‘Enormous disconnect’: As rural women face more abuse, Ontario shelters fear cutbacks

When Anna began planning to leave her husband, she never expected how complicated it would be.

In her rural, eastern Ontario town, there weren’t any resources available nearby for survivors of intimate partner violence. There wasn’t any public transit or any legal aid, either. She also had a daughter and a medical condition that kept her from driving.

A hospital connected Anna with Brianne Luckasavitch, a victim advocate with a women’s shelter called Lanark County Interval House in Perth, Ont.

Luckasavitch helped Anna and her daughter safely leave their home. She supported Anna as she gave a statement to police and navigated the legal system, eventually leading to charges against her ex-husband.

Most importantly, she helped Anna feel less alone.

The shelter’s victim advocate program has helped hundreds of rural women like Anna, who asked not to be identified by her real name because of fears that she could face retaliation from her ex or other members of her community.

And like countless other programs that help rural survivors of intimate partner violence and other crimes, it’s at risk of being cut within months due to a lack of funding.

Rural women’s shelters across the province say they’re juggling a precarious balance of staying afloat while saving women’s lives. These shelters teeter as financial challenges such as grant expiration dates and thinning budgets constantly threaten their services.

Their workers say they can hardly afford to expand services as demand rises. They also can’t afford to stop providing them, as data show that rates of intimate partner violence have only grown in recent years.

“My worry is that in March, we won’t have this program anymore, and women, kids and others will fall through the cracks,” Luckasavitch said in an interview.

Rural women disproportionately face intimate partner violence and they often need help to leave their situations. But shelters across rural Ontario that step up to help say there’s not enough funding to protect them.

While data on rural intimate partner violence are limited, the latest Statistics Canada figures show that in 2023, the rate of police-reported intimate partner violence against women and girls in rural Ontario was about 632 reports per 100,000 people – more than 50 per cent higher than in urban areas, at 408 reports per 100,000.

Nationally, rates of police-reported intimate partner violence rose by 13 per cent from 2018 to 2023, an October 2024 Statistics Canada report found. Advocates say those numbers don’t even paint the whole picture.

Navigating the challenges of rural life and intimate partner violence was something Anna had never imagined.

In their small, isolated town, everyone adored her husband and his family, who were prominent, well-respected community members, she said. Their families had known each other for years before they became romantically involved. Then things began moving fast — he moved into her house, and soon they married. Things were good, she said.

“That’s the worst part of it,” said Anna. “He was great until he wasn’t.”

It started with little things, she said. Her husband would make passive aggressive remarks if she didn’t clean the house after her 10-hour work shift, or make snide comments about her appearance. Then it escalated into screaming, name-calling and swearing, she said.

Anna remembers one incident where he locked her in the garage during winter, and another where he exploded in anger because he thought his dinner wasn’t cooked properly. But because he wasn’t physically hurting her, she thought it wasn’t abuse.

“You don’t call the police because your husband threw dinner on the floor,” said Anna, fighting back tears. “I didn’t know what to do or who to call.”

“I was embarrassed. I feel like I’m a strong person … how am I letting this happen? And it’s hard in a small community because everyone’s connected.”

Anuradha Dugal, executive director of Women’s Shelters Canada, said the actual number of rural women who have experienced intimate partner violence is likely much higher than what statistics show. Not all women report intimate partner violence to law enforcement, she explained, adding that police reporting can be especially challenging for women who identify as Indigenous, Black or disabled.

In rural areas, the higher rates of violence and abuse are exacerbated by the lack of support available to women, and the patchwork funding that doesn’t always address the realities of intimate partner violence in rural communities, said Dugal.

“Rural communities, they have this extra burden,” said Dugal. “Resources that are available to urban women’s shelters are just not available.”

Shelters generally get their basic funding from the province, calculated by capacity, Dugal explained. They receive some capital funding for things such as updates or repairs but funding for everything else, including programming and transportation, comes from grant applications and fundraising.

Dugal said in big cities, there are often more fundraising opportunities and access to private funders. She also pointed to transportation costs as a major example of a barrier to accessing a shelter in rural Ontario communities.

At Huron Women’s Shelter, located about 100 kilometres north of London, Ont., management had to ask staff to be mindful of transportation costs, with the shelter having already gone over its mileage budget for the year by mid-July.

“It costs more to do anything in rural (areas),” said Corey Allison, executive director of the shelter in Goderich, Ont. “If you’re coming up with a funding model that’s going to allocate funds based on numbers, rural will always lose.”

The shelter spends money every week transporting women to and from their location, she said, and they often rely on taxis and Ubers because there’s no public transit in the area. Staff also use their own cars to provide transition services and meet with women in neighbouring communities.

“If I had a policymaker for a day, I would drive them along the route of one of our transition workers, and sit them in the backseat of her car,” said Allison. “We would go from person to person and hear their stories, watch the mileage and see how few people she can see in a day because there’s an hour and a half drive between each person.”

