What can I say? I have been the wife of a criminal lawyer for many years. Some things have sunk in, and one of them is that it's a war zone; the court system is a war zone. It's win or lose. There are people leaving there with high-fives and there are people leaving there like they're the losers. I don't know; maybe David would like to comment on that. It's the reality of the system.
It's also a system that is absolutely gruelling on children. If you had to design a worse system than the adversarial system, I don't think you could--not for sexually abused children. No matter what you do--Bill C-2, which we supported, all the witness aids, and all of that--the thing is, it's still very gruelling.
I want to go back to that case in Saskatchewan. That started in 2001. That was when that young girl, age 12, ran away. That case goes on today. It's, what, coming into 2007? There were three men, right? That case was such a mess that the two last guys are just coming up for trial.
In actual fact, just to show how stacked against children the cards are, we made a complaint in 2001 to the judicial council about the fact that the accused were called “the boys”. They're all adult men; they were called “the boys” in this case. It's now 2006, and we still haven't had a response from the judicial council.
This is a very gruelling process on children. We are talking about people post-conviction. We're talking about these people once they have been found guilty and have come for sentencing. The biggest problem with sex offenders is that they have very, very strong denial processes. The reason they get into this crime in the first place is that all the enormous societal barriers that exist to tell you that you shouldn't get involved with sex with children have not sunk in to them. It's just not there, because they are thinking dysfunctionally. They are also victim-blaming, in many cases--so post-sentencing, I think these individuals should be held properly accountable.