Acknowledgements 

We want to first acknowledge the trust that our research participants placed in us when allowed us to read the documents that represented some of the most difficult months and years of their lives. We acknowledge their bravery in stepping out of cycles of violence and abuse and their desire to impact positive change in the lives of others through sharing their stories.

We want to thank the different institutions and funding bodies that played an important role in ensuring that this work could get done. We are thankful to the Ryerson Research Ethics Board; the Sheridan Research Ethics Board; the of Faculty of Applied Health and Community Studies at Sheridan College; and for the generous funding that we received from the Sheridan SRCA Growth Grant.

A project of this kind requires the contributions of many different people with different skills, abilities and perspectives. We were honoured to have the contributions of many different student Research Assistants work on this project. They contributed from beginning to end- from compiling case studies from the original court documents, to uploading the final manuscript to the Pressbook platform. Thanks to Katrina Chahal, Social Service Worker Program, Sheridan College; Terri Neufeld, Social Service Worker-Gerontology Program, Sheridan College; Kruttika Nene, Paralegal Program, Sheridan College; Maria Aosaf Dawd Paralegal Program, Sheridan College; Denise DeJong, Social Service Worker Program, Sheridan College; Abigail Thompson, SSW Practicum student, Sheridan College; Sally Schlöder, student at the University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany, studying European Business Law undergoing an international student legal externship program with Archana Medhekar Law office in Toronto; Seraphina Seuratan, Paralegal Program, Sheridan College; and Jaspreet Kaur, Social Service Worker Program, Sheridan College.

Thanks also to Marifi Aryo, Paralegal, A.M. Law office with her help with administrative tasks and Sanaya Chaze for her help with the cover design of the book and visual layout of the online document. Thanks to Disha Mahajan for her help in formatting the pdf version of the book.

Thank you Lillian Hogendoorn from eCampus Ontario for your help with getting our book published on the eCampus Ontario Platform. Thanks also to Sam Cheng and Adam Duguay from the Sheridan College Library for your help with copyright issues and dissemination on SOURCE.  Nicole Zhang thank you for helping us to create the final digital pdf version for download. Finally, we want to thank our editor, Sarah Bukhari, for her care in reading and editing our final manuscript.