Transportation is only one of many challenges women in rural communities face when experiencing intimate partner violence, said Pamela Cross, a lawyer and member of Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee. Cross also served as an expert witness in the 2022 inquest into the 2015 murders of three women in and around the small town of Wilno, Ont., about 180 kilometres west of Ottawa.

Rural settings can mean long travel times to shelters, poor internet and cell service or a lack of legal aid nearby, she said.

“The funding formulas favour urban communities in the sense that they don’t take into account the vast distances in rural communities,” said Cross.

Guns are more likely to be present in rural communities, added Cross, and they could be used as a threat. A rural woman may also have to care for farm animals and may not be able to leave them behind, she said – all on top of social stigma surrounding intimate partner violence.

“There’s a lack of privacy. People tend to know other people’s business,” she said. “So it can be really difficult for a woman to take the first steps to leaving a relationship in which she’s abused in a rural community.”

These factors are part of the reason why adequate funding for rural shelters is so important, said Cross.

The Family Transition Place in Orangeville, Ont., about 80 kilometres northwest of Toronto, is facing its own funding challenges. In 2019, the resource centre launched a rural response program specifically aimed at reducing barriers to gender-based violence services for women living in rural communities.

But every year, funding for the program has been increasingly stretched, said Brennan Solecky, director of development and community engagement.

The program, based in a satellite office in nearby Shelburne, Ont., was born out of a five-year pilot project funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada. After that federal funding ran out early last year, the program secured annualized funding from the provincial Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services.

Even with the annualized funding, the program still needs at least $110,000 to continue to meet the community’s needs, said Solecky, and that money will likely have to come from fundraising, which isn’t always easy in a small community.

“Our clients have actually said, ‘If I didn’t know about your service, and if it wasn’t here in Shelburne … I would be dead,'” said Solecky. “With any funding gap, there are cutbacks. But cutbacks are not an option.”

Every year since its inception, the program has served 60 per cent more women compared to baseline. But with only one full-time staff member and one working part time, the program likely isn’t sustainable amid a growing population in Dufferin County and surrounding areas, said Solecky.

A spokesperson for Ontario’s Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services said in a statement that it “works closely” with women’s shelters to establish agency budgets at the start of each fiscal year.

“Budgets are informed by factors including community needs, local partnerships and the organization’s reporting to the ministry,” the ministry said, noting the province is investing $1.4 billion in the sector, including $3.6 million in stable funding for survivors in rural, remote and northern communities.

Dugal said part of the solution to support shelters like the Family Transition Place would be consistent government funding, so they don’t have to rely heavily on fundraising and grant-writing to different funding bodies.

“It affects long-term planning. It affects job security. It affects what kind of things they can do, because all of your funding is controlled by an outside body,” said Dugal.

“This week, you need toilet paper, but next week, you need curtains. Did you ask for curtains when you put in the original grant? And if you didn’t ask for curtains, maybe you’re not allowed to buy them.”

Dugal said an example of what a well-funded system could look like was created during the COVID-19 pandemic, when rates of domestic violence rose and the federal government responded by providing $300 million to support women’s shelters, sexual assault centres and other organizations.

The money came with “very little strings attached,” said Kendall Trembath, executive director of Women’s Shelter, Saakate House in Kenora, Ont. — one of just five shelters along the 600-kilometre stretch from Thunder Bay to the Manitoba border.

“We had federal dollars … we could put them exactly where they were needed at the time they were needed,” said Trembath. “We were able to get programs funded that (we) would not have been able to do otherwise.”

That funding has since ended.

Stéphanie Ahuanlla, a spokesperson for Women and Gender Equality Canada, said in a statement that while the agency does not provide “ongoing operational and administrative funding” to organizations addressing gender-based violence, it encourages organizations to apply for various funding opportunities and calls for proposals.

Ahuanlla also pointed to the government’s 10-year National Action Plan to End Gender-based Violence, which includes bilateral funding agreements between federal and provincial governments and nearly $540 million over five years for gender-based violence services across the country.

But Dugal said the current funding system still doesn’t go far enough to address the reality of intimate partner violence, especially when it happens to women in rural communities.

“When it comes to proving it, it does feel like there’s an enormous disconnect between what we understand as being essential to keep women alive, which is a women’s shelter, and what governments are actually willing to do to maintain those services,” said Dugal.

Those services are life changing, said Anna. In the months following her escape, Luckasavitch and the staff at Lanark County Interval House have helped Anna find housing and counselling services for her and her daughter.

Ultimately for Anna, the importance of funding rural services goes hand-in-hand with speaking up about intimate partner violence, which is more important to fight the stigma that exists in rural areas.

“It could be somebody sitting right beside you and you have no idea,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 18, 2025.

Rianna Lim, The Canadian Press