Status of Women Committee on Nov. 27th, 2014

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 38th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

I would like to let you know that the meeting will be televised by Global Network. The procedure stays the same, with the exception of Global Network being here.

We are continuing our study of promising practices to prevent violence against women. Our study proposes solutions. We are therefore in “solutions” mode or “possible solutions” mode in order to combat the scourge of violence against women, whether in Canada or abroad. I would like to remind the witnesses and the members of the committee that we are looking at promising practices.

Each witness or group of witnesses will have 10 minutes for their presentation. A period of questions will then follow.

I would like to welcome Dr. Jocelynn Cook, scientific director at the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, and Ann Decter, director, Advocacy and Public Policy at YWCA Canada. We are also pleased to welcome, by videoconference from Vancouver, Lisa Steacy, representing the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres, as well as Kasari Govender, executive director of West Coast Women's Legal Education and Action Fund.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Cook, who has 10 minutes for her presentation.

[Dr. Jocelynn Cook, Scientific Director, Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada]

Thanks for the opportunity to be here.

As introduced, I'm Jocelynn Cook. I am the scientific director for the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, which is a member-based organization of about 3,000 members, including family physicians, nurses, midwives, obstetricians, and gynecologists.

Today I'm going to talk a little bit about pregnancy and violence, and touch on postpartum mental health. I will then talk a little bit about our guidelines for intimate partner violence, which you will receive a copy of, if you haven't already, and then the role of physicians in terms of best practices for preventing violence against women.

Everybody knows that violence against pregnant women is a threat to both maternal and fetal health as well as to newborn health. It's a unique stage in women's lives where they're particularly vulnerable because of their pregnancy.

The incidence of physical abuse during pregnancy has been reported to be between 4% and 17%. The data show there can be increases or decreases in abuse during pregnancy, or it can stay the same. There are different types of abuse that can occur.

We know that the acts of violence during pregnancy tend to be recurring and tend to escalate over time.

Violence against pregnant women can cause physical and psychological harm. It can lead to pregnancy complications, morbidity, and mortality for both the mother and the baby. It can also contribute towards poor outcomes for babies.

Some of the data show that because of violence, women may have delayed or no prenatal care. We know there are negative consequences associated with that. There's an increased risk for women who experience violence to use tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs, which also have negative impacts both on pregnancy and on fetal outcome. We can have maternal death. We can have low birth weight when babies are born, and pregnancy complications such as hemorrhaging, infection, poor weight gain, miscarriage, pre-term birth, and small babies. There can also be antenatal violence, which also has implications.

There are a number of studies, not a lot, but there are a few studies, that show a relationship between violence and postpartum mental health, which I think is really important to touch on.

We know that violence increases the risk of postpartum depression, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, and other forms of psychosis. These data have been established.

The data also show that women who experienced violence before or during pregnancy reported higher levels of postpartum mental health problems. As the number of types of violence increased, so did the negative effects on postpartum mental health. Psychological violence, physical violence, and emotional violence increased the negative effects.

Mental health problems have also been shown to be associated with early breastfeeding discontinuation, bonding impairment between mother and babe, fewer positive parenting behaviours, substance abuse, self-harm, and some of the other indications of which you are probably all aware that are specific to women and which we touched on earlier.

With regard to physicians and violence against women, what is their role, and what can they do in terms of improving outcomes for women and their babies?

We know that approximately only 3% of incidents of violence against pregnant women are identified by primary care physicians. That's not a high proportion. We also know that even fewer cases are identified by obstetricians and gynecologists.

It's probably very important, and even essential, for physicians to become adept at identifying women who might be at risk of experiencing violence or abuse during their lives, as well as during pregnancy and the postpartum period. It's important for them to create an environment where it's safe for women to talk about their situations, so that the physicians can really start to understand the complexity of the environment in which they are living, and so that they can refer them for effective treatment and intervention.

Something that's really important is that routine perinatal care visits really offer excellent opportunities for health care providers to screen, to talk to women, to build those relationships, and to start to refer them to effective interventions and put into place and implement best practices for talking to women about complex issues related to lifestyle and behaviour, but also related to pregnancy.

What can we do in terms of better understanding the impacts of violence and abuse during pregnancy in the postnatal period, in this unique period? How can we better improve outcomes for women and their children?

The SOGC guidelines suggest that it's very important, as you might imagine, for health providers to create that safe environment, to really understand the context in which women are living, understand the linkages to the social determinants of health and the implications, and how those very specific contexts and situations that women are in with their children or during their pregnancy.... What are some of the best options for interventions, for referral, to keep women and their babies safe?

