Older Women’s Right’s Matter Webinar: Part 1
Approximate Transcript
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Older women’s rights matter: Providing better support with legal challenges in the context of abuse
PART ONE
West Coast LEAF & the Canadian Centre for Elder Law
Transcript:
Alana: Welcome, and thank you for joining our Older Women’s RightsMatter webinar, the first part of a two-part series. My name is Alana Prochuk, and I’m the Manager of Public Legal Education at West Coast LEAF. I’m joined today by lawyer Krista James who is the National Director for the Canadian Centre for Elder Law. We’re also really lucky to be joined by a family law lawyer with over 20 years of experience, Janneke Lewis, who practices on the North Shore and has experience in the area of supporting survivors of violence with their legal challenges. She’ll be joining us at the end to assist with answering some of your questions about family law.
We want to start off the webinar by thinking about the fact that we are broadcasting from Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish territories belonging to the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh peoples. We also encourage you to rreflect on the territory wherever you are doing your work.
We’re very grateful to our project funder, the BC Council to Reduce Elder Abuse. Without their support we wouldn’t be able to offer this webinar to share important legal information about rights and options for older women fleeing abusive situations.
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“Women often stay in a situation that is very unhealthy and scary for years because they don’t know how to end it. And where do you go when you leave?” –Older Women’s Dialogue Project participant
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Here is a quotation from a participant in one of our projects (which we’ll describe later) that really speaks to the reasons we started this project. Older women have told us that there is a real lack of information about how to get out of an abusive relationship, particularly legal information, and difficulties in finding resources for support if they do decide to leave. That’s why we’re doing this project: to fill a gap in legal information that is centered on the unique needs of older women. We wanted to create a resource to address a number of legal issues that may all come into play simultaneously for older women leaving abuse.
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Introducing the project
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WEBINAR ROADMAP TODAY
Who we are
Why we’re doing this project
What we have learned about experiences of safety and violence from talking to older women through the Older Women’s Dialogue Project
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A bit more about what we’re doing today and this project: We’ll explain a bit more about the two organizations that have partnered to offer this webinar and the reasons for doing this particular piece of work, and some key insights shared by the older women who participated in the Older Women’s Dialogue Project.
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WEBINAR ROADMAP TODAY
What Roads to Safety is allabout, where you can get it, and how we’ll hope you’ll use it
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And we are very excited that today is the launch of Roads to Safety, our 100-page plain language legal handbook for older women fleeing abuse. We’ll give an overview of that and make sure you know how to download your own free copy.
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WEBINAR ROADMAP TODAY
Legal topics relevant to older women’s physical safety:
Capacity and decision-making rights
Protection orders and peace bonds
Role of the Health Authorities as Designated Agencies
Intro to the role of the Public Guardian & Trustee
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Consider this webinar a brief tour of a few important topics in Roads to Safety! We will be covering the legal information in an introductory way. We hope you will use Roads to Safety and particularly the Resources section at the back to obtain more in-depth information and find additional supports tailored to your clients’ legal needs.
Today’s session will introduce some topics that are especially relevant to older women’s physical safety while the next session will focus more on financial safety. Of course, the distinction between physical safety and financial safety is somewhat artificial – as you all probably know, physical and financial abuse often occur together, and a lack of financial resources can undermine a woman’s ability to escape physical violence or meet her own basic survival needs. The division of topics is not meant as a prioritization. We had to divide the topics in some way when we know that the legal issues are all deeply intertwined – which is why we are addressing them all in Roads to Safety.
Today we will touch on powers of attorney and representation agreements only very briefly in the context of decision-making rights. The next session on May 31st will expand today’s brief discussion of powers of attorney and representation agreements to get into steps to revoke these substitute decision-making documents in cases of financial abuse or any other situation where the older women feels the appointed decision-maker is not doing a good job.
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WEBINAR ROADMAP – MAY 31st
More learnings from the Older Women’s Dialogue Project:
Older women’s experiences of financial insecurity
Barriers in accessing legal and financial information for diverse older women
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Next time we’ll go more in depth about older women’s insights regarding poverty and income insecurity and barriers in access to information, especially legal information.
