Our CASAC Approach
CASAC women live with distress and a certain sense of ever-present emergency. Often lives are at stake. Always, the quality of women’s lives is at stake.
Yet there have been times over the thirty years of our herstory when opportunity has gladdened us and made equality-seeking work easier, even thrilling. There have also been times of peril that have shaken our sense of confidence that we can ever improve the status of women in Canada and reduce the sexist violence that holds us all down. Sometimes we would settle for, but cannot seem to achieve, an advance in the treatment of women already beaten and raped. But usually, we have our eyes on freedom and the prevention of another generation of women being abused and threatened. Other times, we can feel the political ground shifting and fear for us all.
We have always attended raped and battered women within a wider framework that has included the shaping of national discourse on violence against women when we could, and taking our rightful place in the public political discussion of what constitutes equality and freedom. We, as do caring, intelligent people everywhere, consider which social change strategies to use to end violence against women and to achieve dignity and liberty for all women … in particular, those we are charged with assisting in Canada.
Read this section in Canada’s Promises to Keep: The Charter and Violence Against Women, p. 17-30.