The issue of gender-based violence against women needs to be treated as an epidemic, and not as individual tragedies.
That’s what officials at Huronia Transition Homes, which provides services and support across Simcoe County to women who have survived violence, are hoping to accomplish by continuing to bring the issue to the forefront of people’s minds.
“It’s really hard, because in the 10 years that I have worked with the organization, this year’s femicide list was the largest we’ve seen,” said Haily MacDonald, the organization’s acting executive director. “We always talk about these things as individual tragedies, but then we miss the mark that this is, in fact, a systemic issue.”
In June 2022, the province released its 68 recommendations that came from the inquiry of a 2015 triple femicide in Renfrew County, she said, adding those recommendations included the province declaring intimate partner violence an epidemic. That, she noted, has yet to occur.
What’s particularly frustrating, she admitted, is that it took seven years for an inquest to happen and for recommendations to be made, following the murders of three women by Basil Borustki, who was sentenced to life without parole for the killings.
In the meantime, more women have continued to be killed by intimate partner violence.
“(In) 2023, we have another femicide — a woman (and) three children murdered and another woman in critical condition,” she said, referring to the October 2023 murders in Sault Ste. Marie.
A second woman, aged 45, was shot but survived the attack. The gunman, identified as 44-year-old Bobbie Hallaert, later killed himself.
“Are we going to wait another seven years to have another inquest with the same recommendations? That’s the difficulty of all of these tragedies being viewed in isolation,” she said.
MacDonald also pointed to the murder of Collingwood residents Ashley Schwalm and Kinga Kristen as proof this isn’t an issue that simply happens somewhere else.
“We know this is really relevant to Simcoe County right now. We have people on the list who are in our communities. The shelters in Simcoe County are full. Our services are full. The worst-case scenario when you have experienced intimate partner violence is femicide. This is happening here,” she said.
The Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses reported 74 per cent of the femicides in 2023 were committed by an intimate partner, family member, or by men known to the victims.
Every year, on Dec. 6 — the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the organization hosts a vigil to remember the lives of the 14 women murdered at L’école Polytechnique, as well as the 58 women and five children who were murdered in Ontario in 2023. During the vigil in 2023, attendees were invited to participate in an activity called “These Hands Do No Harm” where they were invited to write on a cut-out hand an action they were going to take to end gender-based violence. The cut-out was taped to a banner that was covered in the painted handprints of Huronia Transition Homes staff, and the women and children in the programs.
“We wanted to try to honour the lives that were lost and use the opportunity as a call to action for the community on how (it) can support (us) in reducing these numbers and ending gender-based violence,” MacDonald said. “A lot of what we do is based in advocacy as well as those tangible supports of what you need after you’ve experienced that. We do counselling, we have shelter programming, specialized anti-human trafficking work, but then we also try to run events, workshops and programming across the county because we are actively working to prevent the need for our service and reduce the prevalence of violence in our communities.”
There are women’s shelters in Simcoe County, including Midland, Barrie, Collingwood, Alliston and Orillia.
