Does domestic violence increase during a recession?
Yes. The severity of cases this year in Calgary is greater than we have ever seen in 16 years. We have seen children who are being burned. We have women who are losing their babies because their partners punched them in their stomachs. There are other women who need reconstructive surgery and whose faces need to be rebuilt. You cannot imagine the kind of desperate situations we are seeing and the severity of those situations. There are waiting lists at both our emergency shelter and transitional housing facility. Other agencies that do similar work to ours are in a similar situation.
