Thank you, Chair, and I want to thank all of the presenters for coming to share their views with us.
Ms. Campbell, thank you for telling us your story and your views.
I have great sympathy for the consequences of sexual assault for its victims. I represent a large number of people who were victims of sexual assault by the Christian Brothers in an orphanage in Newfoundland in the 1990s.
On the sentencing side, you mentioned the minimum sentence that we have here. Some of these perpetrators received sentences as high as 13 years, which were upheld on appeal. There certainly wasn't any sense of leniency, because the circumstances and the effects on the victims were taken into account. All of that is possible in the current justice system. I think you should get some comfort from that. Obviously there are individual cases about which people complain.
Mr. Trudell helped us by pointing out the mental illness issue, which is also a big factor for offenders. I just received something yesterday from the Mood Disorders Society of Canada suggesting that the numbers on women offenders in our prisons who have histories of physical and/or sexual abuse are as follows: 72% of provincially sentenced women, 82% of federally sentenced women, and 90% of federally sentenced aboriginal women. So in addition to the pain and suffering you've talked about and that we're all aware of, in terms of addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder, and all of the other things that go along with that, many women show up in our prison population as a result of what has happened in their lives.
We have Internet luring—and some of the new provisions in this bill to deal with this, we support. By the way, I moved a motion in the House of Commons yesterday to take the sexual abuse of children section out of this bill and have it fast-tracked through the House of Commons and the Senate, because it's been there before. There are other aspects of this bill that are controversial. We've had some witnesses tell us that it will lead to greater crime and not less crime. We need to look at that clearly and more intensely.
I was told that the government objected to this, saying it was a frivolous motion. But I don't agree with them.
But I want to ask you if there are some things we should be focusing on in terms of prevention. Making Internet luring and the putting of pornography to children offences could have the effect of stopping perpetrators before they actually offend physically. Are there other things that we and society should be doing to focus on the prevention of sexual abuse and of crime in general?