Yes. I mean, there are two pieces to it.
One is that there are specific challenges that LGBTQ people face from abusive partners, right? A partner who is abusive might threaten to force you out of the closet. They might tell family members who you're still closeted to and force you out. Or if you're trans identified and you're using their benefits to access health care, health services, or hormone therapy, a threat of that financial cut-off is a very specific and degrading experience that LGBTQ people face.
On the flip side of things, what we've noticed in LGBTQ communities, especially in rural and remote spaces—Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury—is that LGBTQ folk are reluctant to go to the criminal justice system because they recognize that the violence their partners are bringing to relationships is not necessarily violence because they're—quote, unquote—a “bad person”, but is violence that they've inherited from trauma, from past experiences, and they're bringing it into the relationship. People are trying to find non-criminal justice solutions to address these challenges, solutions that of course don't exist within the LGBTQ community because there is no funding for such services. That's one of the challenges.
At a conference that we hosted in Sudbury, one of the keynote speakers noted that if we were to lock up all the criminals in intimate partner violent relationships, we'd have no one left to date in towns like Sudbury, Trois-Rivières, or Fredericton, because the dating pool is so small, right? StatsCan says that we're 3% to 4% of the population. Most federal departments acknowledge that we're 13% to 14% of the national population, so you're talking about minority communities, and we face very specific and unique challenges. This is a reality that people are talking about on the ground.