A local group is forming a committee to respond to family violence in the community.
This is the final week of Family Violence Prevention Month in Alberta.
To mark the occasion, Stop Abuse in Families (SAIF) recently announced the formation of a working group called the St. Albert Family Violence Protocol Committee. The purpose is to build a collaborative and multifaceted response to domestic violence in the community.
“We’re working in partnership because, especially this year, the cases are very complex, very complicated, and with multiple agencies involved,” said SAIF director Doreen Slessor.
Members of the committee include SAIF, the St. Albert Food Bank and Community Village, RCMP, St. Albert Victim Services, St. Albert Community and Social Development, LoSeCa, Transitions, the St. Albert Catholic counselling team, and Children’s Services.
The joint effort will have to make the best use of very limited resources. Besides that, it’s typical to have at least three of these agencies involved with one family anyway, she said.
The group’s mission is to “prevent and respond to family violence by working in partnership with the community through a collaborative, co-ordinated effort.”
She said that such a diverse group of agencies needed to become involved since there are many points of entry into the system for a family experiencing family violence.
“It could be a lawyer’s office or the Primary Care Network, the Community Village, the dentist’s office, the hair salon …” she said, adding that community education has been very effective in recent years. “Because there are so many people recognizing, responding, and referring, our agencies that provide the support need to be collaborative to provide the best support that we can for what these families need. That’s what this committee is all about.”
We all know each other, we know what we do, we reduce duplication and we’re more effective and efficient working with our families.
SAIF also released a three-month snapshot of domestic violence for the period of August to October 2016. It showed that these community partners dealt with 1,309 unique domestic violence-related interactions, meaning that there might be a family that worked with any one agency on multiple occasions. Of those, slightly more than one-third came from the RCMP but only a few of those ones actually resulted in charges.
She said the high number shows that community education is working and more people are reporting instances of family violence.
This is the first time that these statistics were produced so comparison figures from previous years are not available. Slessor did comment that the figure might not show a complete picture.
“It’s surprisingly high to me because a couple of key partners aren’t in there. If we added those ones in, I think we’d be really, really shocked.”
People can learn more about what tools and resources are out there by visiting the website endfamilyviolence.alberta.ca.
Warning signs of abuse
You may be in an abusive relationship if your partner exhibits one or more of the following:<br />• destructive criticism/verbal abuse<br />• assuming authority<br />• disrespect <br />• minimizing/denying/blaming<br />• economic control<br />• self-destructive behaviour<br />• isolation<br />• harassment<br />• intimidation<br />• destruction<br />• threats<br />• sexual violence<br />• physical violence<br /><br />Call 780-460-2195 or visit www.stopabuse.ca for more information and for ways to find help.