We know that knowledge of whether women have actually experienced abuse will help to target as well those very important postpartum mental health interventions, which are really critical. There is research that examines the long-term impact of violence and abuse on maternal and child health, but we really need to bolster that research, have nice longitudinal studies where we can look at the specifics of situations of violence and then look at best effective practices that come out of that that improve outcomes.

There is some really exciting emerging data—and I'm a scientist, so forgive me for getting excited about this—that show that environmental factors, including stress and nutrition, can affect a woman's brain. Those brain changes can be passed on to future generations and could possibly cause children later in life to become more susceptible to insults—toxicological insults, physiological insults—potentially to an increased mental health risk. That's called epigenetics, when things in the environment can change the actual genes that can be passed on to future generations. We need to better understand that. We need to better understand what's happening during the perinatal period that can affect child development later in life as well.

We need to develop, implement, and evaluate strategies to reduce violence during the perinatal period. Right now, with the information and best practices in the evaluation of those practices, it's difficult to determine during the post-pregnancy and the postpartum period which interventions should really be pinpointed. Again, as you can imagine, it really depends on the situation that the woman is living in. It depends on the resources that are available. It depends on that whole complex context.

We really need more information from well-conducted studies that determine the optimal interventions. It's also very important for our organization to recognize the impact that violence and abuse have on pregnant women and their babies, their fetuses, and all the outcomes, and to work together to help to create knowledge opportunities for health care providers, to help them understand what resources are out there, where they can refer women, and really help facilitate and advocate through that health system. I think that's really important. We as an organization are thinking about helping to create some of those learning opportunities for our members that cross the health sectors that deal with perinatal health.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Dr. Cook. Your presentation was very interesting.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Decter, from YWCA Canada.

Ms. Decter, you have 10 minutes.

[Ann Decter, Director, Advocacy and Public Policy, YWCA Canada]

Thank you.

Much has changed since male MPs responded with laughter and derision when MP Margaret Mitchell stood in the House of Commons in the early 1980s to demand that the government take action to stop domestic violence. Nevertheless, 25 years after the murders at l'École Polytechnique, with much good work accomplished, the issue of violence against women and girls is still very much with us.

Thank you for looking again at this issue and for including YWCA Canada in this discussion.

In a year that has been flooded with news of violence, we know that urgent action is needed on prevention. Across most of the country, there is a mature social service system that responds to women escaping violence. From single safe houses established by feminist activists in the 1970s, we now have networks of shelters for abused women offering a range of support serving most of Canada's population.

These have proven to be a very successful practice in addressing violence against women and need to be maintained. There are gaps in the access to shelter that need to be addressed to prevent recurring violence. Shelter access is inadequate for women in the northern territories, for rural women, for deaf women and women with disabilities, for first nations, Métis, and Inuit women, and for women from Canada's wide range of cultural communities. Expanding shelters and ensuring that shelters have appropriate services to close these gaps is a promising practice.

In particular, access to this successful practice needs to be expanded for abused women with mental health and addiction issues. Shelters have begun to adapt successfully to serve this population by adopting a clear conceptual approach committed to serving all women, including women struggling with complex issues. This shift in model also shifts ways of working to a harm-reduction approach encompassing, among other changes, working comfortably in a grey zone guided by circumstances and the needs of women and children, rather than by set rules and procedures, saying yes rather than no as often as possible, and understanding and implementing a trauma-informed approach to work.

These practices are documented in YWCA Canada's March 2014 study “Saying Yes” and in BC Society of Transition Houses' reducing barriers research and training. More shelters are eager to adopt these approaches, and training in these promising practices is in need of funding.

The provincial, territorial, and national associations of shelters and transition houses facilitate research, training, innovation, policy development, and knowledge exchange. These associations are best practices in preventing violence against women and should be supported by the government.

Safe lives post-shelter require ensuring that women have access to safe, affordable, and permanent homes, quality child care, and adequate incomes. YWCA Canada's research with women in shelters revealed that what happens when women leave the shelter is essential to preventing women from facing further abuse. Nine out of ten women leaving the shelter do not plan to return to their spouses, but four out of ten do not know where they will live.

Of the over 200,000 people estimated to be homeless in Canada, about half are women. Violence, combined with poverty, is the major driver of women's homelessness, and homeless women are highly vulnerable to violence. Preventing violence requires preventing women's homelessness.

Women leaving shelters need access to permanent affordable housing. There are a wide variety of successful practices that should be pursued to increase women's access to affordable housing, including prioritizing women's access to social housing, rent control, rent subsidies, seeding non-profits to create housing, requiring affordable housing units in all housing developments, and direct development of social housing by government.

