Immigration hurdles hinder women's path to safety

Immigration hurdles hinder women’s path to safety. Asia fled her abusive husband after he started threatening to kill both her and their children. Here, she tells of how she escaped and rebuilt her life thanks to the help of shelter workers at Women’s Habitat. Staff photo/IAN KELSO

"When he started threatening me that he can even take the life of my kids, this was the point when I thought that this is too much," she said. "I cannot sacrifice my kids for the sake of a person who doesn't know how to respect the wife and how to love the kids."

In many ways, Asia and her children's story reads much like those of the approximately 62,000 women and 38,000 kids across Canada who found protection and sanctuary behind the protective walls of this country's 569 abused women's shelters in 2008. Domestic abuse knows no colour, no creed, no culture - its devastating physical and emotional tolls no more or less severe for any one person or group of people.

But in other ways, Asia's story of struggle highlights some of the unique vulnerabilities and challenges faced by that unknown number of abused women who call this country their adoptive home - some living in hiding without status, and others, like Asia, living in the limbo of Canada's immigration system.

Living far from all that which is familiar to them, women like Asia, whose pseudonym testifies to a fear of retribution for speaking out, have to dig perhaps deeper to flee their circumstances and change their fates.

For, when fists and feet rain down upon them, the umbrella protection of family is often times far from reach - in Asia's case nearly 10,000 km away.

"I was not allowed to speak to my parents in Pakistan very often, and when I did, it was on speaker phone with him sitting beside me," she said. "I didn't know how to let them know I was suffering."

Her husband told her if she ever left, arrest and deportation would surely follow. Asia believed him because he'd denied her outside contact with her new world so long, she simply didn't know enough about how the system really worked.

And when he withheld her passport and other immigration documents from her, telling her it was customary for the husband to control such matters, Asia had no choice but to relent.

"He was of the idea that if I got my papers, I could escape him and he didn't want that," she said.

Such are the challenges many of the immigrant and refugee women Women's Habitat welcomes into their protective fold each and every year, said its executive director, Rhonda Roffey. A recent population snapshot at the Etobicoke shelter showed more than half of its residents at various stages in obtaining their immigration status.

What sets Asia apart from many of her peers, Roffey said, is the fact that she's both a university graduate and speaks English very fluently - two big pluses in an immigration system that assigns points to applicants based on education, language and work experience, among others.

Many of the abused women who pass through Roffey's door, though, aren't nearly as qualified, and ofttimes the men in their lives exploit that fact: "If you are an abusive male, a woman without citizenship is super vulnerable, and that's really appealing," Roffey said, noting that neither the immigration nor the refugee system do enough to protect these women.

"The system is not set up to deal with issues of poverty and violence that people are facing and it's particularly not set up to deal with women. Domestic violence is not necessarily an official refugee issue, but it should be because these women are fleeing violence, but it's gendered violence and not always recognized as such."

Exacerbating fears is an announcement made by immigration minister Jason Kenney late last month, proposing changes to the refugee system he said will result in "faster protection for those who need our help and quicker removals of those who do not."

Kenney's $540 million Balanced Refugee Reform Act would give asylum seekers just eight days to obtain counsel and file claims, which would then be guaranteed to be heard within 60 days by civil servant employees of a new appeal division of the Immigration and Refugee Board.

"The days when asylum seekers could file appeal after appeal are over," he said at a news conference in Etobicoke on March 31. "People who told a false story to come to Canada should not get to stay."

Critics of the reform package argue, however, that it will deny many claimants the Humanitarian and Compassionate Application, one of the few last-chance avenues abused women have had at their disposal. Zahra Dhanani, legal director for the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC), said adopting such a "two-tier triage system" could prove disproportionately fatal for women - much as it did for Grise, a young Mexican woman who was deported to her death last summer.

Grise, 24 at the time of her death, her mother Nuemi and her little sister Bebe, came to Canada from Mexico to seek refuge from drug traffickers in 2004. Their first asylum application, spurred by the murder of Nuemi's ex-husband, was rejected in 2005 and the family went into hiding to avoid deportation.

In August 2008, Grise returned to Mexico to visit her dying grandmother. There, she was reportedly attacked and raped, leaving her pregnant. She came back to Canada, but despite her alleged abuse was deported back in December, followed shortly after by her mother and sister. Three months later, Grise was kidnapped again, her lifeless, childless body discovered murdered in June.

"It appeared to be an execution-style killing," said Francisco Rico-Martinez, an immigration lawyer with FCJ Refugee Centre who helped secure visitor's visas for Grise's mother and sister after the discovery of her body. "No one knows what happened to the baby."

For a short time before they were deported, Grise's family stayed at Women's Habitat. Reflecting with sadness over her fate, and looking toward the future, Roffey said her biggest fear is that women's shelters might become targets for immigration officials looking to remove non-status women - a fear substantiated earlier this year when just such a case made headlines.

In late February, Canada Border Services agents entered a downtown Toronto women's shelter in search of Jane, a non-status rape victim and single mother from Ghana.

The "unprecedented attack" sparked outrage amongst a collective of anti-violence against women advocates, who maintained the search of Beatrice House served no other purpose than to retraumatize a victim who'd sought the shelter's protection from being forced to return to a life of virtual sex slavery.

CBSA responded to criticism of the move with assurances they will only enter a shelter in cases where a proactive investigation leads them there: "In these rare cases, when entry to a shelter becomes necessary, the situation is always approached with sensitivity and discretion," said agency spokesperson Anna Pape.

Eileen Morrow, coordinator of the Ontario Association for Interval and Transition Houses, said those assurances were too little, too late - the Beatrice House incident sent a message to abused women far and wide that shelters are no longer safe or confidential spaces. The resultant threat of detention and deportation, she added, might force women and children to remain in an abusive situation.

"Enforcement activities of the CBSA should not trump the women's right to safety. With or without immigration status in this country, women have a human right to safety from violence, and with or without warrants the CBSA must stop looking for migrant and refugee women at shelters and other women's services," she said.

Jane, who was not living at Beatrice House the day CBSA came looking for her, said she's been forced now into a life of hiding, and intends to live underground until authorities give up trying to find her.

"I'm like a mouse, I'm still hiding. I want my status, to get my permanent residency to stay in Canada, but I've been denied for everything. That's the struggle," she said back in March, her three-year-old daughter at her knee. "It's been very difficult and I go through a lot of pain. I don't sleep in my life. Even my baby, too, she is going through a lot of stress. She is Canadian but does not enjoy a Canadian's life."

Asia, on the other hand, has only thrived over the last six months she's spent at Women's Habitat. Next week, she'll take her biggest step since leaving her husband, when she and her family move from the shelter and into a three-bedroom apartment of their own.

"I'm happy, but nervous, too. I might be lost without the staff here," she said this week. "I never thought I'd have a house of my own to live with my kids."

With her children thriving both physically and emotionally, Asia is looking forward to a bright future for them all. She recently started volunteering at her children's school, and hopes that now that's she's got her worker permit, she might soon be able to get a job.

"All of this because of my friends here at the shelter who helped me so much. I have no family here; they are my family," she said this week. "Next I am going to find a job - this is my promise to myself."