Gender-based violence workshop aims to provide safe space for Muslim women and gender-diverse people

After multiple horrific cases of violence against Muslim women in the province, Muslim women and gender-diverse people are gathering in St. John’s to share their stories, learn about available services and create strategies for safety, empowerment, and collective healing.

“As Muslim women, they should feel safe, protected, and they should be able to gather with confidence and with trust,” says organizer Shazia Shaheen.

The three-day workshop is part of the Building Safer Communities Together initiative, led by the Canadian Council of Muslim Women’s Atlantic Chapter in partnership with the Anti-Racism Coalition of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The event will focus on preventing gender-based violence and strengthening culturally-safe supports for Muslim women and gender-diverse people in the St. John’s metro region. It is funded by Newfoundland and Labrador’s Office for Women and Gender Equality. 

Shaheen, project manager for the initiative, says the workshop is intended “to provide a safe space and a culturally responsive [space] where we could understand the needs of each other as a Muslim community and as Muslim women.” 

She says the response has been overwhelming. Initially developed for 20 participants, organizers had to increase the capacity to 25 in response to the demand. They closed the registration portal just two days after it opened. “We are receiving a lot of requests, even through email, that they are so desperate they want to participate in the workshop,” Shaheen says. 

Recent cases of violence against Muslim women in Newfoundland and Labrador have inspired the workshops, Shaheen explains. “We had been thinking for a while [about] what we can do in the community to spread the information [about violence] and to engage the Muslim women.”

Nariman Abdul Alghafour, a mother of five, was murdered in March 2024. Prior to her death, she had gone to the police about her abusive husband.

Months later, in July, Baran Abed was also murdered, her body found in a suitcase in St. John’s. Her husband, who was also found dead, was suspected of the murder. 

Last month, a father abducted his five-year-old daughter from St. John’s and took her out of the country.  

Shaheen says Muslim women can face violence in various forms and from multiple sources, including partners or strangers on the streets, and that the violence is often rooted in Islamophobia and racism. “Being a Muslim, then women, then women of colour, and then if you are black,” she says, naming some of the factors that make women the targets of gender-based violence. “So the precarity and the vulnerability [compounds].”

Muslim women face barriers

Muslim women also face barriers when trying to access help. A person’s immigration status—refugee, temporary foreign worker, or student, for instance—can impact the support they are permitted to access or feel comfortable asking for. If a woman does not have an MCP card and is not financially stable, she cannot access health services, Shaheen explains.

Other hurdles include language barriers and lack of knowledge about the services available to victims of gender-based violence. 

To address some of these barriers, the organizers have invited community groups to a panel discussion and a question-and-answer session on the last day of the workshop so attendees can ask about available services, which languages they are in, and whether the programs are culturally sensitive enough, among other things.

One of the organizations attending is the Newfoundland and Labrador Human Rights Commission. Executive Director Carey Majid says the event is a good opportunity to hear from community members about their concerns and to inform attendees about the province’s human rights complaints process and other programs. 

“Sometimes smaller groups can really lead to good conversation, like very frank, open conversations about what’s happening in people’s lives,” Majid says.

The workshops, which run Dec. 5-7 in St. John’s, will provide caretaker services for mothers with young children, and interpreters will also be available for translation in Arabic, Bangla, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and other languages upon request. 

Though the group is at full capacity, Shaheen says other programs will be offered in the future.