That's exactly right. In the last panel, you heard from Ms. Deshman. For many indigenous women, just getting bail is a challenge.
Think about it. You have a prior record for something else. You're charged with an offence. You're charged with assault, along with your partner. You're not going to get bail. What do you do? Well, you plead guilty, because you want to get out of jail, but now you have a domestic violence charge against you. If you want to allege violence against your partner the next time, if there is a next time, he can say, “Oh, she did it too.” You now have a reverse onus facing you. You're never going to get out of that cycle.
The difficulty with reverse onuses is that in many ways they're lazy. I mean, do the work: If there's a concern for public safety, then make that point. Reverse onuses make it too easy to keep people in jail, and again, they're often the wrong people. This is the whole history of all the attempts—very well-meaning attempts—to deal with domestic violence. They've led to more and more indigenous women being caught up in the justice system. We have to stop and actually think about what the real impacts of this will be on the ground. From our perspective, those will be quite damaging to indigenous women.