As part of African Heritage Month, Alice House is sharing a blog by our Family Violence Awareness Coordinator, Shannon Gumbs. She explores the unique, often overlooked barriers Black women face when seeking support for IPV in Nova Scotia and why culturally responsive care matters. Read on to learn more.
Layers of Barriers, History, and Disproportionate Risk
Black women in Nova Scotia experience intimate partner violence (IPV) within layers. While much of the existing IPV research applies – fear, love, hope, the cycle of abuse, and the complex reasons people stay – Black women face additional barriers when they navigate violence and seek help. These barriers are rooted in history, culture, and ongoing systemic inequities.
Black women in Canada experience disproportionately high rates of intimate partner violence (42%) higher than the 29% for visible minority women overall but similar to the 44% for non‑visible minority (predominantly white) women. This highlights Black women’s elevated risk compared to other racialized women, compounded by stigma, underreporting, and systemic barriers to support.1
Nova Scotia’s history of slavery, segregation, and anti-Black racism has contributed to a long-standing “code of silence” around family violence. This history has fostered deep mistrust of formal systems. During Kitchen Table Talks hosted by the Association of Black Social Workers, African Nova Scotian women voiced deeply rooted fears: What if reporting makes the violence worse? What if my children are taken by child welfare? What will my family or community say? Where do I go if there is nowhere safe to turn?2
Fear of Criminalization and Racialized Stereotypes
Many Black women are hesitant to call police, fully aware that over-policing and racialized stereotypes, particularly assumptions of aggression, can result in their own arrest alongside the abuser. Many Black women also carry a deep sense of responsibility: to not criminalize their partners, black men who are already overrepresented in the justice system, and to not expose the community to further trauma or scrutiny.3
Layered onto this is the pervasive “strong Black woman” narrative which is often framed as a compliment while it quietly minimizes pain and discourages vulnerability. This expectation operates within us and across society, shaping unconscious bias about what an ideal victim looks and acts like, who is believed, and who deserves support. When black women are perceived by service providers as inherently strong, resilient, or unemotional, Black women may be assumed to need less help or no help at all. On their part, this may push them away services that feel unsafe or unwelcoming.
Black women across cultures may show less overt emotional reactions: fewer public tears, more controlled speech or even silence. This is not an absence of pain, but rather a culturally shaped survival response. Systems that rely on narrow ideas of what trauma or victimhood should look like frequently leave us underserved.
When Systems Fall Short for Black Survivors
Black professionals in the gender-based violence sector in Nova Scotia echo these concerns. At the Women at the Centre’s Sharing Circle in June 2025 at the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute (ANSJI), as part of the Canada-wide Truth & Transformation project, Black experts affirmed what survivors have long been saying: current systems frequently fall short for Black survivors and can even cause harm, deepening isolation rather than reducing it.
For Black immigrant women, the barriers can be even more layered. In addition to the challenges described above, many are away from their support systems, fear jeopardizing immigration status, can often times face language barriers and lack of knowledge about community resources. Many also operate with the belief that accessing services is a “burden” on a system they feel privileged to be part of. All this can keep women suffering in silence.
Compounding all of this is the absence of comprehensive race-based data on IPV in Canada. Outside of data collected on Indigenous peoples, race is largely excluded from official IPV statistics. Without this information, we lack a full picture of who is experiencing violence, who is accessing services, and importantly who is not.4
Toward Culturally Responsive Support
Amid these challenges, there are efforts within Nova Scotia that attempt to reduce barriers and increase access to support. Alice House has partnered with Black-led and Black-serving organizations to build trust and knowledge to increase awareness of our services. We also recognize fear as reason folks don’t interact with the justice system; we offer support navigating formal legal processes.
While these efforts do not resolve the systemic barriers, they are representing steps toward a more responsive practice. To truly support Black women, organizations need to build trust, increase cultural awareness and capacity, and create responses that support Black survivors in ways that may be different from current ways of being and doing.
- Alternatives for Women ↩︎
- Courtney Brown, Kitchen Table Talks in the African Nova Scotian Community: Pathways 2 Justice, Year Two, (Association of Black Social Workers, 2019) ↩︎
- Patrina Duhaney, Criminalized Black Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence in Canada, (Violence Against Women, 2022, Vol. 28(11)), 2765–2787 ↩︎
- Adam Cotter: Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics, Intimate partner violence: Experiences of visible minority women in Canada, 2018, (Statistics Canada, 2021) ↩︎
