Thank you. That's a really good and complicated question in a short amount of time.
The barriers my work looks at include the unwillingness of those in the first line of response—the police and later Crown counsel—to actually see and to recognize the experiences of women. This is my concern. I think it's very useful to look at legislation and to think about strengthening the Criminal Code, but sometimes it gives us a bit of a false sense of security because, in fact, if you have women who won't even bother to report because they feel they are going to be treated with contempt by the police and that their cases will not be properly investigated, there becomes a privatization of violence against women, the idea that it's meant to be solved by women alone, perhaps in conjunction with some community supports but that there's no state responsibility to interfere with male violence.
What needs to be underpinning all of this—these new offences and action plans—is the idea that this isn't for women to navigate on their own but that there's a state responsibility to step in and to interfere with that violence.