Gender-based violence is not new to the province of British Columbia (BC), to the city of Vancouver, or to the Downtown Eastside (DTES). But as intersecting and seemingly unending crises continue to become more urgent, the acuity and nature of this violence has changed in shape. Both the frequency of gendered violence and lack of remaining space for respite is alarming.
As things worsen at extreme rates for our gender diverse and trans kin in many regions of the world, and as Indigenous women and two-spirit peoples under Canadian law have long warned: we must refuse to let this reality become normalized.
P.O.W.E.R., PACE Society, Care Not Cops, Harm Reduction Nurses Association, Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War, Crackdown Podcast, Support your Local Sex Workers Vancouver, Stop the Sweeps, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and The Mainlander Editorial Collective are concerned about these new forms and the frequency of violence, and the abandonment of what little service network exists for those who experience gendered violence, particularly for sex workers.
The failure of the City of Vancouver and provincial government to respond to the temporary or permanent closures of multiple spaces in the DTES where people experiencing gender-based violence can access support and reprieve is violence within itself. The City of Vancouver has instead continuously expanded funding to police – a carceral arm that reinforces gendered violence and oppression. There has never been adequate provision of safety in the first place, particularly spaces that are truly trans inclusive, non-carceral and/or explicitly following principles of decolonization.
Gender-based violence in our communities
Unending crises – including the increasingly toxic drug supply, settler-state police power expansion, and endless displacement – have fostered an environment that contributes to an overall lack of safety for people who are disabled, drug users, racialized, and/or unhoused, while simultaneously creating conditions where gender-based violence is a routine, and even expected, part of the everyday lives of women and gender diverse people. Trans and two-spirit people likewise face added layers of exclusion embedded in most facets of Vancouver’s societal fabric, including at most medical sites and particularly within our punishment (‘criminal justice’) bureaucracies.
Recent trends in gendered violence are a symptom of social and cultural norms that embed gender subordination, economic marginalization, settler colonialism, and social exclusion as the status quo. This violence is then reinforced by a lack of safe, affordable and dignified housing, income insecurity/economic policies (including exceptionally low social assistance rates) that trap women and gender diverse people in poverty, as well as austerity measures that eliminate or limit access to community support. Increasing rent and economic precarity in particular force many women and gender diverse people to endure unsafe conditions, including being forced to remain in a violent household.
Factors such as surveillance embedded in health and social services, alongside increased interactions with police – who are often themselves perpetrators of gender-based violence – heighten exposure to violence and limit opportunities for recourse, allowing those who commit gender-based violence to act with impunity. This is especially evident among women already targeted by state violence including those who are criminalized for using drugs or for being visibly unhoused, have precarious citizenship, and those who are involved in some form of criminalized income generation. Among women living in Vancouver’s DTES, 52% reported feeling unsafe as a result of police presence. In another sample of 157 women living in the DTES, only 15% stated they would go to the police if they felt unsafe.
The settler colonial and racist forms of power and domination that are foundational to “Canadian policing” create conditions in which Indigenous or otherwise racialized women remain disproportionately impacted by state violence, heightening exposure to police scrutiny and interrelated forms of gendered violence. Violence against Indigenous women and gender diverse people, including two-spirit people, in particular is an urgent human rights issue that is largely ignored, concealed and/or perpetrated by state institutions. The rate of violent victimization among Indigenous women is nearly triple that of non-Indigenous women, and the homicide rate against Indigenous women across “Canada” is six times higher. Simultaneously, overt settler-state racism in the punishment bureaucracy (or so-called ‘criminal justice’) system has culminated in the mass incarceration of Indigenous women, who account for roughly 50% of the women in federal prison (despite only accounting for 3-4% of the population of women). Indigenous women also face significantly more punitive sentencing than other women.
The pervasive reality of gender-based violence is that it does not occur in isolation. Rather, gender-based violence overlaps with police violence as well as many interrelated and escalating crises and inequities to undermine the safety of women and gender diverse people, with Indigenous or otherwise racialized women and gender diverse people continuing to be disproportionately and deliberately impacted by gender-based violence in our communities.
The temporary and permanent closure of gender-specific harm reduction and drop-in sites
The impacts of gender-based violence is compounded by the chronic underfunding and temporary or permanent closure of gender-specific drop-in and harm reduction sites across the city. Closures have removed some of the few remaining safe spaces left for women and other gender diverse people. The suspension of services will have inevitable consequences, contributing to experiences of gender-based violence and paucity of resources already available to women and other gender diverse people.
