Quebec women’s shelter Shield of Athena has launched a new multilingual website aimed at improving resource access by eliminating language barriers for women and families experiencing violence. The new website was created to provide more accessible and inclusive access to critical information, including prevention, support services and resources, for both victims of conjugal or family violence in 11 different languages. “Linguistic access is very, very important to us, because a lot of the women that are referred to us by the existing health and social services are women who do not speak either English or French,” said Melpa Kamateros, executive director of Shield of Athena. Asking for help One in every two women who come to the centre does not speak English or French. According to Kamateros, it is already difficult for women to ask for help when they or their family are experiencing violence, and if there is a language barrier, it makes asking for help more difficult. “Legal access is very important, and the reality is when you possess the minimum knowledge of language, that doesn’t really help you a lot because you’re missing all the subtleties and the meanings,” she said. “We want to give access to those who are underprivileged, diminished, minimized, and, by consequence, living in a lot of danger because they can’t access information or resources.” Kamateros says language barriers also impact the time it takes to provide resources to women. “When you have to help people who don’t speak English or French, the intervention instead of being in one hour takes three hours to do,” she said. “Youth protection, the legal system, could take an average intervention of two hours, but that might take four hours if there’s a language barrier.” Prevalence of violence against women The launch comes at a time of growing concern over the prevalence of femicides and gender-based violence across the country. Femicide is the intentional killing of a woman or girl because of bias against this group of people or misogyny, with the accused most often being a current or former intimate partner of the victim. According to Statistics Canada, women are disproportionately killed by their spouses or intimate partners, with 41 per cent of women killed by a spouse or intimate partner compared with 5 per cent of men. In Quebec, there have been 11 suspected femicides recorded since the beginning of the year. There have been 63 femicides recorded so far this year in Canada. The preliminary data was provided to CTV News at the beginning of July by the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, which documents all women and girls killed in Canada. As investigations into suspicious deaths continue, the numbers may change. “It’s a social phenomenon based on gender inequality, and when it is also coupled with a language barrier, it makes it very difficult for victims to access services or to even find out information on these services or on the dynamic of conjugal Family violence,” Kamateros said. Front-line workers feel pressure Women’s shelters across Canada continue to report increasing demand in light of rates of violence against women. Kamateros says that because the centre offers its services in multiple languages, it is continually operating over capacity. “Our shelter this year was working at 100 per cent, all while conducting major renovations. The demand for services is always there,” she said. “So we are there to make sure that everybody has access to information on family violence.”
