Thank you.
First of all, I want to say how very much I appreciate the testimony you've provided today. It is certainly a horrific atrocity that is occurring in the Congo and elsewhere, and I am completely empathetic to the concern.
During the course of your statement, you asked what we would do if we found out that 40 rapes were occurring on a daily basis in Canada. That piqued my attention, and so I made a quick request to my staff to tell me how many sexual assaults—because we define it in sexual assault terms in Canada, not as rape—occur in Canada on an annual basis.
To put it in context, you said that 16,000 rapes occur in a population of 71 million in the Congo. That's about 43 per day, or about two per 10,000 people.
In Canada, there are about 21,000 sexual assaults on an annual basis, levels one through three. That's six per 10,000, or about 57 per day.
In the United States, there are 88,000 forceful rapes every year. That's a ratio of 28 per 10,000, or 241 per day.
Those are horrible numbers. Nobody is suggesting that those numbers are acceptable. But when you put it in that context, how do you explain the comparison, that on the face of it, things actually look worse in Canada than they do in the Congo right now?