One of the challenges—and it's painfully clear to me, in the process I've been going through and in being in Toronto yesterday at the inquest into Ashley Smith—is that the false dichotomy of people being victims or offenders is just that; that when we have prisons filled with people who have survived residential school abuses or violence generally or mental health issues, and when we see the evisceration of social programs and health care, we see a creation of the climate for increased victimization of many people and the abandonment of those people by the state. I think that is the fundamental...whereby you can start preventing victimization if you provide supports.
The campaign by our aboriginal sisters for the missing and murdered women is a perfect example. Many of those women were also criminalized. It didn't mean they deserved to be taken and murdered—and I don't suggest that anybody is saying that. It's very much linked also to the challenge that our friend Cindy Blackstock is bringing on behalf of aboriginal children who have inadequate education, and the challenges that are being brought by the Native Women's Association of Canada with a number of young people and women who don't have access to adequate nutrition and health care on reserves.
I think we need to start much earlier than this. But to answer your question, once they are in the system, I think the greatest way to show accountability is to be accountable ourselves and to demonstrate the sorts of behaviours we want to see.
When we worked with young men and young women in the juvenile system, and when I worked with men in the adult system, one of the things we tried to do was identify with them who they had victimized, how they had victimized—sometimes these weren't people they had ever been charged for, maybe a family member, or it might be somebody else—and how they were also victimized. This was not to excuse their behaviour, but to help them get in touch empathically with...because many of them have been desensitized, by that stage, to their own victimization and therefore to the victimization of the people they've harmed.
I'm going now from people who have been in the system, including people who were victims who were part of the process or who were identified as victims by the system and those who were identified as perpetrators. The ones who have gone on and done very well in the community talk about understanding this—having opportunities to be contributing members of the community and being able to pay back in all kinds of ways.
Lisa Neve, who was once declared a dangerous offender, helps by trying to mentor young people. She had a horrendous history of victimization before she went on to be in the youth justice system herself and to be labeled one of the most serious young women in the system. Now, almost everybody would agree—she has been thirteen years out of the system—she contributes to the community and does everything she can to prevent anybody else from both being victimized in the way she was or victimizing in the way she did.
Those are some of the limited...you know, in the 30 years I've been doing this work, that's what I've been able to see. But very much I think modelling the behaviour we want to see is key at every level: for our teachers, for our educators, for our government, for those of us who do the work—it's key.