Thank you.
Good morning, and thank you very much for the invitation to provide input on Bill C-332.
I'm joining you this morning from Treaty 7 territory here in Mohkinstsis, which is the traditional territory of the Blackfoot peoples.
I am speaking on my own behalf this morning, but some colleagues and I did file a submission with the Department of Justice for its study of coercive control in October of 2023. My co-authors are Janet Mosher, Wanda Wiegers and Shushanna Harris. I'm relying on that submission for my remarks this morning.
We argue that it is crucial for all actors in the legal system to gain a nuanced, contextual and intersectional understanding of coercive control to be able to, for example, support risk assessments and safety planning. However, we do not support the criminalization of coercive control in Bill C-332 because of problems with the current legal treatment of intimate partner violence.
We identify several concerns. I'll focus on three sets of those concerns today.
First are concerns about the current criminal legal system's handling of intimate partner violence. The current focus of the criminal law is on incidents of abuse—for example, assault—in which the seriousness of the incident is often tied to physical injury. Embedding an understanding of coercive control, which focuses on patterns rather than on incidents of abuse, poses significant challenges for police, prosecutors and judges.
Legal actors may also fail to recognize the range of coercive and controlling tactics that are influenced by systemic racism, colonialism and other systems of oppression. For example, immigration status can be used as a tool of abuse.
However, the current treatment of intimate partner violence by the criminal legal system and its actors raises concerns about their ability to gain this sort of nuanced understanding. For example, police continue to lay dual charges in intimate partner violence cases, with Black, racialized and indigenous women being disproportionately criminalized.
These problems and broader issues with systemic racism and colonialism have led many women to turn away from the criminal legal system. As I argued before this committee in 2021, we can no longer call these “unintended consequences” because we know the likelihood that they will occur.
Our second set of concerns is with respect to how coercive control is being addressed in the family law system. We're currently reviewing cases under the Divorce Act amendments from 2021, and our early review suggests several concerns.
Family law courts are struggling to understand coercive control and continue to approach allegations on an incident-focused basis. Like the criminal legal system, family courts also characterize intimate partner violence as mutual in many cases, which may minimize the harms of the violence to women and children.
Family courts have also characterized women's attempts to protect their children from violence as amounting to coercive control itself. Given the willingness of family courts to accept allegations of so-called parental alienation, this feeds into potential findings of coercive control against mothers, who risk being criminalized or facing adverse parenting outcomes.
These are examples of perpetrators manipulating the legal system against the real victims of coercive control. Unfortunately, courts are sometimes persuaded by these types of arguments because of the ongoing influence of myths and stereotypes about intimate partner violence and its victims, which is again of heightened concern for women experiencing intersecting inequalities. For example, women are often wrongly accused of making false allegations of intimate partner violence to gain a so-called upper hand in family law proceedings.
If coercive control were criminalized, yet difficult to prove, that would likely feed into these assumptions and work against women and children in parenting disputes as well as undermine their safety.
It's also important to note that coercive control is defined differently in the proposed criminal amendments from the way it is defined in the Divorce Act, which could lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
Then our third set of concerns is with respect to Bill C-332 specifically.
The provision has no explicit connection to intimate partner violence. The prohibited conduct is not defined, and it's unclear how many repetitions of behaviour are required. This vagueness is susceptible—