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WEBINAR ROADMAP – MAY 31st
Legal topics relevant to older women’s financial safety:
Revoking powers of attorney & representation agreements
Basics of CPP, GIS, and OAS
Property & pension division after separation
Other steps to protect property in the context of abuse
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And we’ll look at legal topics that are particularly relevant to older women’s financial security, especially in the context of financial abuse.
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THE CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ELDER LAW
Dedicated to improving the lives of older adults
Research, writing and analysis for law reform
Collaboration and consultation with community groups
Developing materials to help people understand legal rights and responsibilities
Transcript:
Before we get into the subject matter of the webinar, we want to tell you a bit about the two organizations that have produced this training. Now I’ll hand it over to Krista to explain a bit about the Canadian Centre for Elder Law.
Krista: The Canadian Centre for Elder Law is Canada’s national not-for-profit organization focused on the law and policy issues that impact us as we age. Our work includes research, writing and analysis to make recommendations for law reform. We do a lot of collaborative activities with organizations across BC and Canada and engage in a significant amount of consultation with community groups, in particular with older women to identify their experiences with the law. And we develop public legal education and other kinds of education tools to help people understand their legal rights and responsibilities under the law. We were created 12 years ago as a division of the BC Law Institute, which is BC’s independent law reform agency. We began as a bilingual organization publishing materials in English and French, and over the years we’ve become increasingly multilingual, publishing materials and running consultation events in a number of different languages in addition to English and French. We publish all of our tools on our website and we make sure they are available for free. The final slide has our contact information including our website URL. We also have been collaborating with West Coast LEAF on work focused on older women for quite a number of years, since 2012.
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WEST COAST LEAF
Promotes women’s equality through law
Believes differences must be respected and supported by the law, and by social and institutional practices
Litigation, law reform, public legal education
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Alana: The “LEAF” in “West Coast LEAF” stands for “Legal Education and Action Fund.”West Coast LEAF is a non-profit organization that has been around since 1985. It is the first and only organization in BC dedicated to advancing women’s equality through the law.
West Coast LEAF was founded largely with the goal of ensuring that the promise of equality rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would translate into a more equal reality for all women in their day-to-day lives.
We work to advance women’s equality in three ways. One is through litigation: getting involved in court cases as intervenors to share our expert perspective on how the issues at hand impact women’s safety or equality rights. Another is law reform work; we engage in research and writing on law and policy issues impacting women. An example is the Older Women’s Dialogue Project that we will discuss shortly. We also often make submissions to parliamentary committees that are making laws and communicate with lawmakers in other ways to try to shape that process to better protect women’s rights and safety, and sometimes we also make submissions to international bodies like the UN. And the last piece of our work is public legal education: events like today’s webinar as well as the in-person version of the workshop and Roads to Safety, our legal handbook for older women.
West Coast LEAF’s primary focus is changing systems to improve conditions for women, but we do offer one frontline service which is very exciting and is a new program for us. We have partnered with Allard School of Law at UBC to open Rise Women’s Legal Centre, a new full-service legal clinic staffed by law students who are supervised by lawyers, and the focus is on family law. You can get all of the information about that right on the front page of our website and again, that URL will be shared on the last slide.
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OLDER WOMEN’S LEGAL EDUCATION PROJECT
Roads to Safety: Legal handbook
Wallet-sized resource
Service provider training: workshop and webinar
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Today’s webinar is part of a larger collaboration between CCEL and WCL called the Older Women’s Legal Education Project. We wanted to fill a gap by providing easy-to-understand legal information that would help older women understand their rights and options in the event that they decide to (or have to) leave their homes due to violence.
We decided to use two avenues to provide legal information for older women fleeing abuse:
Roads to Safety, a 90-page plain language legal handbook designed for older women fleeing abuse, including plenty of examples and stories to illustrate the legal concepts, multilingual emergency information in the inside cover, and a multi-page list of resources for support and further information at the end of the handbook. We anticipate that this handbook will be a helpful reference tool for service providers as well as for older women themselves. We received feedback from the community that the breadth of this resource is useful because it means that older women and service providers can find a lot of the legal information they might need all in one place rather than having to piece together information from many different sources. At the same time, we also received feedback that such a large handbook might pose a safety risk by being more conspicuous/easily noticed by an abuser, might create information overload for women in crisis, and might present accessibility problems for many women. That’s why we also decided to create….
