Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to provide our recommendations on Bill C-78.
As my colleague Shalini mentioned, I am with the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario. I'm a staff lawyer.
Our next recommendation is regarding the definition of “family violence”. We recommend that the definition be amended to include a couple of other types of abuse. We welcome the inclusion of different types of abuse, such as physical, sexual, threats to kill or cause bodily harm, psychological and financial. However, we recommend that cyber-violence and spiritual abuse also be included in the definition, as they reflect both the reality of the communities we serve and our current society at large.
Spiritual abuse would entail, for example, mocking someone's spiritual beliefs, forcing someone to practise certain aspects of their faith, preventing someone from practising certain aspects of their faith, or using religion as a justification for violence or abuse. We see this from time to time in our casework.
Cyber-violence is increasingly being used as both an intimidation and revenge tactic against intimate partners. Recently, a client of ours who was going through a divorce and also facing immigration issues disclosed to us that her husband had spread intimate photos of her on the Internet and via email to her friends and family. This can have devastating consequences for women who belong to particular communities, especially certain South Asian communities where reputation is paramount. It's not only used as a way to threaten and control women, but it could also lead to their ostracization from the entire community.
We believe that recognizing spiritual violence and cyber-violence as part of the definition of “family violence” would provide for a more fulsome definition.
Our next recommendation is with respect to the terms “custody” and “access”. We recognize that the bill proposes to do away with these terms to promote a less adversarial framework for parenting decisions. However, we do have some practical concerns.
In terms of our international experience, just to give you an example again, SALCO recently worked with a client whose children were kidnapped to Pakistan by her abusive ex-husband, and the only way she could get her kids back was if she showed the court in Pakistan that she had sole custody. The court in Pakistan was looking for that specific language, so if we change those terms, we have to take into consideration whether that would be understood and recognized in the international context.
As well, the terms “custody” and “access” are still used in other domestic legislation, such as in immigration legislation and child protection legislation. We know that family violence does not happen in a silo. It often intersects with immigration and child protection matters, so changes would jeopardize the consistency with other legislation.
We recommend that either these terms be retained, or, if they're removed, that there be clear language that explains the equivalent of these terms as they're used in other legislation.
Finally, we also know that even though these terms have been changed in other jurisdictions, we don't really have any evidence that changing these terms has actually led to a reduction of conflict.
SALCO has been doing a lot of public legal education in communities because a lot of our clients have language barriers and simply don't have a lot of knowledge about their legal rights. We have spent a lot of time and resources in developing language-specific materials explaining these terms, so changing them would mean that we'd have to revisit and revamp all of that, and we simply don't have the resources to do so.