Status of Women committee  And thank you so much for being patient.

Status of Women committee  I think there is a lot of collaboration possibly with the White Ribbon campaign, organizations such as that with community leaders, young professionals, and talking about it at the level of gender equality. SAWC has its own reference of the ways in which they want to work [Inaudible—Editor].

Status of Women committee  I would like to add that we really are encouraged by the suggestions that have been asked of us for the changes the federal government can make. This is very encouraging. As I said earlier, we have a lot of anecdotal evidence, but...some resources and maybe a working group, where someone like Kripa can be at the table for a sustained period of time to look at the indicators of violence coming out of these cases, at what the forms of violence are, how we can analyze the policy.

Status of Women committee  A lot of South Asian women in that age group are also family women. To substantiate what Kripa is saying, they're not single women. Quite often they have married at an early age and have the responsibility of children, which makes it harder to leave but also harder to stay away from violent situations or a relapse into the situation.

Status of Women committee  You bring up a very important point here, which we have been talking about in terms of the continuum. The earlier team was testifying from the university perspective. I think at the school level in gender they would like to point out that we need to redefine the language of violence.

Status of Women committee  I can quickly speak to that as well, and Marmitha was going to say something. What we have is anecdotal evidence. We are going by the work that SAWC has done based on our case studies. I'm at Ryerson. The first generation project at Ryerson is in general and not just on South Asian background.

Status of Women committee  I'd like to add that, given the patriarchal nature of the marriage, I think the dependence of women on men as spouses and the age difference are the crux of the matter. In terms of the collaboration, it might be useful for us to have some seamlessness in terms of interconnectivity between the different players.

Status of Women committee  This is perpetrated [Technical difficulty—Editor] who are beholders and enablers of the values that present a different context of violence. While we believe that we need to understand the different forms of violence through the experiential lens of young women and girls, what we can say with confidence and based on our qualitative work and research and our ongoing work with the community is that isolating this issue only makes young women and girls more vulnerable and marginalized.