2) A folding wallet resource listing resources for support for older women and providing a link to the legal handbook. There will be three versions of the wallet resource: a version listing only services that are available in languages other than English, translated into ten languages other than English; a version in English listing services with a focus on specialized supports for Indigenous women; and a general English version.
3) A training for frontline service providers who support older women or advocate on their behalf. We recognize that for many older adults, reading a print-based resource will not be an accessible way to learn about rights, but talking to a trusted support person may be a great way to get information and explore options for navigating legal challenges. That’s one of the main reasons we are offering this webinar to you - in the hopes of ultimately getting important legal information to older women. We have also delivered an in-person version of this training in Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby, Kelowna, and Nelson. We can explore the possibility of offering it in your community if there are funds available for travel.
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Older Women’s Legal Education Project
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Older women have told us that they face many different types of legal challenges, and that it can be hard to find clear legal information that applies to their situation. That’s why we created a handbook that brings together information about a wide range of legal issues they may face.
As a companion piece to Roads to Safety, we have also produced multilingual wallet cards listing sources of support and information for older women. This is available in 12 languages and in a specialized version listing services for Indigenous women.
The final component of the project is the training for frontline service providers, which exists both in this webinar format and in the form an in-person three-hour workshop that we have delivered in several communities around BC.
We are grateful to the many older women and other members of our community who helped with this project.
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Roads to Safety – What’s in the handbook?
•Emergency information & safety planning
•Decision-making rights
•Immigration and sponsorship
•Legal help
•Public financial supports
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Roads to Safety – What’s in the handbook?
•Keeping grandchildren safe
•Financial abuse
•Property division after separation
•Resources for support
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Many older women are caregivers for younger people in their lives, so we knew it was important to include information on keeping grandchildren safe.
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Older Women’s LEGAL Education Project
Why this project?
•Findings from talking to over 450 older women in nine languages through the Older Women’s Dialogue Project
•Separation of seniors’ services and violence against women sectors
Transcript:
Through the Older Women’s Dialogue Project, a collaboration between West Coast LEAF and the Canadian Centre for Elder Law that we’ll explain in just a moment, we heard from older women that:
•Violence and safety are huge issues for them
•They lack access to information on their rights and options
We also noticed that conversations about violence against women and about elder abuse were often separate (although these two experiences of violence are certainly not separate), and that services for seniors and services for women are not always integrated and do not always take into account the unique needs of women who are older. There is a need for sharing of knowledge across sectors to enhance support for older women.
Based on this input from older women, West Coast LEAF and the CCEL launched the Older Women’s Education Project with funding from the BC Council to Reduce Elder Abuse (CREA).
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ONE THEME from OWDP
VIOLENCE AND BARRIERS TO SAFETY
Some issues:
•Increased physical vulnerability to violence
•Lack of access to transition housing
•Systemic violence perpetrated against Indigenous women by institutions and individuals
•Social isolation: both a safety risk and a strategy for self-protection
Transcript:
Many themes emerged from OWDP, but one that came up especially often was the prevalence of violence in the lives of older women. And of course, experiences of safety and abuse vary greatly depending on each woman’s identity, life circumstances, and experiences of inequality.
Since the legal information in today’s webinar focuses on women’s safety, we’ll briefly touch on just this one theme from the OWDP. The full report from Phase 1 of the project can be downloaded from either the WCL or CCEL website.
Physical vulnerability to violence may increase due to declines in the health of older women or the greater prevalence of disabilities among older women. A great number of the older women we met live with significant ongoing fear of violence. They do not feel safe in their communities, and sometimes in their own homes. Elder lesbian, queer and trans women were clear that their gender and sexual orientation need to be respected and protected in order for them to feel safe. Women shared stories of health and residential care staff, knowingly or not, putting women ‘back in the closet’ by not respecting their gender identities and treating them with inappropriate care.