Where it is safe to do so, women who have experienced violence should retain possession of the home, and men who perpetrate violence should be required to find new housing. This is a promising practice in place in some Canadian jurisdictions. In Manitoba, the Residential Tenancies Act was amended to permit women to terminate rental leases when the residence becomes unsafe due to domestic violence.

The streets are not safe for women, and women hide their homelessness. The wholesale shift of Homelessness Partnering Secretariat funding to the Housing First model with access criteria based on chronic and episodic homelessness needs to be accompanied by a deliberate strategy to connect women generally, and women in shelters for abused women in particular. YWCA Calgary's community house is a promising practice for this, and My Sister's Place in London has a pilot project for a model as well.

Mothers who have left abusive spouses need access to the workforce. Affordable, quality child care allows mothers to support themselves and their children through employment.

Research on Quebec's low-cost, broad-based child care system confirms that child care dramatically increases single mothers' access to employment. Based on the Quebec experience, it is hard to overstate the positive impact of widespread access to low-cost child care on women raising children on their own.

Between 1996, when low-cost child care was introduced in Quebec, and 2008, the number of single mothers on social assistance was reduced by more than half, from 99,000 to 45,000. The after-tax median income of single mothers rose by 81%. Poverty rates for single parent families headed by women declined from 36% to 22%, from more than a third to less than a quarter. Low-cost, affordable child care is a proven practice for preventing violence against women.

To prevent violence or a return to violence, women need an adequate standard of living. Income support and social assistance levels need to keep women and children out of poverty, not in it. Child support payments for children when their mother is on social assistance should not be deducted from the mother's social assistance income. A court case on this has been launched in British Columbia. Eliminating this practice across the country would be a promising practice.

Sexual assault centres are an excellent and long-established practice supporting women who have experienced sexual violence. Their role in preventing violence has long been undervalued. Research shows that there are 460,000 sexual assaults annually in this country: for every 1,000 assaults, 33 are reported to the police, 29 are recorded as a crime, twelve have charges laid, six are prosecuted, and three are convicted. Many of these women receive the support of sexual assault centres.

For the past month, we've witnessed women speaking out on their experiences of sexual violence. Women speaking out need to feel that police forces and court systems will respond fully and supportively to the crimes committed. Police and court systems must begin to work better for the women who have experienced violence than for the men who have committed it. Access to justice is an issue for all women who experience violence. Women who access shelters often face a variety of legal processes without access to counsel due to limitations on legal aid. Lack of access to justice is particularly acute for indigenous women.

YWCA Canada's two-year building capacity project provided training on legal information for violence services workers aimed at increasing access to justice for aboriginal women dealing with violence. As well, the website vawlawinfo.ca houses the training materials from this project. The Nunavut violence services legal information manual, in English and in Inuktitut, explains Nunavut's Family Abuse Intervention Act to the workers for the first time.

Legal information training for violence services staff is a promising practice, and funding is needed to continue training. We recommend to the committee the work of Luke's Place in Ontario, lawyer Pamela Cross, and the Ontario government court worker program.

Reducing violence against indigenous women must be a priority in preventing violence. Recent reports on the low incidence of grants from Status of Women Canada for projects focused on aboriginal women suggest strongly that Status of Women Canada should adopt the practice of issuing calls for proposals with a specific focus on aboriginal women. Funding where the need is greatest has always been a rewarding practice.

Changing the behaviour of men and boys is essential to the long-term prevention of violence against women and girls. At YWCA Canada, we are hopeful that these days of brutal revelations and women breaking silence will constitute a changed moment in the long struggle to end violence against women and girls. When men in leadership stand up in public to say that violence against women is not okay, they increase the momentum for change and stem the tide of sexist backlash.

This week, along with the launch of our annual rose campaign to end violence against women and girls, we launched a new initiative, #NOTokay, intended to reach the general public. To prevent violence against women and girls, we need the kind of societal shift in attitude that happened with drinking and driving and with smoking in public places. Long-term public awareness campaigns were essential to making those changes, and they will be essential to preventing violence.

The websites notokay.ca and pascorrect.ca went live this week, and the distinctive red X logo spread across social media sites. We are hopeful that it will join the many campaigns bringing awareness to this issue with the message that when people think something is not okay, it's time to say it's not okay.

To address these gaps, to coordinate policies and services across jurisdictions, to continue to move forward towards safer lives, and to prevent, reduce, and eventually end violence, Canada needs to develop a national action plan on violence against women. That must begin with a national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you, Ms. Decter.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Steacy, for 10 minutes.

