Fraud Scam Resource
Thousands of Canadians have lost millions of dollars each year after being tricked into providing their personal information. This type of trickery is called a ‘scam’. The definition of a ‘scam’ is an illegal trick, with the goal of getting money, or personal information that can then be used to get a person’s money or identity. Scams are real and can target anyone. Often, fraudsters will target individuals online, over the phone, by mail and even in person. If you have been the target of a scam the best thing to do is report it to the appropriate authorities, regardless of the amount. This resource outlines some of the most common scams that are currently being used, the agencies fraudsters often pose as and what you can do to be aware and better protect yourself.
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This toolkit has been written for service providers who assist racialized women living with precarious immigration status in Ontario, Canada. The aim of this project is to build the capacity of settlement workers, lawyers, and students to work with non-status, racialized women who have experienced gender-based violence. This training toolkit will provide information on issues affecting racialized women with precarious immigration status in Canada by exploring the relationship between race, gender, and immigration status.
Sewing is traditionally women’s work. Often characterized as homespun, even quaint, it is associated with the domestic sphere. What at first glance may appear charming belies the persuasive ways in which women work with textiles to depict apartheid in South Africa, identity, forced migration, grassroots activism, encoded messages, and remembrance of murdered and missing indigenous women. Perhaps that is why the powers that be are mostly unaware of its subversive potential, and thankfully so, as this potential remains under the radar “sew” to speak while galvanizing those at the margins. How might sewing bring women together in a circle of care, give them a sense of belonging to a larger community that provides hope and meaning while creating the conditions for activism and social justice? Such gatherings of women allow for precisely the confluence of belonging, healing, and resistance. Given their origins, we believe political arpilleras are particularly compelling in this regard. Arpilleras are three-dimensional appliquéd textiles of Latin America that originated in Chile. The backing is hessian, which translates into arpillera in Spanish. Women stitched onto hessian their everyday lived experiences under the gruesome and oppressive dictatorship of the US-backed coup of Augusto Pinochet, which occurred on September 11, 1973, against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. So, too, their threads and bits of fabric from the clothing of the “disappeared” allowed them to express what could not be expressed in words. Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery writes that violence against women is a form of terrorism. Women essentially navigate a kind of war zone as part of everyday life. Sexual assault, child abuse, and family violence can only be understood in a sociopolitical context. Herman argues the personal is political. She writes that recovery from interpersonal trauma commonly develops in progressive stages, and she describes a model of recovery for women in which there are three stages. Stage one is safety and stabilization. Stage two is remembrance and mourning, and stage three is reconnection, commonality, and integration. We believe there is great value in women entering the public sphere as a collective to address violence against women systemically when recovering from gender-based violence. Recovery is not an individual personal act achieved in isolation but rather a cooperative endeavour linked to a sea change of cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs. Women tap into their potential by evolving into agents of change. In the following, we address an arpillera group program for women survivors of violence at a violence against women organization.