Changing Ways counselling is making connections and saving lives

Changing Ways Executive Director Tim Smuck knows prevention is the game changer when it comes to making women and children safer in their communities.

The Duluth Eqality Wheel

Intimate partner violence (IPV) used to be a private matter considered best dealt with behind closed doors. It was rarely discussed in public let alone by law makers who were predominantly privileged white men.

However, by the 1980s the overwhelming body of evidence laid bare the fact that IPV is rooted in a man’s need for power and control over his partner. That forced policy makers to step up — albeit reluctantly.

In 1982, NDP MP Margaret Mitchell was laughed at by members of Parilament for simply stating that one in ten men regularly beat their wives. Mitchell considered it a watershed moment. The next, day an aplogy was issued to Mitchell and the women of Canada.

By 1983, Canada introduced mandatory charging requiring police officers to lay charges in IPV cases. The intent was to protect assaulted women from further threats and abuse.

Unfortunately, mandatory charging created an unexpected spike in women being wrongfully charged with assault. Turns out officers lacked the skills needed to determine the dominant aggressor and often relied on wounds as proof of who assaulted whom.

It’s been well established that men use force inflict pain, injury and death. Women use force in self-defence. A woman who has been strangled may not have any visible marks. However, a woman being strangled instinctively scratches at an assailant’s face, neck and chest to get them to release their grip thereby inflicting wounds.

Officers called to IPV disturbances often do not understand the history of ongoing abuse and threats of violence that cause women to act out. Women tend to retaliate when threats or acts of violence target their children or pets – not themselves. When women use ‘weapons’ they tend to be things like water bottles or cell phones thrown to ward off an advancing attacker.

Women wrongfully charged with assault are often directed by the court to complete a 12-week partner assault response (PAR) program. These programs were designed to create an understanding of the power imbalances that exist in IPV.

Generated using a male lens, PARS is meant to help abusive men understand their behaviour. The PAR program has never been adapted using a gendered lens for women. But, in a twisted way, the fact that many women come to realize that they are being abused may just save their lives.

Click here to learn more about the spike in women being charged and calls for implementing a standardized feminist, gendered lens for women’s PAR programs.

While the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General (OMAG) has not created woman-centered initiatives, individual program providers work to adapt PAR programing material when possible.

I sat down recently to have a conversation with Tim Smuck, Executive Director of Changing Ways, to discuss policing and the PAR programs his organization offers.

Changing Ways is located in London, Ontario where over one-fifth of police service calls are IPV related. Smuck says that while he has had some incredible conversations with the Domestic Violence unit around how to minimize wrongful charging of victims, the issue lies with frontline officers.

Smuck maintains that frontline officers lack solid training in what coercive control looks like and how victim resistance presents. While Smuck and his staff continue to advocate for improvements they acknowledge that this is an area that needs more direct investment to ensure officers are thoroughly trained.

Changing Ways staff created the Women Intervention and Support Program (WISP) in response to the women’s PAR program. The 12-week program is intended for women charged with domestic assault who have been referred through the criminal justice system. Partners of the women are offered support as well.

Using a gendered approach, the program holds women accountable for their behaviour while allowing them to examine their personal circumstances in order to assess risk and create safety.

Time is spent working to really understand coercive control, how resistance can put them at risk and why they were charged. Women are encouraged to be accountable for their choices while taking into account their circumstances. They are also supported as they become empowered and able to make changes that lead to safer, healthier relationships.

Smuck has been inundated with so many requests from agencies wanting to implement WISP that he decided to encourage OMAG to fund the program.

“There has to be a differential response here in how we work with women. It is fundamentally different. In fact, many of those women are at even higher risk because we know when resistance is present, that is a huge indicator of potential risk of femicide,” Smuck stated.

“This is still an area where the province needs to do some work on and investment in. We are working with them on that. We’re pushing this very, very hard. And, I think policing overall needs to do a better job at equipping frontline officers on when showing up to an IPV call. I think that there’s much better jobs that policing can do if they had better training when going to those types of calls,” Smuck added.

