Thank you for the question.
If I may, the Department of Justice has been looking at these issues for a number of years and has held seven sector-specific round tables or workshops with police, crown prosecutors, victim services workers, child protection workers, shelter workers, and academics to talk about some of the gaps, challenges, and promising practices in dealing with this wide range of harmful cultural practices, if you will, or what the UN will sometimes call “customary practices”. As a result we've also funded a number of projects.
In 2013, we held a letter of intent for projects to respond specifically to forced marriage, which resulted in half a million dollars in funding over three years for four projects, including for SALCO for awareness raising, training, and risk assessment. So we fund some of the work of the key service providers through that program.
Status of Women Canada has also funded over $2.8 million for early and forced marriage, and honour-based violence-related community-based projects. They had a specific call for proposals in 2012 on honour-related violence. At the federal level we cannot directly fund some of these services, but we can fund NGOs and other community-based organizations that provide these services. This is something we have been doing for number of years and will continue to do.