Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief says it will not cut any of its services, despite not getting almost $35,000 in funding from the City of Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»this year.
Last month, the city denied the organization’s application for grant funding because, staff said, Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief’s policies do not line up with the eligibility criteria to receive a grant. Requirements include the provision that organizations “must demonstrate accommodation, welcomeness and openness to people of all ages, abilities, sexual orientation, gender identities (including trans, gender-variant and two-spirit people), ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, religions, languages, under-represented communities and socio-economic conditions in its policies, practices and programs, except in instances where the exclusion of some group is required for another group to be effectively targeted.”
Founded in 1974, Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief (VRR) is the oldest rape crisis centre in the country, and it has long drawn criticism for its policies that exclude men, transgender women and anyone who is not a cis-gender woman, from some of its services.
The organization’s peer counselling, support group and transition house are only open to women who are born female. Its other services, such as public education, legal assistance and the 24-hour crisis help line, are open to anyone who is the victim of male violence.
VRR argues that some women who are recovering from violence at the hands of a man do not feel comfortable around someone who was born male.
“By denying core services to trans women, Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief Society limits the availability of services to trans women who experience sexual violence. In that sense, they are more marginalized,” City of Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»staff told council.
Getting grant funding every year is not guaranteed for any organization. The city received 315 grant requests for this year. A total of 255 of them, representing more than $9.6 million in funding, were approved. However, Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief Society collective member Karla Gjini said the organization had been receiving this particular grant for more than a decade.
“It is a pretty big chunk of money,” said Gjini. “We do think that public education is so important to be able to actually change the way that our society is set up so that women in the future don't experience male violence.”
She added that losing that money “does make it a little bit harder and we will have to fundraise a little bit more, but there's no way that we would cut any of our services as a result of it.”
The issue of whether VRR should receive city funding was first brought up last year.
At a council meeting last March, transgender advocate Morgane Oger, who has openly criticized the organization’s policies, urged city council to stop funding Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief.
Council voted to award the organization “termination funding,” Gjini said.
“That was basically a conditional kind of thing where if we didn't change the way that we worked, we weren't going to get any more funding.”
She said the society decided to apply for the grant again this year, even though it has not changed its policies, because they feel that they are within the accommodation criteria.
The issue has elicited strong emotions on both sides. At last month’s council meeting, speakers made the case for and against the organization getting municipal funds.
“We need your help. We deserve crisis lines,” said Brooklyn Fowler, who is co-chair of the city’s LGBTQ2S+ advisory committee. “We deserve support workers, counsellors and transition houses that believe that we, too, do not deserve violence. That we deserve safety and that we deserve dignity.”
Many VRR members and supporters spoke about the work the society has done over the years to fight violence against women and support victims of violence.
“We pride ourselves on ultimately what we are fighting for is women’s liberation, and that when I answer the phone I’m not only responding to a woman who has been raped, but I am fighting for a world where there is no more rape,” collective member Ashani Montgomery told council.
Following last year’s vote, several city councillors were attacked on social media and via email for the decision to stop funding VRR.
“It was vitriolic. It was aggressive. It was hateful. It was really hurtful,” said Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung. “But, you know what, it was a fraction of what I think some of the folks in our trans community experience every day.”
Kirby-Yung told the Courier that there has been some backlash from this year’s decision, but it has been “milder.”
“Some social media and emails, but not nearly as full of pure hate, aggressive and vitriolic as last year.”
Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Rape Relief was also the last summer.
In late August, staff and volunteers arrived to find threats — “Kill TERFS, Trans Power,” “TERFS go home. You are not welcome,” “F*** TERFS” and “Trans women are women” — scrawled across the windows of the group’s Commercial Drive storefront space that is used for support and training groups.
 (TERFS stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.)
A few days earlier, a dead rat was nailed to the door. It wasn’t the first one. More “dead roadkill” was found nailed to the door, and a few months before that someone shoved a dead animal into the mail slot.
“We haven't had anything like that happen since then and they hope that nothing like that ever happens again because obviously like it's better to work together than to be like working in this way,” Gjini said.
Despite the criticism, the vandalism and the loss of funding, VRR is standing firm behind its policies.
“It's better for women in Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»to have a variety of services to choose from. And we do think it is important that every group be able to decide for themselves how they want to serve the women that they work with,” Gjini said.
“We’re not professionals. We’re just regular women using our own life experience to group with other women and relate to other women and strategize with other women,” she said. “So it is a little bit different and it is important to have that life experience of being treated as female your entire life from the time that you’re born.”
