BCIFV home > Media Release > October 19, 2004

For Immediate Release: October 19, 2004
Contact: Penny Bain, Executive Director, BCIFV
phone: 604.669.7055, 1.877.755.7055, or
pbain@bcifv.org or www.bcifv.org

Media Release:
BCIFV Joins Others in Condemning Impact of Legal Aid Cuts on Women.

The BC Institute Against Family Violence has notified the Attorney General of BC of its support for the recent West Coast LEAF/ Centre for Policy Alternatives report on the impact of legal-aid cuts on women.

“When the cuts to legal aid were implemented in 2002, many individuals and organizations within the anti-violence community predicted that women would be disproportionately affected,” says Penny Bain, Executive Director of BCIFV. “The LEAF/CCPA report confirms that these predictions have been realized.”

In a letter to the Honorable Geoff Plant, the Institute endorsed the report and urged the AG to reconsider the 2002 policy, which has led to virtual elimination of legal aid for family-law matters while preserving legal aid for individuals facing criminal charges.

“The harsh reality is that use of legal aid services is not gender neutral,” writes BCIFV Chair Frances Grunberg in the October 12th letter. Eighty-percent of people who use criminal legal aid are men. By contrast, women seek family legal aid at twice the rate that men do.

More often than not, the reason that women seek legal aid is that they are attempting to escape intimate-partner violence and secure safety for themselves and their children. They require professional advocacy to help them negotiate the rocky waters of separation, divorce, custody, and access, which their abusers may use to continue exerting power and control by exhausting the women’s financial and emotional resources.

Without financial assistance many women, already financially and socially isolated by their partners, have little choice but to remain, and keep their children in, dangerous situations.

“The irony is that the very men who assault them (the research bears this out) will indeed have access to criminal lawyers through legal aid to insure that they have their right to a legal defense,” writes Grunberg. “This is inherently biased against women, as well costly and counterproductive health and social policy.”

The United Nations has expressed concern that the 2002 policy constitutes a breach of Canada’s international obligations as a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Moreover, it violates the rights of the affected women and children to life, liberty, and security of person, as outlined in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

For more information, see our website, particularly our fact sheet on the implications of legal aid cuts.

From LEAF (September 2004): Legal Aid Denied: Women and the Cuts to Legal Services in BC

Full text of the letter is here, and in the upcoming issue of the Institute’s thrice-yearly publication, Aware, available in hard copy and online in November or early December.

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