I'll start, and Mr. Orr may wish to add something.
Forced marriages are something very difficult to quantify. The known incidence of forced marriages in the immigration system is quite small, and the instances tend to be anecdotal. We are certainly looking now more systematically to track cases when we have reason to believe there was a forced marriage.
A forced marriage will not all that often come to the attention of a visa officer. The victim is normally not going to tell the visa officer that it was a forced marriage, because as the victim, she is fearful that if it became known that had she told a government official it was a forced marriage, she would be put at risk.
There are some numerical indicators. DFAIT'S consular services have dealt with about 100 cases of forced marriage over the last few years. Bob mentioned that the Immigration and Refugee Board sees cases in which forced marriages are one of the reasons for the claim. There have been some studies. One by the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario gave some numbers. I don't have them in my hands, but there were 200 cases, I think, of forced marriages that they had dealt with in the South Asian community in Ontario, but let us remind ourselves that not all of these involved an immigration component; they could have been second-generation persons.
Quantifying it is very difficult. We know it occurs. We know from working closely with other countries that they have these issues as well. Forced marriage indeed is very hard to quantify because it is normally hidden. Sometimes it comes to our attention through tips, through written information, and visa officers can probe. In a small number of cases, the visa officer will feel that it is a forced marriage situation.
Then they have to work very closely with Foreign Affairs or with the CBSA to try to deal with the case in a way that won't further victimize the victim. If we issued a refusal letter saying, “You're refused because your sponsor forced you to marry”, we would be putting the victim at risk, because then the forcer would understand that the person had revealed the situation to a government official. Most of this is about trying to protect the victims and not further victimize them when we come across such situations.
We are looking at a number of possible ways to work more closely with Foreign Affairs, making sure that we have good information sharing. Should Canada look broadly at practices in other countries, if they have a dedicated forced marriage unit? These are all good questions. We're examining every angle we can to see how to ensure that we're doing all we can through the immigration system to prevent forced marriages.