Men Are Part of the Solution (MAPS) is still waiting to hear whether they'll be able to keep their doors open in Thompson past March.
According to MAPS board member Oswald Sawh, the organization has in recent years been the beneficiary of regular installments of one-time funding from the Thompson Urban Aboriginal Strategy and other groups, but that they are now looking beyond that for a source of permanent, annual funding.
The provincial government is the primary source being lobbied, and Sawh was part of a delegation that met with Gord Mackintosh, minister of family services and consumer affairs in late November. "We're hoping that this time around the province will agree," said Sawh - MAPS attempted to get similar funding from the province last year, but was unsuccessful in that attempt. "I think he knows the urgency of our request," said Sawh of the meeting. "He's very much in support of the program."
Sawh, who has worked with MAPS since it began in 2000, expects that MAPS will learn of the province's decision "early in the new year." Should that funding not materialize, MAPS will only be able to continue in an extremely diminished role. They will not be able to afford employees or a full-time counsellor, and will revert to a lobbying organization that holds sporadic forums - a minor role that they have played in the past.
Along with Leslie Tucker, executive director of the Thompson Crisis Centre, Sawh made a presentation to city council Nov. 28, outlining the work their organizations do in addressing domestic violence concerns in the community.
"We provide a counseling program with a focus on men that have anger issues, and with a more specific focus in the area of domestic violence," explained Sawh. "Even though the Crisis Centre provides extremely important work for the women and children, there were no support programs for men - men who either were committing violence at the household, or that were at the other end, being victimized themselves."
"We operate a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week crisis shelter," said Tucker. The Thompson Crisis Centre also runs a transitional program for domestic abuse victims looking for support and counseling, as well as an emergency telephone line. "It fielded 986 calls in 2009/10, out of which 486 were directly related to domestic violence," added Tucker. Crisis Centre personnel helped an additional 119 clients, who didn't set foot in the Crisis Centre itself, through a partnership with the Burntwood Regional Health Authority.
Other statistics for the Crisis Centre last year include 632 individuals - 293 women and 339 children - making use of the emergency shelter over a total of 4,646 bed nights, while the transition floor saw 414 total bed nights between 73 women and 110 children. The emergency floor numbers are on pace to be even higher in 2010, as the Crisis Centre had seen over 4,100 bed nights on that floor through July.
Sawh and Tucker also recounted personal stories to show the specific impact domestic violence can have on individuals.
"I remember about five years ago, MAPS had a sharing circle, and there was this young man, he must have been maybe 14 years old," recanted Sawh. "He looked tough - this is a young man that if you saw him cross the street, you would go on the other side. He started to talk about his experience, being sexually and physically abused when he was growing up. He broke down in tears when he was talking about his experiences. At that time, we didn't have a program where a male could go to talk about his issues. When the guy said he really wanted to talk about what he had experienced, I couldn't tell him where he could go to talk about these issues."
"I ran across him a few years later," continued Sawh. "He was probably in his late teens, and he started to talk about how his life was going, and I was even more disturbed to find out that he himself had now become an abuser. He was abusing his girlfriend. It made me realize that when we talk about domestic violence, we're talking about the family unit. Take out the gender issue, we're talking about what happens in a household. Domestic violence is not just a gender issue. It happens to men, it happens to women."
"You can either become a victim, or a perpetrator, or you can try and shake your past loose and talk about your issues and ensure that it doesn't happen to any other children," said Sawh, who both witnessed and was victimized by domestic abuse while growing up.
"We need to make sure we talk about it more, so it's no longer a bedroom issue, no longer an issue between two consenting adults," he added. "It's about the future of our children. We talk about the drugs, we talk about the gang issues, we talk about the exploitation of our youth - but if you look at where a lot of those issues came from, it springs from broken, unhealthy homes. Domestic violence is one of those causes of what we see on the streets today."
Noting that Northern Manitoba has some of the highest domestic violence rates in Canada, Sawh also mentioned that the issue has been prioritized by the RCMP for the area.
"I'm certainly hoping that you keep domestic violence as a priority," said Tucker. "It has a huge impact on community safety. In order to have safe communities, we need safe homes."
Coun. Luke Robinson questioned Tucker on whether the Crisis Centre had any intake of elders who had been abused, to which Tucker responded in the negative. "I think maybe something that's missing is that they don't know that they have that avenue," offered Robinson. "Maybe that's something that should be brought to their attention."
