]
Would you consider it abuse if you saw a man yelling at his girlfriend? What if he called her an awful name? What if you learned that a female friend of yours had to give her partner passwords to her phone and computer, and that he frequently checked her emails, texts and social media [...]
