ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, there has been a great deal of organizing around the issue of Same Sex Partner Abuse in Toronto. The focus of this activism has been on raising public awareness within the LGBTQ community and beyond, as well as on improving service providers’ understanding of, and response to, this issue. Unfortunately, as with many issues pertaining to marginalized communities, the paucity of funding has meant that for every grant won to study and organize around same sex partner abuse, there follows a few fallow years. As a result, each new project tends, necessarily, to replicate rather than build on the knowledge gained by the project that went before. For example, the majority of projects that I am aware of, both past and present, have been primarily concerned with producing public education resources, brochures and posters. Funds are rarely available to go beyond this initial stage to focus on research, documenting clinical interventions, and so on. Every few years, subsequent funding is made available for the further production of public education resources. Much of the fi rst year at the David Kelley Services (DKS) project was spent developing a set of brochures to replace the brochure and posters that had been produced during two prior rounds of funding.1 In my experience, this appears to be a result of a complex set of infl uences including funding constraints, a lack of vision on the part of administrators, and the absence of a network connecting activists across geographical distance. The project that this chapter describes received the longest sustained funding grant ever dedicated to the issue of same sex partner abuse in Toronto and was the product of more than a decade of writing and activism by LGBTQ community members and service providers. What follows is an attempt to document the results of this project name the David Kelley Services-Same Sex Partner Abuse (DKS-SSPA) project, so that those who come after-and there will be others-can build on what was accomplished over the three years of the project’s life span, rather than being forced to engage in the Sisyphean task of re-charting the same terrain.
