Media releases

• Brock-YWCA research addresses affordable housing barriers faced by women, gender-diverse people

  Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 23 November 2022 – R0130

  The lack of affordable, safe housing in Niagara hits women and gender-diverse people particularly hard, says a recent Brock University-Niagara YWCA policy brief.

  But it is more than just a shortage of inexpensive shelter that sees women and gender-diverse people being disproportionality locked out of the affordable housing system, says the brief, “Improving Safe and Affordable Housing for Women in Niagara, Before and After COVID-19.”

  “There needs to be systemic change in providing programs and supports, so women and gender-diverse people are in a position to access housing, which goes beyond adding more housing units,” says lead author Joanne Heritz, Brock Assistant Professor of Political Science and Niagara Community Observatory (NCO) Research Associate.

  The research team will present the brief at the YWCA Niagara Region’s Annual General Meeting, to be held online in the Microsoft Teams platform Wednesday, Nov. 23 at 6 p.m.

  To produce the brief, researchers with Brock’s Niagara Community Observatory partnered with the YWCA Niagara Region to form a Housing Advisory Council consisting of women and gender-diverse people who experienced homelessness, members of organizations who represent people with lived expertise of homelessness, and YWCA officials.

  Through focus groups, researchers interviewed residents at the YWCA shelter and women in transitional housing to share their experiences.

  From these interviews and other information gathered, the research team identifies five key areas in which women and gender-diverse people face barriers to access and keep housing that meets their needs:

  • Affordability: Rent increasing an estimated 25 per cent from 2021 to 2022 now places minimum-wage earners “in core housing needs;” for instance, a single working parent spends more than half of their minimum wage income on housing.
  • Support systems: Some reported a lack of disability units. Also, income supports such as ODSP and OW tend to penalize people who earn extra income, live with an employed family member or get a minimum-wage job.
  • Trauma: Survivors of partner abuse face low income or inadequate social assistance, dependence on the abusive spouse for financial support, poor credit scores and precarious employment that leads to mental health and self-worth issues. Also, housing in locations with active substance use can be traumatizing for women recovering from addictions.
  • Discrimination: Women who are Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, immigrants or were previously in homeless shelters found it especially difficult to get decent housing.
  • Safety: Because of high rental costs, the only affordable option is housing in neighbourhoods with high rates of substance use, theft, yelling and violence. Some participants reported feeling unsafe because they must share living spaces with strangers, including bathrooms and kitchens, for affordability.

  The brief puts forth recommendations to the federal, provincial and Niagara Region governments.

  Research team member and YWCA Executive Director Elisabeth Zimmermann says her organization has “always supported women who are in need of housing,” particularly as Niagara is going through a housing crisis.

  “This joint research provides important information that verifies the importance of having an understanding of the housing needs of women and gender-diverse people and needs to be considered in any solutions that are developed,” says Zimmermann. “We are grateful for the report.”

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  * Doug Hunt, Communications and Media Relations Specialist, Brock University dhunt2@brocku.ca or 905-941-6209

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  Categories: Media releases

• Brock researchers examining pandemic’s impact on bullying

  Tuesday, November 22, 2022 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 22 November 2022 – R0129

  Now that middle and high school students are back in the classroom, Brock University researchers are looking to see whether bullying behaviour has changed.

  Brock bullying expert Tony Volk and his team are resuming a five-year bullying research project they were conducting before the pandemic shut their work down.

  In 2017, the Professor of Child and Youth Studies received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the project “Reconceptualizing bullying: strengthening the foundation for measurement, research, interventions and policies.”

  He and his team — including Brock Associate Professor of Psychology Andrew Dane and Queen’s University Professor of Psychology Wendy Craig — are creating and testing new concepts and methods that aim to modernize the bullying research field.

  Academics who study bullying generally refer to a definition of the behaviour created at the time the field took off in the early 1990s.

  Eight years ago, Volk created a new version: “Bullying is aggressive, goal-directed behaviour that causes harm to another individual within the context of a power imbalance.”

  Through their research project, Volk and his team are testing out the definition and other novel tools by surveying 1,000 Grade 5, 7 and 9 students and their families in the Niagara and Hamilton Catholic school boards.

  Each survey consists of three questionnaires: one asking students if they have ever been bullied or have themselves bullied other students; another asking students about their personality traits, goals and who their friends are; and a third asking students and their parents to identify who among their peers are bullies, who supports the bullies and who defends those being bullied.

  The information gathered will enable the research team to form sophisticated line graphs that map out groups of friends, bullying networks and how these two networks relate when superimposed on one another.

  Volk says this level of sophisticated social network analysis provides greater understanding of the relationships, patterns and group dynamics that may foster bullying.

  “Do groups of friends who bully a particular kid cluster together? Are kids bullying people who they call friends? Over time, do kids start joining the popular group that is bullying other kids, or do they go away? Do kids who are bullied start banding together?” he says.

  The team has collected data from four surveys so far. Preliminary findings include:

  • One in five children and adolescents in Niagara engage in bullying behaviour, and one in five are victims of bullying, which reflects the national average.
  • Peers do cluster together with other peers when it comes to being bullies or victims.
  • Selfish personality traits predict bullying behaviour.
  • Average levels of civility were supported by peer popularity but high and low levels were not, such as being too unruly or too well-behaved.
  • Both victimization and witnessing victimization are associated with lower psychosocial well-being and higher levels of emotional problems.

  The team is scheduled to head back to classrooms this week to pick up where they left off, with the added dimension of assessing if and how pandemic restrictions have impacted bullying behaviours.

  Volk says bullying research done by other colleagues during the pandemic found a decrease in bullying — including cyberbullying — across the board.

  “Are we going to see this trend continue, where these behaviours were lower during the pandemic and now they’re going to stick at a lower level, or will bullying behaviour go back to what it used to be before the pandemic?” he says.

  The answer could go either way. On the one hand, bullying is partly a learned behaviour, says Volk, so if teens learned new, healthier ways of interacting with one another during COVID, that could carry into the present.

  On the other hand, “the average level of anxiety has increased across the board, and we know that anxiety is a risk factor for victimization, so that’s something we’re cautiously concerned about,” he says.

  Volk is a member of the Brock Research on Aggression and Victimization Experiences (BRAVE), one of Canada’s largest teams of child and youth bullying experts. The group includes professors and graduate and undergraduate students researching aggression in order to prevent it and help its victims.

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  * Doug Hunt, Communications and Media Relations Specialist, Brock University dhunt2@brocku.ca or 905-941-6209

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  Categories: Media releases