While non-profit organizations are already limited in their ability to challenge status quo arrangements of power that necessitate their existence in the first place, the closures without replacement and chronic underfunding of support services for sex workers and other women – particularly as the VPD can snap its fingers for the $5 million dollars from the city to fund ‘Task Force Barrage’ outside of typical budget discussions to wreak further havoc in the DTES – shows that communities who do not embrace policing will be starved of public resources under the provincial and municipal governments’ current law-and-order direction in the name of “public safety.”
The impacts of this are highlighted by PACE Society – an organization by, with and for sex workers – executive director Kit Rothschild who has seen the impacts of this firsthand, “As funding dries up, community spaces close while police budgets grow. Displacement in the DTES, over-policing, and surveillance push women and gender-diverse people into greater violence and precarity—while stripping away the resources meant to keep them safe.”
Jennie Pearson, a University of British Columbia PhD student and PACE volunteer says, “Women and gender minorities, including sex workers, rely on community-led spaces to meet their health and safety needs. Sex workers deserve to feel like these spaces matter, and are worth keeping open.”
“In February, PACE Society announced the temporary closure of its drop-in space due to a funding crisis. Overnight, PACE members lost access to their counselors, peer support groups and social networks. Funding for community-led, rights-based approaches to sex work services have been historically hindered in BC due to governments’ prioritization of prohibitionist approaches and “exit programs” that do not meet community needs, nor address gender based violence or whorephobia [exclusion and discrimination driven by moral panics linked to sex work].”
Prohibitionist drug policies exacerbate gender-based violence through an increasingly unpredictable unregulated drug supply
In the context of prohibition, the toxic drug supply continues to evolve in order to evade police crackdowns. Police drug seizures of all sizes destabilize the drug market and increase overdoses, particularly seizures of fentanyl. Prohibitionist frameworks have made the supply unpredictable and more complex over time. In recent years, this has led to an influx of benzodiazepines (‘benzos’) and other sedatives in the illicit drug supply.
Benzos are a nervous system depressant that have many positive and pleasurable effects; however, they can lead to symptoms such as confusion, dizziness, drowsiness, passing out, and long periods of memory loss when used unknowingly or unpredictably. These symptoms have especially serious consequences for women and gender diverse people, who increasingly experience theft, physical, and sexual violence. Additionally, women are more often using their drugs alone to avoid potential experiences of gender-based and drug war violence, which exacerbates their risk of fatal overdose. The influx of benzos in the supply has made this increase in isolated use especially concerning as benzos are not responsive to naloxone, and, when mixed with opioids, create the potential for more complex overdoses. Alongside this sedative-contaminated supply, the province has reported that drug toxicity deaths among “females” has risen 60% within BC since 2020 – due in part to the changing supply, and other intersecting social and structural factors.
With recent changes to BC’s safer supply programming, which now requires that all prescribed safer supply be witnessed by a health professional, women and gender diverse people are likely to experience even more prohibition-related violence.
This is highlighted by Michelle D., a researcher with P.O.W.E.R., and member of the BC Association of People on Opioid Maintenance, “Our dilaudids are being taken from us and that’s going to make us more reliant on fentanyl patches because it’s the only thing that healthcare workers don’t have to witness. But we know they’re going to take that away from us too and it’s not even something many of us want to be on. Women are eventually going to be entirely reliant on the poisoned drug supply, and I’m worried what that’s going to mean for us.”
The interconnectedness between access to opioids, stimulants and medicines related to gender-affirming care should not be downplayed either. Not only are the – very active – moral panics being driven against trans people, sex workers and people who use drugs being generated by the same sources of power, the provision of the substances are often gate kept by the same institutions, regulatory bodies, and their actors; and their withholding of medicine and drugs contribute to daily harms and premature death.
Police-led displacement from public spaces destabilizes the lives of women and intensifies their vulnerability to violence
The same carceral logics that underpin prohibition fuel the systemic displacement of women from public spaces. Amid the influx of benzos and other cutting agents/adulterants that make up the drug supply, increased efforts have been made to clear people from the streets in the name of “public safety.” Examples of this violence include street sweeps — where the removal of tents or other informal shelters creates conditions of “absolute homelessness” — and policy changes that legislate the forceful removal of people from visible areas, under a guise of criminality or deviance driven by moral panic (e.g., Bill 34/recriminalization; involuntary treatment). Given the lack of available housing – including a recent move by Vancouver’s city council to put a hold on building any new supportive housing, as well as treatment spaces, these tactics largely result in displacing people to more dangerous, isolated environments, ultimately increasing encounters with police and severing ties to community networks.
