I, too, would like to thank you, Mr. Spratt, for a very lucid presentation. It's very helpful to the committee at this stage of our deliberations, and I'm grateful you came.
You talked just now to Mr. Hussen about sexual assault. That's an offence that covers a wide waterfront, it seems to me, from egregious conduct all the way down to some unwanted touching, if you will. Similarly, aggravated assault covers a huge range of possible conduct.
If the sponsor were here, I think he would be saying to call a spade a spade, to use the words that need to be meant so that people have clarity, and that torture is a totally different category from aggravated assault.
I take your point about not wanting new offences in the Criminal Code. I get that, but it's not that new an offence. We already have one for state actors, so we'd just be trying, particularly with the amendments, to make torture in the private sphere consistent with that for state actors.
There is a last thing I want to ask you on that point, which is on the issue of gender violence particularly in the field of torture. A lot of the motivation and the witnesses for this have come from feminist groups, which say that torture is about the destruction of humanness, personality, and identity of the person being tortured. It's about breaking a person.
Why wouldn't we want to have clarity in our Criminal Code about this category of conduct, which isn't just aggravated assault, but seems to be something quite distinct?