At the start of 2025, La Débrouille, a support and accommodation center for women and trans people who are victims of violence between intimate partners, would like to remind you: the number of feminicides does not return to zero on January 1.
In 2024, Quebec recorded 25 feminicides, including 13 from marital contexts. While 2025 is just beginning, at La Débrouille, we don’t have the heart for celebrations. We refuse to turn the page so easily on the victims of the 25 feminicides of 2024, just as we refuse to turn the page on the government’s failures to protect them.
Increase in requests for help
At La Débrouille, we are on the front line facing the scale of gender-based violence and the massive increase in requests for help in our accommodation resource.
In 2023-2024, we welcomed 79 adults and 43 children into our home, double the number in 2022-2023. At the same time, requests for our help and support services without accommodation have tripled.
For the year 2023-2024, we supported 273 people for a total of 3,830 meetings compared to 2022-2023 where we supported 149 people through 1,157 meetings.
Faced with this increase in requests, the waiting times to access our support services without accommodation are now more than 3 months, unprecedented for our resource.
While our services are overflowing, our funding remains the same.
For concrete actions by the government
Protecting and supporting victims of intimate partner violence requires human and financial resources. To be able to continue to offer quality services, ensure immediate care for victims and protect them from possible femicide, transmicide or infanticide, we require:
– A recurring increase in our funding in order to hire new workers in our external services (support without accommodation);
– A recurring increase in our funding for prevention and awareness raising among young people and adults regarding intimate partner violence;
– A structural change within early childhood environments and school resources so that young people are supported in developing their emotional intelligence and critical thinking in the face of stereotypes, prejudice, violence and discrimination.
Our budgets are currently insufficient to offer adequate support and it is wrong to believe that non-recurring sums from calls for special projects meet our real needs.
We demand sustainable resources to be able to continue to effectively combat intimate partner violence, from its roots to its direct consequences on individuals.
Behind each of our services, lives are at stake. Remember that in Quebec it is estimated that one in five women have been, are or will be victims of intimate partner violence during their lifetime.
The statistics regarding trans people are invisible but we can, without a shadow of a doubt, argue that they would go in the same direction.
Behind these figures are our sisters, our children, our neighbors, our friends and our colleagues. One in five women: look around you… Maybe you even know the next victim of femicide, and what will you really have done to allow us to protect them?
We hope to agree on these points: we will not reset the clock this year. Our lives are priceless, but our work is.
The La Débrouille Collective Action and Awareness Center team. For the people we support and for our colleagues who are at the end of their tether.
List of partner organizations, co-signatories of the letter:
ADFT Welcome and BSL Integration (AIBSL)
Auberge du coeur Le Transit
Eastern BSL CALACS
Mitis Women’s Center
Grand-Portage Women’s Center
Perinatal Center Between Two Waves
Center for Immigrant Workers
CLEF Mitis-Neigette
Bas-Saint-Laurent Housing Committee Rimouski-Neigette Community Development Corporation
C-TA-C
Divergenres
Lashing
I hang up
The House of Hope of Mont-Joli
APTS Bas-Saint-Laurent union
Consultation table of Bas-Saint-Laurent women’s groups
