A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

One of my long-time friends has Dissociative Identity Disorder – what they once called multiple personality. Getting to know her and her people over many years has helped me to see that it’s not a mental illness at all, it’s a coping mechanism. I see so many parallels with this thing we call addiction. For my friend, dissociating was a sane response to an insane situation, which in her case was a long childhood of non-stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse. When her little-girl self couldn’t handle what was happening to her, she found a way to check out. Some other “person” that her amazing brain had created would emerge to take the pain and heartbreak, and then retreat deep inside with the memory to protect my friend from having to know it ever happened. Being able to dissociate so completely as a child was a brilliant strategy for her at the time. She thinks it probably saved her life, allowing her to take repeated abuse that any fully present child could never bear. The cop...

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving. Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times. Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for. “The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse...

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We are a long way from done.  The line on the graph looks like a dip in the road – downhill for a few years after 2009, then slowly climbing back up over a decade starting in 2014. It tracks the number of police reports in Canada related to intimate partner violence. For a while, things were improving. But that’s over now, with violence rates (54 per 1,000 for Canadian women) now back to the levels of 15 years ago. Similar trends are evident in the US, where aggravated domestic assaults have risen to heights not seen in more than 20 years. What were we doing right for those good years? What did we start doing wrong? When the issue is something as deeply in the shadows as intimate partner violence, a clear answer is hard to come by. With 80 per cent of people experiencing IPV not even reporting the crime to police, any trend line is only ever scraping the surface. But the rising stress of daily life on P...

Scrambling to pack up as bylaw gets ready to close in In days gone by, I'd be out talking to people living homeless and hearing mostly about police. These days, it's all about City of Victoria bylaw enforcement. The city's bylaw department and many new bylaw hires have been given expansive new powers to seize people's stuff. The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays out all the places where impoverished people aren't allowed to sit, stand or lie down, but it's the 2023 Property in Custody Bylaw that really gives the muscle. I'd like to share some sections from these bylaws, in hopes that someone who understands civic law might have ideas on how to push back against them. It's hard to believe that they could possibly be legal given the grand misery they are causing to people, none of whom have the capacity or the knowledge to stand up against them. As noted by one young fellow out there I spoke with, Michael, "maybe one per cent of the people out here kno...

If words in a newspaper could solve the social crisis on our streets, we'd be on our way with the back-and-forths that have been happening in the Victoria Times Colonist since a Sept. 24 column by Les Leyne kicked things off.  But things have gotten confusing on Facebook what with the ridiculous fight between Meta and the Canadian government that has left us unable to share newspaper links in Canada. So here's all four parts of the back-and-forth laid out in order - Les's piece, then my response, then a comment piece by retired nurse Barbara Wiggins, then my response to that. Hope this helps for those trying to follow all of this. And while there are some differences in opinion throughout, it's really heartening to see the TC devoting all these column inches to this issue. Les Leyne column in the Sept. 24 Times Colonist that started things off: B.C. has slid into an attitude of “endless accommodation” of antisocial behaviour by desperately ill people on downtown street...

  Bylaw sweep is on in Victoria and this man has to run to get to his stuff before it's gone A communications strategist living through a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude right here in her own province spends a lot of time mulling how to shift the conversation to the advantage of all the people living the crisis.  So I'm testing something new on Instagram, @streetstoriesvictoria . If you're familiar with Humans of New York, my little test is taking the lead from that fine feature. My aim is to be a pair of eyes out there and tell some small stories - no opinions, no casting blame, just seeing.  I've only just begun so currently have a mere seven posts, but stick with me and I'll get those numbers up fast. After 40 years of observing all the factors that have gotten us to this tragic place, I am seeing people - the public, policy makers, most definitely the politicians - getting things so wrong on so many fronts, and I think much of that is because people hav...

I wrote a letter to the editor to the Victoria Times Colonist that they ran Sept 27 as an opinion piece , which I then posted on Facebook, where it got major traction primarily among people who aren't my "followers."  I'm saying all of that because it has led me to conclude that those of us who think like this about the social crisis burning on all of our communities' streets need to be way more out there in public spheres with our thoughts. There is more support than we might think, and governments that only ever hear from the highly active lock-em-up types need to know that.  Let's take a leaf from the populist playbook and get loud at every opportunity. (Ideally by pointing out the reality rather than just shouting angrily at the "other side" that they're idiots, though I admit I came pretty close to doing that in this particular rant, didn't I?) I fear that some of us in this fight have concluded that it's hopeless to openly push back...