No Way Out

For Natashsa Petrova the early days in Canada were among the happiest of her life.

But in the space of a few months she would discover that in her adopted home of British Columbia things are very difficult for women fleeing abusive husbands. Her cautionary tale also reminds us that life is only getting harder for the more vulnerable among us.

Born and raised in the Russian Far East, Petrova was working three jobs and living with her family when a long-time woman friend who'd married a Canadian sent her the coordinates of a man who was looking for a Russian bride.

After sending and receiving much e-mail, the man boarded a jet in Vancouver for the first leg of a journey that would take him to Petrova's home on Sakhalin Island. Shortly after his arrival, the couple married and in 1998 flew back to Vancouver with a visitor's visa tucked in the new bride's purse.

"The first year," Petrova recalls, "everything was like dream. He was nice person. He was gentleman. You want this. You want that."

From Russia, no love

But as the months passed, she became worried. Her six-month visitor's visa expired, and her husband had yet to sponsor her. She did not have landed immigrant status and could not work. She was totally dependent on a man who seemed less a beneficent knight and more a belligerent and controlling knave. One minute "I was in golden cage" the next "I was dealing with man whose career went sour," Petrova recalls.

Then the drinking got out of hand.

"In year I felt like helpless puppy. I try to get answers to questions. 'If you say you are not doing financially well, then I go to work. But I don't have valid documents. You said you applied to Immigration.'"

Early into the second year of a deteriorating marriage, Petrova discovered she was pregnant. She briefly considered fleeing to her native Russia, but abandoned the idea. Her father's "Old World beliefs" were certain to translate into little emotional and financial support. And there was the added problem of where she would come up with the $2,000 necessary to get her back to where she once belonged.

Rejecting life as a single mother in Russia, she opted to see the pregnancy through, then leave her increasingly abusive husband and take her chances in a new and still strange land.

By any measure, Petrova was a woman in need of help when in 2002 she fled her husband with her infant son in tow and entered North Vancouver's Sage Transition House for abused women.

The Tyee recently learned of her story through Atira Women's Resources Society, a non-profit operating shelters for abused women and their children in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, White Rock and Surrey, where Petrova and her son have been residents for the past 15 months.

Worst possible limbo

Atira executive director Janice Abbott says Petrova, who spoke to The Tyee on condition that her real name not be used, was a woman caught in the worst possible situation.

"When she arrived, she was ineligible for any assistance and not eligible for work either. She was basically between a rock and a hard place," Abbott recalls. "Her husband was to have sponsored her, and he took his time doing that. And the result was that when she left him he hadn't even bothered to file the sponsorship application."

Like other women escaping abusive relationships, Petrova was in reasonably good shape initially. That's because "first stage" transition houses or shelters, which house women and their children for up to one month, do not charge their clients, if that is they are lucky enough to find available space. (At Atira's three transition houses alone, between 1,200 and 1,500 requests for shelter per facility per year are rejected due to lack ofspace.)

But after the first month, things became much more difficult. With only three dozen or so suites in the Lower Mainland, spaces in longer-term second stage transition house are at a premium. And once in, women were expected to pay their subsidized housing costs.

Petrova eventually landed at Atira's second stage transition house in Surrey, where the Society has 11 spaces leased in a townhouse complex. Through a combined effort that saw the complex owner waive a portion of Atira's lease costs, Atira waiving its operating costs, and Atira assuming the costs of an aggressive fundraising effort, Petrova's $370 monthly rent, plus food, heat and hydro costs were completely covered.

"We probably sent out over 200 letters to church groups, local businesses, the Rotary Club, anything we could think of," says Linda Djadidi, program coordinator at Atira's Koomseh House.

In the meantime a legal aid lawyer began the vital work of helping Petrova obtain her landed immigrant status. (The option of returning to Russia was out of the question, unless she wished to leave her Canadian-born son in her ex-husband's hands.) That work, at least, was covered by the provincial government through B.C.'s Legal Services Society. In February, five years after she left Russia, Petrova finally received what her estranged husband had promised but failed to deliver.

With her status secured, Petrova became eligible for benefits. It would take eight months more before her first welfare cheque arrived and she was able to begin paying her subsidized housing costs. "And we thought the bureaucratic red tape in Russia was bad," Abbott wryly observed.

Last of safety net

While Petrova's case is among the more extreme that she has seen in her 11 years at Atira's helm, Abbott says it could have been even worse for the Russian immigrant.

Unknown to Petrova, the provincial government announced in January 2002 that it was cutting 40 per cent of its funding to the Legal Services Society. The move resulted in dramatic changes to the provision of government assisted legal aid, in particular to prospective clients looking for help with immigration and family law.

As of now, the only way that a person qualifies for legal aid relating to immigration is if they face deportation -- something that was never an issue in Petrova's case. Outside of this narrow aspect of immigration law, all low-income people looking for assistance in this area are now responsible for all legal costs, no matter what their circumstances.

Had Petrova had the misfortune to arrive in B.C. one or two years later than she did, she not only would have lacked the funds to shelter herself, but been left to beg strangers to cover the legal costs needed to resolve her immigration woes.

The other major withdrawal of legal aid has been in the area of family law. Prior to the cutbacks, there was far greater latitude in what legal aid lawyers could provide low-income people, mostly women, looking for help with family law matters. Those days are gone, leaving many women in difficult straits.

Laurence Scott, a lawyer practicing family law in the Kamloops area, says the cuts now mean that unless a woman can prove she is being physically abused by her husband or that the husband is threatening to take her children out of the province, she does not qualify for legal aid.

Liberal lawyer: Cuts too deep

Scott, a longtime Liberal supporter, says he believes some of the cuts made by the Legal Services Society were probably justified. And that includes the closure of many of the 65 regional offices LSS once operated. But the cuts have gone too far, he says, and the result is that a low-income woman is now either left to represent herself in court or to beg friends or family to help her.

"If she doesn't, she risks losing the family home. She risks losing her children. She quite possibly loses a claim on spousal support because the children are going to be the primary focus of the court in terms of financial support. And she could quite possibly lose out on asking for a share of her husband's pension, if he has one," Scott says.

What most concerns Scott is that the money required to provide family law services to low-income women is not a huge amount of money in the broad scheme of things, perhaps $2 million per year.

"We're not talking $50 million here," he says.

When Petrova thinks back on the nightmare that her new life in Canada became, she is most thankful that she got the legal help when she did. And she is unequivocal in saying that without it she and others like her would needlessly suffer.

"If I were leaving now, my husband, no status and stuff, I wouldn't even be able to get legal aid. So the women that are out there with violent husbands and stuff, they're not entitled to anything. It's basically like being in the street."

Petrova's assessment is shared by Abbott, who has seen more than her share of women in trouble in her 11 years at the helm of Atira.

"Not that things were great before," Abbott says. "But they've certainly gotten worse. There are women who need child custody and access arrangements formalized, and can't get legal aid. There are women who need help getting child support and can't get legal aid. And there are women who need restraining orders and no-contact orders because they continue to be harassed and can't get legal aid."

"And even if women do initially qualify for some legal aid," Abbott observes, there are limitations on how much legal aid they can get. "They often cannot go back a second time if their husbands refuse to pay maintenance or break a restraining order. And more often than not that happens. We're not talking about guys who want to do right by their former wives or children."

Petrova should, indeed, count herself lucky that at least part of her ordeal ended before things got a whole lot worse in her new homeland.

Freelance writer and researcher Ben Parfitt lives in Victoria. He is a frequent writer and commentator on natural resource, business, environmental and social justice issues for a variety of publications and author of Forest Follies: Adventures and Misadventures in the Great Canadian Forest