CALL 24HR CRISIS LINE
604-872-8212

CALL 24HR

CRISIS LINE

24 HR CRISIS LINE 604-872-8212

Women Only Space

It is under male oppression that women recognize the need to gather and organize to create rape crisis centres, transition houses and women centres — women only spaces. Consciousness raising gave us our collective voice. Grouping with women who share the same life experience in women-only space is still our most valuable tool to redefine, validate and guide our struggle for our own liberation.

News

Position paper on the definition of “woman” in international human rights treaties by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls

By Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls

April 4, 2024

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Women Only Space Women's Movement

City of Vancouver withdraws support for our public education work

We are encouraged by those who spoke on the day in favour of our work and the political principles guiding us. As well, by the hundreds who expressed similar sentiments in their letters to council members. We are also grateful to the many who have donated to us, ensuring that we can carry on and even expand our public education efforts.

March 1, 2020

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Women Only Space

Discrimination Against Women in the Name of Inclusion: A Statement From Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter

In a woman-only space, with other women, who have the shared experience of being born without a choice to the oppressed class of women we come together to organize and strategize our resistance and our fight for women’s liberation.

March 16, 2019

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Women Only Space

Blog

Women-Only Space: A firsthand account

April 2, 2021

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Women Only Space Consciousness Raising

Bill C-16: Vancouver Rape Relief’s submission to the Senate Committee on Legal And Constitutional Affairs

We have no doubt that people whose behaviour is not consistent with the tyrannical, socially imposed definition of manhood or womanhood, including transgender people, suffer condemnation, discrimination and violence. Women have been punished since the dawn of patriarchy for disobeying the suffocating constrictions of girlhood and womanhood.

By Hilla Kerner

May 10, 2017

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Women Only Space

Sustaining Our Resistance to Male Violence: Attacks on Women’s Organizing

But more often the worry was that someone who had grown up being treated as a male to adulthood simply did not share the references women make in our telling each other about assaults, the objective or subjective experiences of being raised from girlhood to womanhood.

By Lee Lakeman

2006

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Women Only Space

Nixon v. Vancouver Rape Relief Society

Legal Arguments, Human Rights Tribunal Decision, BC Supreme Court Judgement and BC Court of Appeal (BCCA) Judgement.

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Women Only Space

Rape crisis centre in B.C. endures assault

Being female is a complicated mixture of physiology, cultural conditioning and lived experience – or even, as one academic thesis would have it, “a political category created through oppression.”

By Michele Landsberg

December 23, 2000

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Women Only Space

Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy

Women must be able to formulate and express their own ideas as individual women and as a constituency that is affected by patriarchal laws and practices in uniquely gendered ways—an experience which no man is open to and cannot experience for as long as patriarchy defines gendered relationships to power and privilege in their present form.

By Patricia McFadden

1995

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Women Only Space

Contact Us

What we offer

Peer Counselling
Grouping with other women
Advocacy with police
Accompaniment to a sexual assault exam
Housing for women and children escaping violence

Women Only Space

Position paper on the definition of “woman” in international human rights treaties by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls

City of Vancouver withdraws support for our public education work

Discrimination Against Women in the Name of Inclusion: A Statement From Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter

In a woman-only space, with other women, who have the shared experience of being born without a choice to the oppressed class of women we come together to organize and strategize our resistance and our fight for women’s liberation.

Women-Only Space: A firsthand account

Bill C-16: Vancouver Rape Relief’s submission to the Senate Committee on Legal And Constitutional Affairs

Sustaining Our Resistance to Male Violence: Attacks on Women’s Organizing

But more often the worry was that someone who had grown up being treated as a male to adulthood simply did not share the references women make in our telling each other about assaults, the objective or subjective experiences of being raised from girlhood to womanhood.

Nixon v. Vancouver Rape Relief Society

Legal Arguments, Human Rights Tribunal Decision, BC Supreme Court Judgement and BC Court of Appeal (BCCA) Judgement.

Rape crisis centre in B.C. endures assault

Being female is a complicated mixture of physiology, cultural conditioning and lived experience – or even, as one academic thesis would have it, “a political category created through oppression.”

Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy

Contact Us

What we offer

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