It's a huge gap. There's a bit of push and pull, right? Some women are scared of leaving the area; they've never really left the area before. What does it mean to be out of the area? Some do feel more comforted being in the area, but my girlfriend has three kids and lives in aboriginal housing, which is not even 500 metres away from where we used to work. Now she's taking her kids by that area, and it's triggering her every day. How do you stay sober when you're triggered every day, right?
I think you're from B.C., right? In Vancouver here we call it poverty pimping. We have these monolithic organizations that try to take over every project that comes up, and in doing that, they trap everyone in this part of the city in an area of —I'll be generous—ten square blocks and then turn and look at people and say that they have all the resources they need, but they don't. They don't have anything.
In Vancouver here, we have harm reduction. We don't have recovery; that's too expensive. We don't have detox beds; that costs money. Giving a condom and a needle is the cheapest way to deal with this issue.
We need to find the political will to put money into resources that say we value our women—not only our indigenous women, who are absolutely owed that, but women, period. We have a Prime Minister who wants to say we have a feminist government or a feminist country; I call bullshit on that. I still can't get a peace bond for a woman who's black and blue. I still can't get police to take trafficking seriously.
I hate the word “trafficking”; it's prostitution. Trafficking is just a fancy new label for something that's been going on for millennia, which is men's sexual abuse of women, right?
Sorry. I went on a tirade.
What I think would be beneficial is to create programs outside the demographic of where women are abused and slowly work them into communities outside of what they know. I succeeded because I'm not walking by a crack dealer to go and get milk. I'm not walking down a street where every third car is asking me if I'm for sale.
We need to change the living conditions of women, and by that I mean that we need to expand the parameters of where they can live, because we've limited them to these little spaces that entrap them in a cycle over and over and over again.
Okay, I'm done.