Melody Wise, a masters candidate at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, and research coordinator for An Evaluation of Sex Workers Health Access (AESHA) project shares that, “Street sweeps are part of an ongoing struggle for social and spatial control in Vancouver’s DTES. The result is not just the displacement of marginalized and criminalized women, but the erosion of their basic rights to exist in public, to access care, and to be seen as human.”
“This is not a new phenomenon—it is the latest phase in a long history of urban dispossession where the lives of marginalized and criminalized communities have always been treated as expendable.”
BC’s expansion of involuntary treatment in particular poses a significant threat to women and gender diverse people. Involuntary treatment relies on the violent apprehension of people from community, placing many women and gender diverse people in abusive institutions without access to appropriate care and with few accountability mechanisms to safeguard against gender-based violence – a similar lack of accountability which has been seen in BC-based recovery centres, where women have repeatedly reported being placed in unsafe positions and exposed to gender-based violence with little oversight. In the context of an increasingly toxic drug supply, involuntary treatment increases likelihood of fatal overdose/drug poisoning death, alongside the other forms of prohibition-related gender-based violence outlined above. As the BC government moves to build gender-specific involuntary treatment sites, there are questions about just how far people will be removed from their support networks.
Police contribute to persistent gender-based violence at the expense of protecting women
With the expansion of police power – in scope, budget, and number of officers – in Vancouver and other regions in BC, a clear message has been sent to women: many state actors, by funding police instead of safety, are on the side of the perpetrator.
We have witnessed three main ways that this message has been operationalized for women who have been subjected to gender-based violence. First, the potential for further criminalization or arrest, the risk of experiencing discrimination, and widespread mistrust of the police largely restricts their ability to contact the police or file formal reports following violence. Second, policing is a deeply misogynistic institution. Women who do report instances of gender-based violence are often subjected to further violence, as police officers dismiss their initial reports with no recourse while simultaneously demeaning and belittling them throughout the process. At the same time, Vancouver’s growing police presence/budget in recent years correlates with the closure of services that directly support women and other gender diverse people. In 2025, the VPD budget is set to cost at least $434 million. Finally, police are often instigators of gender-based violence themselves. This ranges from individual acts of physical, sexual, and verbal violence by a single officer, to systemic or structural violence reinforced by police that disproportionately impacts women. When combined, this indicates that police are not simply a sunk cost, but a public expense that actually works against women’s safety.
Limited and potentially negative consequences of protection orders and peace bonds in Vancouver
Women and gender diverse people cannot rely on police to address gender-based violence, regardless of whether a protection order or peace bond is obtained. While being granted such court-ordered protections is already inconsistent and requires participating in a larger criminal-legal process that can be very complicated and isolating to navigate, police often do not enforce an order even in situations where a breach has been made. In a recent BC-based survey, nearly 40% of survivors of gender-based violence stated that, in instances where they had reported a breach violation to police, the police response was largely inadequate and neglectful, often leading to more violence. The lack of response to women and gender diverse people in these instances (and in general) highlights a blatant disregard for the safety of gender-based violence survivors, and further demonstrates the misogyny that is deeply embedded across BC’s police forces.
The use of protection orders and peace bonds also maintains a system where survivors of gender-based violence are forced into the realm of policing, with few meaningful alternatives or access to multi-faceted safety plans. This effectively makes survivors reliant on a violent institution for their “protection”, placing them in a position where they are more vulnerable to police abuse, harassment, and apathy, rather than meaningfully improving safety. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the pursuit of protection orders or peace bonds to instead start a cycle of surveillance and targeting of people who pursue them and/or call police for support when their bonds are broken – which leads to a reasonable skepticism of their use. Taken together, this process highlights the inability of the criminal justice system to adequately address issues of gender-based violence more broadly, demonstrating that more police or punitive responses to gender-based violence will not actually mitigate experiences of violence.
Because these carceral pathways are inherently tied to criminalization, women with precarious status, who are undocumented, and/or have no citizenship may not be able to access them without putting themselves at risk of state violence. Not only could migrant women face possible deportation, but people can be detained in Canadian immigration holding centers indefinitely. Notably, migrant sex workers face targeted campaigns of criminalization by police, who then act as gatekeepers for who can access services that should protect people from perpetrators of violence. There are likewise reasons to be concerned about Canada’s decision to adhere to the Donald Trump-led border securitization requests, which only worsen this situation, as the move also destabilizes the drug supply and leads to another wave of overdoses.
