Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the longest standing Canadian front-line service responding to women who’ve experienced all forms of male violence including rape, battery, incest, prostitution, and sexual harassment. Since 1973, our group has responded to over 52,000 women on our 24 hour crisis line, and since our transition house opened in 1981 we have sheltered over 6,000 women and children.

We work as a feminist collective. Our membership reflects the women calling us and includes women of colour, Indigenous women, 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, women who grew up in poverty, working-class women, and lesbians. Our members range in age from 19-72. Some members of our collective are women who first were callers of our crisis line and/or residents of our transition house.

1. The role of women’s shelters and transitional housing

Women’s shelters and transition houses have been forms of direct action, developed for women by women in the 1970s as a part of the North American women’s movement. In addition to providing immediate safety, they offered a place to group, analyze, strategize and fight back against male violence. Our group still operates with and is guided by these feminist principles.  

The women staying in our transition house are usually escaping one particular person, often their male partner. Sometimes she’s trying to escape a pimp, or protect her child from incest. Some women stay with us after being sexually assaulted and want to be in a place where they have the comforting company of other women. Occasionally, women stay with us after leaving an abusive same-sex relationship or after fleeing to Canada to escape persecution in their home country for being a lesbian.

Safety is the key reason women come to stay at a transition house, but what they get is even more than that^[1]. Women in feminist transition houses get to be part of a community of women who encourage and reinforce each other in their decision to leave abusive men. They get to be part of a community of women who offer concrete advice and practical mutual aid of cooking, child care, and searching for future housing. We sit together around the kitchen table to discuss the conditions of our lives and strategize what we can do about it.^[2]

2. The links between housing insecurity, poverty, and gender-based violence, access to safe and stable housing

We see in our frontline work that women frequently risk homelessness when they escape violence. 45% of the calls we respond to about male violence against women include a request for shelter. Many women who call us have little income or are completely dependent on the abuser. Of the women who stay in our short-term shelter, the vast majority (78%) live in poverty and 18% work in low paid jobs^[3].

Residents of our transition house cannot find safe, adequate, and affordable long-term housing in their community. The waitlist for subsidized housing can be 5+ years long, so women are forced to chase the lowest market rents which are still unaffordable, unsustainable, and often unlivable. Women stay with us for longer and longer lengths of time because they can’t find a suitable, affordable place. Women who’ve moved out of our house regularly call on us to provide them with gift cards to be able to buy groceries for their family. Instead of building a self-determined life free from violence, women who leave controlling and violent partners are kept in a state of precarity and because of this, risk returning to the men they left or entering a new abusive relationship just to see to their basic needs.

3. The capacity and accessibility of women’s shelters and transitional housing across Canada to support vulnerable women and those fleeing violence

Over the past two years, our transition house has been full or over capacity 94% of the time and we understand that this is common in other transition houses^[4]. Because of the lack of affordable housing and mental health support, and the long waits for detox and treatment services, transition houses are pressured to become all of these things.

We know that some transition houses don’t have the budget for two staff on shift at all times which leads to burn out and a lack of partnership and training. We are fortunate to have a committed group of women who volunteer with us to ensure there are always two women available on the frontline, and a peer-based model that maximizes our capacity and accessibility, designed by and for the women we serve.

Transition houses and shelters are pressured to spend time creating and enforcing funder mandated policies and procedures, meeting enormous administrative burdens, and collecting data to surveil women. This time and energy could be better utilized in meeting the concrete needs and requests that women have, and encouraging their full participation in decision making for the organization going forward. Then organizations can be managed by women of the communities (particularly of race, class, and ability) that they serve, making accessibility and capacity baked into how we work.

Recommendations:

1. Ongoing, guaranteed funding for autonomous, women-centred, independent women’s shelters and transition houses in every community in the country [urban, rural, and remote] that are separate from government, social service, law enforcement, and institutional intrusion.
2. Ensure that women-centred detox and recovery services are available on demand, have an understanding of women’s particular experience of addiction and its connection to male violence, and that enable mothers to continue their parenting responsibilities to their children^[5].
3. Provision of a Guaranteed Livable Income that meets adequate standards of living and allows for discretionary spending to enhance full participation in community life. It must be provided unconditionally, given to all individual adults in a household regardless of marital status and provided for each child that is in the care of that adult, to all who reside in Canada regardless of their immigration status.
4. Create safe, affordable, and permanent housing for the full range of women: disabled women, women with children, lesbians, women of colour, Indigenous women, older women, students.^[6]

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^[1] Vancouver Rape Relief’s Written Closing Submission for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, https://vrr.seriousotters.dev/1143-2/

^[2] A Call Back to our Original Practice of Feminism in our Transition Houses by Pauline Funston, originally published in Canadian Woman Studies October 2000 https://casac.ca/feminism-in-the-transition-house/

^[3] Vancouver Rape Relief’s submission to the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance for the study on Bill S-233 https://vrr.seriousotters.dev/a-national-framework-for-a-guaranteed-livable-basic-income-vancouver-rape-reliefs-submission-to-the-standing-senate-committee-on-national-finance-for-the-study-on-bill-s-233/

^[4] BCSTH WTHSP 2025 24 Hour Census Report https://bcsth.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/WTHSP-24-Hr-Census-Report-Revised-200426-2.pdf

^[5] 45 Feminist Demands to End Male Violence against Women https://vrr.seriousotters.dev/45-feminist-demands-to-end-male-violence-against-women/

^[6] 99 Federal Steps to End Violence Against Women https://vrr.seriousotters.dev/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/99-Federal-Steps.pdf