Smuck sees prevention being the real game changer when it comes to ensuring the safety of women and children.

“We intervene with those who cause harm, which primarily as we know 85 per cent identify as men. So, if we intervene with men, we can work to prevent a lot of those other community safety and violence against women response pieces,” explained Smuck.

Prevention is available in the form of the Being the Change program. This voluntary 16-week program is open to men who haven’t been charged but whose relationships are on the edge or who are doing risky things. Participants learn new ways of handling situations while receiving much needed support.

For those men who have been court ordered to attend one of the 12-week PAR programs, it’s really important to understand the level of violence and risk the men pose to ensure they get the help they need.

Early intervention is intended for first-time offenders. Peace Bond programing is for men with low-risk types of charges. Then, there are the men on probation for committing serious offences indicative of a high risk for femicide.

Smuck knows that if agencies were properly funded, they could absolutely reduce femicide.

“This is where I’m pushing hard because the biggest gap, in my opinion, in PAR is we have no high-risk case management dollars. We need to be equipped to have high risk case management so we can really wrap around him in ways we can reduce his risk,” Smuck argued.

Some of those wrap-around services are really quite basic like individual counselling; helping the offender find employment; talking about not going back to the relationship; finding housing supports; and just listening so the anger doesn’t play out somewhere else.

In December 2022, the OMAG made an additional $2 million in funding available for PAR programs. However, if spread evenly over the 51 agencies offering PAR programing, every agency got just shy of $40,000 over the course of a year and a half. Each year PAR programs receive over 11,000 referrals collectively.

While Smuck knows that is nowhere near the level of funding that’s needed, he believes, “it is a great step for the province in terms of hearing our voices that PAR agencies were closing and the program itself was at high risk of being unsustainable. So, the province did listen and respond which we deeply appreciate.”

In an effort to improve programming, the OMAG has committed to ongoing quarterly meetings with PAR providers and to work toward implementing some of the Renfrew Recommendations.

Those recommendations resulted from the inquest into the femicides of Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk, and Nathalie Warmerdam (CKW). The women were murdered in Renfrew County on September 22, 2015 by a man known to each of them.

In June 2022, the CKW inquest into the triple femicide issued 86 recommendations with fully 68 of those directed at the Ontario government. The provincial recommendations included oversight and accountability; funding; education and training; measures addressing perpetrators of IPV; intervention and safety.

Unfortunately, inquest recommendations are non-biding so there is no legal obligation to implement them. The five-person jury recommended that the inquest parties reconvene one year later to discuss progress made implementing the recommendations.

Doug Ford only issued a response to the inquiry recommendations on July 1, 2023 – one year after they were released.

Sixteen months later, not one of the 68 provincial recommendations has been implemented by the Ford government.

Smuck works closely with Jennifer Dunn, Executive Director of London Abused Women’s Centre (LAWC) as well as with Jessie Roger, Executive Director of the Anti-violence Network of Agencies (Anova) – Ontario’s largest women’s shelter and the London-Middlesex’s sexual assault centre.

LAWC supports the partners of men participating in Changing Ways programing thereby creating holistic wrap-around support for these relationships.

Smuck is also looking forward to connecting with and learning from the staff at ALTOHSA Family Healing Services whose services assist First Nations communities.

Kiizhay Anishinabe Niin  (I am A Kind Man) is ALTOHSA’s Indigenous PAR program that the province has formally endorsed.

“It’s great to see MAG formally endorse that program. We are actually connecting with ALTOHSA Family Healing Services in order to learn from their program in terms of what are some of the things that we can actually implement into our programing like the Seven Grandfather Teachings. When we talk about Truth and Reconciliation and what some of those actions can be, I think PAR agencies need to go and learn from our Indigenous partners,” said Smuck.

During Woman Abuse Prevention month, Smuck and his team have been promoting and supporting LAWC events like the Shine the Light on Woman Abuse campaign. The team will also be doing work in December around the United Nation’s 16 Days of Action Against Gender Based Violence as wells as White Ribbon Day commemorating December 6, the anniversary of the 1989 École Polytechnique femicides.