Jeremy Klaszus

Luka, 56, had to make a choice between an abusive boyfriend or living on the street. She now shares her story with other women

Like many women who’ve lived in abusive relationships, Luka first experienced abuse as a child. “My father was very, very degrading and insulting to myself and my mother,” says Luka, 56, who grew up in B.C. “I was really a sitting duck for a relationship that would prey on that.” Later in life, Luka struggled to leave an abusive boyfriend. It was a choice between him and sleeping on Vancouver’s unforgiving East Hastings street, where she had previously lived alone in a van.

Luka’s story isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s frighteningly common in Alberta, the province with the highest rate of domestic violence in the country. When someone like Luka chooses to leave an abusive situation — often with her children — she has very few options. Newly released statistics from the Alberta Council for Women’s Shelters (ACWS) show that more than 25,000 women and children were turned away from the province’s women’s shelters in 2006 alone, and crisis calls to women’s shelters have doubled in the past two years.

When a woman fleeing an abusive home is rejected by a shelter, there is often nowhere else for her to go. “They have a choice of becoming homeless or going back home and perhaps being murdered,” says author Susan Scott, who recently wrote All Our Sisters, a book about women living on the streets of Canadian cities. “That’s a pretty grim choice.” According to the ACWS, 53 per cent of women who used an Alberta emergency shelter last year were aboriginal. “They’ve got so many strikes against them,” says Luka. “Their abuse has been so violent and so endemic.”

Luka enrolled in a women’s humanities course in Vancouver while she was still living with her abusive boyfriend. Through the program, she was able to move in with another woman and get back on her feet. She recently moved to Calgary and now writes and performs songs about her story in hopes that other women won’t have to make a choice between abuse and homelessness. “It’s really a vicious cycle,” says Luka. “I don’t think it’s possible for women to overcome these things without reasonable housing. It’s our right, but we’ve been led to believe it’s a privilege.”

Luka and Scott recently shared their stories at a panel discussion on women and homelessness in Calgary. Scott, a former Calgary Herald reporter, prefaced her comments by saying “we shouldn’t even be at this level of conversation.” “It should be a no-brainer that we all need homes,” she says. Yet Calgary’s tight housing market has made it very difficult for women in abusive situations to move out. Scott calls the dearth of affordable housing in Calgary a form of “institutional abuse.”

Even when a woman finds an affordable rental unit, she may not be able to move in. Studies have shown that landlords are less likely to rent to women transitioning from a shelter than women coming from stable situations. “There is an inherent bias in the system,” says Leslie Tutty, a family violence researcher and social work professor at the University of Calgary.

Despite the overlap between domestic violence and homelessness, violence and homeless agencies have traditionally worked independently of each other. As a result, most of the homeless facilities in Calgary are geared towards men. “Mixed shelters present a huge problem for women,” says Scott. “If you’ve experienced abuse, particularly as a child, walking into one of the big shelters with a lot of men milling around can be really difficult.”

Calgary has only four emergency women’s shelters with a total of about 125 beds. By contrast, the Drop-In Centre alone has space for 1,100 people, and the Mustard Seed and its temporary shelter have space for about 500 people. “Calgary, I think, is really bad [compared to other cities],” says Scott. “We stack up very poorly in terms of facilities for women.”

Luka says it’s important for people to understand that homeless women can’t simply end their problems by “getting a job” — a surprisingly popular myth in Calgary. “When I was living in that van, I had no telephone,” she says. “I had no bathroom. I had no way to get myself cleaned up in the morning and actually go for an interview. And if I did, where are they going to reach me? How are you going to do it? It’s impossible…. Housing is so crucial.”