When I said “the backlash”, I meant that it's very clear that we are seeing increased charging. As women call the police for protection, they're increasingly likely to also be charged if they have used any kind of defensive force, so we have a large number of women in prison now who have been charged with assault in situations in which it should have been recognized that they were actually trying to defend themselves and/or their children.
I would commend to you the research of Elizabeth Comack and the work that's been done. It was argued that women are becoming equally violent, that emancipation and equality mean that women are equally violent.
When she actually looked at the statistics, just in Winnipeg alone she and her researchers found that although the charging rates were about equal, in virtually none of the cases of women who had been charged with assault did the people who were the victims require medical attention. In almost all of the cases involving the men who had been charged with assault, at least medical attention--and often hospitalization--was required. You just have to peel back that one layer of the police file and see very clearly the differential in terms of charging practices, prosecutorial practices, and, I would say, sentencing practices.
When I see a woman and a man charged.... There was another case out of Winnipeg last year or the year before. A woman was charged who had first been the victim of the man she was co-charged with. She had been lured into a situation in which she was sexually exploited. Then she had been used to lure other young women in with her. She was charged for procuring. She was charged for sexual assault. She received the same sentence as the man who had first been her victimizer--the perpetrator.
Now, I'm not suggesting that there's no accountability or agency on her part--not at all--but is there the same agency and accountability when that's the manner in which she became involved in that act? I would suggest not.
That's part of the countercharging aspect.
In terms of the management protocol, Correctional Services has said that they will end the protocol. By next month, we're supposed to have a new plan. We've urged them to actually look at some of the options, such as the Brockville treatment centre, to get the women completely out of federal corrections and out of the prisons, because the environment is such that the manner in which those four indigenous women--right now labelled under the supermax designation--are treated is worse than in the supermax special handling unit that exists in Quebec for men.
These women are escorted everywhere. They're in isolation. They're developing mental health problems. Those who had mental health problems when they came in are getting worse. The ability for those women to ever integrate back into the institution, the prison, let alone the community, is being hampered. Prison is becoming the greatest risk factor for those women and for public safety. We've argued that we should look at somewhere to get them out from under the prison setting so that they're not continually being punished for behaviour that in a mental health setting would be seen as symptomatic of the mental health label they carry and that would not necessarily be seen as something that should be punished.
I think there are many examples of things to be done. Also, Louise Arbour made many recommendations about limits to the use of segregation and the way to have correctional accountability. I would commend her comments to you.
I won't go on further.