A path forward: Non-carceral recommendations to address gender-based violence in our communities
Through the collective lens of our organizations, we have witnessed a rise in carceral “solutions” to crises that directly contribute to gender-based violence, which we know will only lead to more violence. Rather than increasing the police’s already inflated budget, we recommend addressing the root causes of gender-based violence by dismantling the systems that embed gender subordination, economic precarity, and racist, settler colonial logics; prioritize community care; and adequately fund resources that support women and gender diverse people.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of recommendations:
- Immediately prioritize allocating appropriate resources to community-level/led harm reduction, drop-in, and gender-based violence services intended to support women and gender diverse people, including safety planning to reduce or eliminate future violence and community crisis lines untethered from police.
- Regulate the drug supply and expand access to community-run compassion clubs.
- Immediately end street sweeps and other policies that displace women from visible public spaces and increase encounters with police.
- Increase social assistance wages to above Market Basket Measures to account for inequities, and adequately increase crisis grants.
- Immediately remove all police powers from the Mental Health Act on the way toward eliminating the Act altogether.
- Decriminalize drugs (for the first time).
- Decriminalize sex work.
- Improve access to housing and adequate shelter, including gender-specific, trans inclusive, and safe shelters.
- Stop the expansion of healthcare-police joint programs, which discourages the use of healthcare services by people seeking stability and safety.
- Re-allocate police funding towards accessible, community-led programming that tailors consequences and accountability toward perpetrators of abuse prior to potentially fatal or otherwise acute incidents.
- Expand access to detox on demand and non-coercive treatment services.
- Implement the 35 key recommendations put forward by the Red Women Rising report.
THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP NOW
- On May 8, Support Your Local Sex Workers Vancouver is organizing an event at the Birdhouse to raise funds on behalf of PACE Society. This event is hosted with support from PACE Society, including Jennie Pearson, who says, “In the face of inadequate funding, spaces like PACE need community support. Sex workers and allies are organizing a fundraiser for PACE on May 8th at the Birdhouse. All are welcome.” Follow @supportyourlocalsexworker_van on instagram to stay updated. You can donate directly to PACE Society by e-transferring funds to: info@pace-society.org.
- On May 12 and 19, you can drop by 717 East Hastings between 11am – 1pm to drop-off donations of gently used clothing, survival gear and hygiene products. Follow P.O.W.E.R. on instagram for more specific calls related to this should they come up.
- Members from The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users have initiated a women’s mutual support and safety group, “Women of the World.” Sign up is each Tuesday at 3:30pm, and it runs from 4:00pm – 5:00pm at 380 East Hastings Street.
- Become familiar with recognizing an overdose, learn how to administer naloxone (and carry a kit, which are free of cost at BC pharmacies), and consider ways you may be able to create safety for people who have lost consciousness due to non-opioids mixed in the supply.
- Click here for printable zine version of the statement
FURTHER BACKGROUND
Article: MMIWG2S+ and the Failure of Policing by Nickita Longman
Report: Red Women Rising by Carol Muree Martin and Harsha Walia
Book: Order Unbroken by Angela Sterritt
Statement: VPD Siege on the DTES Furthering Displacement and Endangering Women
Article: Harm from ‘Robbery Dope’ on the rise by DJ and Jenn McDermid
Article: For migrant sex workers, police are the ‘most dangerous gang’ in the business by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam
Report: Harms of End-Demand Criminalization: Impact of Canada’s PCEPA laws on sex workers’ safety, health & human rights
Article: Police benefit from unregulated drug and sex work markets by Crystal Laderas and Tyson Singh Kelsall
Film: The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
Study: Violence, policing, and systemic racism as structural barriers to substance use treatment amongst women sex workers who use drugs by Shira Goldenberg et al
Article: Pickton inquiry slams ‘blatant failures’ by police from CBC News
Transcript: These wicked policies are by design and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise from Mona Woodward
Article: Against Carceral Feminism by Victoria Law
Study: ‘It just doesn’t stop’: Perspectives of women who use drugs on increased overdoses during the COVID-19 pandemic by Kelsey Speed et al
Report: Federal Housing Advocate’s Observational Report, British Columbia, 2022
