Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the members of the committee for inviting me to participate in this hearing.
As you heard, I'm a professor of law at the University of British Columbia and my research focuses on legal responses to violence against women, with a particular focus in recent years on sexual violence. I'm pleased to see that this committee is seriously considering how to address the problem of coercive control in intimate relationships, which is inflicted in most cases by men against women and girls.
I think it is important to note that while addressing this problem may serve to prevent further serious violence, and certainly the private member's bill in question speaks to the terrible mass killings in Nova Scotia, it's also important to understand that this coercive and controlling behaviour causes great harm to victims, affecting their sense of self-worth and throwing up real barriers to accessing the resources they need to get away from an abuser.
It's also important, and I would say this based on my own work, to recognize that coercive control may be a precursor to sexual violence in addition to or instead of physical violence. I agree with the aims of the bill, and in general I think such an offence could be useful for police and Crown counsel. I can see that this offence forms a useful middle step between an assault charge and a peace bond in some cases.
Having said that, I think it does bear saying as well that there is a history of some police and Crowns failing to use the tools they already have at their disposal, and creating one more offence will not solve the troubling tendency to disbelieve women when they report violence or the lack of other supports in the community to address the violence that they experience.
In the time remaining to me in my opening remarks, I would like to address some of the relationships and behaviour that may be overlooked when we speak of coercive control and mention a couple of features of the text of the offence that could raise concerns about whether it will achieve its important aims.
For the past several years my colleague, Isabel Grant, and I have been researching sexual violence across women's lifespans, focusing on the particular challenges that arise when prosecuting sexual assault against older women and against teenage girls, for example.
In our research we saw numerous examples of coercive control against these victims that were age-specific. For example, in our study of cases involving teenage girls we saw that the single-largest group of perpetrators were male family members, most often fathers but sometimes brothers, uncles and grandfathers. Most of these men lived with the girl in question but some did not. Controlling behaviours included controlling what a girl could wear, taking away any privacy she might have, isolating her from other family members and friends, and refusing to let her go to school or ride the bus. In one case we reviewed, a father refused to let his daughter speak to her brother, going so far as to separate them at meals so that they couldn't have contact with each other.
In the cases of older women, our primary conclusion was that the barriers to detection and prosecution when the abuser is a family member are significant. In the cases we could find we saw coercive behaviour by husbands but also sons, nephews, and grandsons. These sometimes took age-specific forms such as controlling access to necessary medication or doctor's visits or cutting the woman off from transportation so that she wasn't able to get around on her own. It also included cases of making the woman believe that she was forgetful and incompetent, that she was in the early stages of dementia and, therefore, couldn't manage her own affairs.
I want to say that while it is spousal or dating relationships that may come to mind first when we think about coercive control, I would urge the committee not to overlook these other kinds of relationships in which this behaviour also occurs and is often a precursor to other violence.
I'll conclude by saying there's a lot to discuss here in terms of the offence itself, in particular, the mental element. Fundamentally, what I would say is that it's important not to create an offence that replicates some of the problems we've had with the criminal harassment or stalking offence, and I see some of those challenges here.
I'm looking forward to discussing that more with the members of the committee.