Courage Run helps victims of violence and their children

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The annual Shoppers Drug Mart Run for Women will be held at Centennial Park in Moncton this Sunday, raising funds to help victims of sexual assault and their children.

Kristal LeBlanc, CEO of the Beausejour Family Crisis Resource Centre and the Courage Centre in Shediac, said this year’s event has a goal of $100,000, with proceeds going toward the Little Courageous daycare centre. It will be the first daycare in Atlantic Canada specifically for children who have been exposed to trauma and family violence. It will be housed within the Courage Centre and the money raised will help pay for the needed renovations.

The run begins Sunday at 8 a.m. at Centennial Park, with many local teams participating. Visitors are welcome to drop by to make a donation and learn more about the programs. The centre’s facility dogs, who offer companionship to victims through the process and go to court, will be at the run Sunday.

LeBlanc said the Shediac-based centre saw incidents of sexual violence in New Brunswick increase dramatically during the pandemic and that continues.

She said its staff has grown from five to 28, with programs now offered in Fredericton and Saint John.

“We’re still seeing a massive increase in family violence and sexual assaults,” LeBlanc said.

From January to April of 2024, the centre provided 1,400 counselling sessions to victims of family violence and sexual assault, along with their children. More than 260 of the sessions were for children. The total for 2023 was 3,089. That’s the number of counselling sessions, with many repeat visits for victims, but the actual number of individual victims was not available. She said many victims simply try to forget about it and don’t come forward.

“We used to do 2,000 interventions in a year, and now we’ve had 1,400 in the first four months of 2024,” LeBlanc said.

She said sexual assaults result in trauma that can haunt victims for the rest of their lives. She said everyday things like the smell of deodorant or the sound of slamming doors or dishes clattering in the sink can cause a victim to have anxiety attacks.

“It hits you every day in every way. If you don’t get counselling, these things aren’t just going to go away.

“Children who are exposed to violence in the home often don’t know the proper ways to show their emotions and regulate how they are feeling. All they felt at home was anger and aggression and not healthy ways to express that,” LeBlanc said.

“These things continue to happen, so it is important to maintain the infrastructure to help victims, like safe housing and specialized counselling,” she said. “We can’t expect people to come forward if they don’t think we’re going to be there to pick them up and provide those services. There’s always a huge funding requirement to provide that support.”

LeBlanc said this year’s big project is to get the daycare centre established to provide children with specialized treatment at a young age, before they become perpetrators themselves.

Melissa Doucet, a member of the centre’s board of directors, said the Little Courageous Daycare is important because it will help children who have become traumatized victims of family violence. She said the daycare will help them understand their experiences.

Doucet will be running with a team of her co-workers from Re/Max Avante Realty in Moncton.

The Courage Centre in Shediac is the first trauma centre of its kind in New Brunswick. Besides emergency response and counselling, it has long-term housing options, a sexual violence centre and support through the court system with justice facility dogs.

The Little Courageous Daycare will provide a space for children as their mother attends counselling. It will also help children heal from their exposure of abuse in the home, hopefully breaking the intergenerational cycle of violence, LeBlanc said.

The Moncton run is part of the Shoppers Drug Mart Run for Women, a national event that saw more than 24,000 participants at 18 communities across Canada, raising more than $2.9 million last year.

For more information about the Centre Courage Centre, visit healingstartshere.ca