[Lisa Steacy, Representative, Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres]

First I would like to thank the committee for inviting the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres/L'Association canadienne des centres contre les agressions à caractère sexuel, which I'll refer to as CASAC, to present today.

Founded in 1975, CASAC member centres continue to provide front-line crisis support and intervention to women who have experienced men's violence, from Halifax to Vancouver, in English and French, in urban centres and rural communities.

One of the crucial functions of CASAC is to speak publicly for the thousands of women who tell us their stories on confidential phone lines. Every woman who calls a CASAC centre takes the risk of speaking honestly and deliberately about the violence she has experienced. I would be doing these women a disservice if I did not speak similarly here today.

Any discussion of promising practices to prevent violence against women requires an honest and deliberate definition of what exactly we are trying to prevent. The phrase “violence against women” elides a fact that must be central to this study, namely that men are responsible for the continued rape, battering, harassment, incest, and prostitution of women.

December 6 this year will mark 25 years since 14 women at L'École Polytechnique were separated from male teachers and peers and then gunned down by one man specifically because they were women. There is still no public or private place in Canada, other than rape crisis centres and transition houses, in which women are completely safe or free from the threat of men's violence.

Battering husbands or ex-husbands in B.C. have been responsible for attempting to murder women, and in some cases their children, in their homes on 17 separate occasions so far this year.

In May, the RCMP confirmed 1,181 cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women, deaths and disappearances for which men were overwhelmingly responsible. Since then, men's lethally sexist and racist attacks on aboriginal women have continued unabated. We know that at least Rinelle Harper in Winnipeg and Marlene Bird in Saskatchewan were sexually assaulted, brutally beaten, and left for dead by small groups of men in public places.

In February, at least two male athletes and students from the University of Ottawa's hockey team raped a young woman in Thunder Bay. Last year female students at UBC and St. Mary's were oriented to their university experience with male-led chants promoting their rape.

Rehtaeh Parsons was raped by young men, and young men continue to attack her by creating and distributing pornographic images of that rape.

The buyers of sex who will soon be criminalized by Bill C-36 for the exploitation of women in prostitution in brothels and on the streets are overwhelmingly men.

More than 330 women RCMP officers and employees have exposed that they were systematically sexually harassed on the job by their male colleagues.

Women have come forward and gone on the record to say that CBC's Jian Ghomeshi used his power and status to attack a number of women he worked with and dated.

These recent and highly publicized cases of men's violence against women echo what we hear when we respond to women who call the crisis lines, from the women who reveal and resist the routine and myriad acts of violence that enforce and exploit women's unequal civic, political, economic, and social power in relation to men. The inequalities of poverty and racism further compound the vulnerability to and effects of men's violence on impoverished women, women of colour, and aboriginal women.

If any practice or policy to prevent violence against women is to be truly promising, it must be grounded in and tested against the promise of women's right to be free from all forms of sexist discrimination and violence. This promise is enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and articulated in international instruments, including CEDAW, to which Canada is a signatory.

I'll take today's opportunity to reiterate two of the elements of policy change on violence against women that CASAC has advocated for, for decades: first, the responsibility of the criminal justice system to prevent and respond to men's violence, and second, the need for the government to invest in and actively and respectfully consult with the independent women's movement.

Since CASAC is a coalition of rape crisis centres and time is limited, I'll focus on criminal law responses to sexual assaults.

Past improvements to Canada's criminal laws and policy on sexual assaults have been made because of the demands of women and women's groups that criminal law protect their right to equality by preventing and sanctioning the violence that is perpetrated by men against them. Two examples of the hard-won achievements are the criminalization of rape in marriage in the Criminal Code and Supreme Court articulations of the legal obligation to obtain explicit and ongoing consent to sexual activity.

Sexual assault is a deeply gendered crime. Women are the most likely victims of this crime and the least likely to commit it. The criminal justice response to sexual assault is abysmal. Only 0.3% of rapes committed result in a criminal conviction. Statistically speaking, the criminal justice response to rape is one of virtual impunity.

Since the 1970s the statistic that 70% of women who report all forms of sexist violence to front-line anti-violence workers do not engage the police has remained steady. Less than 10% of sexual assaults are reported to the police. Several of the cases that I mentioned earlier have fiercely reignited a public discussion of and debate about the way that the criminal justice system routinely fails women who have been raped. The hashtag “been raped never reported” allowed women to say on social media what rape crisis workers and raped women have known and said publicly and privately for years: women do not and cannot rely on Canadian authorities to live up to their responsibility to enforce the laws that criminalize sexual assaults and violence against women.

