Commitment & Involvement with the Anti-Violence Movement

Maggie's Resource Centre is a feminist organization and as such supports, adopts, and promotes a feminist analysis of violence against women and their children.

Feminism is a method of analysis and work, a commitment, and a perspective that puts women first; feminism starts with, recognizes, accepts, and honours our own and other women's experience as a basis of working towards ending the many oppressions which influence, effect and determine our lives.

To this end, a feminist analysis of violence against women and their children:

• begins with, recognizes, accepts and honours the experiences of individual women who have been and/or are victims of violence;

• acknowledges that violence against women and their children must be understood as a continuum that includes but not  necessarily limited to verbal/emotional/psychological/physical, and sexual abuse;

• recognizes that violence against women and their children is a consequence of and serves to reinforce that wide-spread social, economic, and political inequality experienced by women around the world;

• acknowledges that while individual abusers make individual choices regarding their use of violence and consequently, must be held socially, ;legally, and morally accountable for those choices, a primary or exclusive focus on the individual experiences and/or characteristics of abusers cannot account for the scope, proportion and dimensions of violence against women today or throughout history.

Maggie's Resource Centre believes that the delivery of services, resources, and supports to individual women and children is an integral component of an international movement working towards the elimination of all forms of violence against women and children. While the anti-violence movement will not be successful if limited only to individual intervention, Maggie's Resource Centre understand that the fulfillment of its primary mandate, the provision of temporary shelter, information, resources, referrals, and counselling to abused women and their children, is an important and essential part of this comprehensive and multifaceted movement.