Vancouver Rape Relief Centre

Women's Rights, Rape Crisis, Shelters

Vancouver, BC

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604-872-8212

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info@rapereliefshelter.bc.ca

Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter is Canada's longest-running rape crisis centre, founded in 1973 by Johanna Den Hertog, Janet Torge, and Teresa Moore as part of the emerging Vancouver women's movement. It was the first rape crisis centre in Canada. The organization incorporated in 1975 and opened a feminist transition house in 1981, providing emergency shelter to women and their children fleeing male violence.

Vancouver Rape Relief operates a free, confidential, 24-hour crisis line — answered without interruption since 1973 — and provides peer counselling, advocacy, accompaniment, and a free legal clinic. All services are delivered by a collectively organized staff and volunteer body, many of whom are themselves survivors of male violence. The organization defines violence against women to include sexual assault, wife assault, incest, prostitution, and sexual harassment, and works to challenge the social attitudes, laws, and institutional procedures that perpetuate it.

Vancouver Rape Relief maintains a women-born-female policy for its core peer counselling and shelter services, and is one of the last remaining rape crisis centres in Canada to do so. This policy has placed the organization at the centre of significant legal and political controversy: in 2019, the City of Vancouver withdrew its annual grant of $34,312 after the organization declined to extend its core services to transgender-identified males. The organization has continued to operate through community fundraising and provincial government support, serving over 1,400 women annually through its crisis line and more than 120 women and children through its transition house.