Project will study gender-based violence in Westman

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This article was published 09/01/2025 (252 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Women’s Resource Centre is investigating the status of gender-based violence in Westman.

In a two-year project, centre team members are visiting nearby rural communities to identify weaknesses and strengths in social services that are provided, Jamie Brown, a project coordinator at the centre, told the Sun. In December, centre staff visited Killarney as the first community in the project.

The first team meeting in Killarney was with several agencies and focused on “the issues and concerns that they’re seeing in the communities in terms of gender-based violence,” Brown said.

Brown said discussions with local social services providers can include trends they’re seeing with clients, services and resources that are already available, and service gaps and services that local staff wish they could provide.

The goal is to understand supply and demand: to document what level of social services exist in rural areas and find if more are needed.

The first meeting in Killarney included members from Child and Family Services and the local school division, victim services and Manitoba Housing, Brown told the Sun. It was a “temperature check” before the centre will return to town in January and conduct focus groups to dig deeper.

Brown said the focus groups will include individuals like those who personally experienced gender-based violence in the community.

As of late December, the centre team’s plan was to also assess Virden, Neepawa, Minnedosa, Carberry, Pilot Mound, Shoal Lake and Hamiota. The two-year project has about 18 months remaining, Brown said, and will end with a report. The plan is for the team to visit each community at least twice.

As the team looks to research rural areas, a key Brandon service that supports women has seen an increased need in recent years.

In August 2024, YWCA Westman president Lois Ruston said the women’s shelter had seen a 10 per cent rise in shelter stays in 2023. She said clients were also statistically staying longer at shelters before resettling into communities, as those fleeing violence met a market with a lack of affordable housing.

While the Women’s Resource Centre works to create more detailed information about services in rural communities, there are already trends that suggest the problem of gender-based violence exists in such areas.

The Government of Canada wrote in 2023 that the rate of Manitoba’s gender-based violence was twice as high in rural and remote areas than it was in cities. And, the rate of that violence in the province was higher than the national average across Canada.

Targeting rural areas, The Women’s Resource Centre aims to provide information that could shine light on the rate of these issues in areas near Brandon.

The research project is titled, “Advancing the rights of women experiencing gender based violence in southwest Manitoba,” and Brown said it receives funding from the federal department of Women and Gender Equality Canada.

Rural areas may be overdue for more research, as the federal government also wrote that youth face higher violence rates in these areas as well. According to the government’s online fact sheet about family violence, rural areas had higher rates of violence on youth across the provinces: “Girls had a rate of family violence that was twice as high as girls living in urban areas (652 versus 325 victims per 100,000 population).” A similar ratio was observed in boys.

“We are hoping to travel out to a different community every month,” said Brown. “So we’re going to go back out to Killarney in January, and then in February I think the next one we’re planning is Virden.”

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com, with files from Abiola Odutola