Group that helps women escape domestic violence coming to Vancouver

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Women fleeing an abusive relationship in Metro Vancouver will have access to another helping hand starting next month.

A volunteer-run moving and storage service for women and children leaving domestic violence is launching in the city.

Shelter Movers started in Toronto two years ago, when service creator Marc Hull-Jacquin starting asking around, questioning law enforcement officers and shelter operators about how women escape abusive homes and into safer places.

“We’ve moved over 400 women and children successfully in that [two-year] time span and now we’re trying to expand operations,” explains Brian Vidler, Director of the Vancouver chapter, adding this is the only service of its kind in Canada.

On top of moving people’s things, they offer as much “trauma-informed” assistance as they can.

He says they then launched in Ottawa last fall and now they’re coming to Vancouver, where he says the need is huge.

“On a typical day in Vancouver, there’s over three women and over two children moving into a shelter or transition house every day,” he says.

“That’s 25 women a week. The need is huge. And that doesn’t count the other women who are leaving a home but aren’t moving into a shelter and are moving into another family house or some other arrangement.”

He says a woman is at the highest risk of violence when leaving an abusive home.

“At the time when she’s at the most risk of violence, she’s also trying to organize moving all of her materials, finding storage for that, and trying to do all of that without letting the abuser know.”

With those stresses in mind, Vidler hopes the group will make the whole process easier and safer for women and their children.

“We’re trying to remove that barrier that might prevent her from leaving and losing a lot of her material… Imagine trying to afford [rent] and trying to replace all of the things that you’ve collected…and all the children’s toys, cribs, clothing.”

The service works through shelters and is partnered with storage services and all the movers are volunteers that have gone through background checks and undergone trauma training.

They go to the woman’s home, help her sort through her belongings, and then, of course, move her. Each case is categorized according to risk.

“The first one is the lowest risk–a resettlement move. That’s when they’ve gone through the whole system and moved to a new home. The majority of our moves is called an escorted move where a woman has left the home, already in a shelter or some other location, and we would take her back into her home and retriever her items after she’s left,” he says.

The third is the “urgent exit”.

“That would be a call, ‘I need to go now.'”

For now, they’re starting with the low-risk moves as they work out expansion kinks before they take on more urgent cases.

Top Stories

Top Stories

Most Watched Today