In the Ghomeshi case, women came out in a significant number to expose the actions of a violent man and to explain why they did not report these attacks to the police. A tremendous amount of media attention was paid and in turn public pressure was exerted. Feminists reiterated our criticism of the failures to apply criminal law to levy consequences against men in cases of violence against women. Yesterday Jian Ghomeshi was arrested for and charged with several counts of sexual assault and one count of choking a woman. This demonstrates that when there's substantial political will, police and the criminal justice system can and do have the power to swiftly investigate and lay charges when a man attacks a woman.

Rehtaeh Parsons reported her rape to the police before it was public knowledge and national news. After her suicide, pressure from her grieving parents and an outraged public, including feminists, for a response from the criminal justice system mounted. Earlier this week two young men pleaded guilty to charges of making and distributing child pornography in that case. The creation and distribution of the images of her attack have been acknowledged as a crime. No one has been charged with the attack itself.

Rape is ultimately the responsibility of the men who commit it. The inadequacy of the criminal justice system's response to sexual assault provides one stark example of the systemic failure to adequately prevent and respond to the injustices committed against women, both individually and collectively. Criminal laws contain the promise that men will be held accountable for the violence that they commit. Accountability through assiduous application of existing criminal law would demonstrate that the government is committed to preventing the rampant continuation of these crimes.

CASAC research has shown that when a woman is provided with information, accompaniment, and advocacy from a rape crisis centre, her slim chances of having a proper police investigation done and charges laid increase.

Rape crisis centres in Canada were formed in a period when women across the country were uniting to challenge and transform the status quo of women's lives. They were established in the 1970s with, by, and for women of different ages, races, classes, and backgrounds who were taking direct action against men's violence. Rape crisis centres have received no operational funding from the federal government. In British Columbia, where I live and work, no rape crisis centre, including the one I answer the lines at, receives operational funds from the provincial government.

The increased impoverishment of women and the systematic dismantling of social welfare systems means that the remaining unfunded independent women's centres are pressured to tend to all the effects of women's desperate inequality, including hunger, homelessness, addiction, and mental health. Yet CASAC centres continue to connect women to the meagre supports to which they are entitled, to services, and to each other. They connect women's experiences of and responses to men's violence to advocacy campaigns for specific reforms and systemic social change locally, provincially, and nationally.

In 2012, the largest ever global study on violence against women concluded:

The autonomous mobilization of feminists in domestic and transnational contexts—not leftist parties, women in government or national wealth—is the critical factor accounting for policy change.

The development of policy and practices to prevent violence against women will be ineffective without a substantial investment in and incomplete without an active and respectful consultation with the independent women's movement.

The piecemeal projects proffered and funding promised so far in these hearings by the federal government are not an adequate substitute for a substantive and sustained commitment from all departments at all levels of government to preventing and eliminating women's civil, economic, social, and political inequality.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Ms. Steacy.

Now, Mrs. Govender, for 10 minutes.

[Kasari Govender, Executive Director, West Coast Women's Legal Education and Action Fund]

Thank you for having me here today. I'm pleased to be here to talk about best practices and preventing violence against women.

As you know, I am the executive director of West Coast LEAF. West Coast LEAF works to achieve equality by changing historic patterns of systemic discrimination against women through B.C.-based equality rights litigation, law reform, and public legal education.

Personally, my expertise is in women's substantive equality and constitutional law. I mention that because I'm happy to answer questions of a legal nature and I'll speak to that perspective today.

I want to start by talking about what I think is the beginning point of this conversation about solutions. Violence against women is inherently gendered. We cannot understand violence against women, or prevent it, without understanding that at its root it is about sexism and power imbalances in society between men and women but also imbalances based on race, disability, indigeneity, place of origin, and economic status.

lt is absolutely vital to understand that violence against women is a manifestation of women's inequality. On average, every six days a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. Half of all women in Canada have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16. Eighty-three per cent of all police-reported domestic assaults are against women. Women are three times as likely to experience serious violence such as choking, beating, being threatened with a knife or gun, and sexual violence. This is not a matter of men behaving badly; this is sociological phenomenon and it requires a systemic and systematic solution.

While we know that reducing violence against women entails social change, law has an important role to play in manifesting and creating that change. Our Constitution guarantees equality both before and under the law, including on the basis of sex, and guarantees security of the person equally between men and women. This means that the government has an obligation to ensure that its laws and policies at the very least do not perpetuate inequality or violence, and do not act as obstacles for women seeking to leave an abusive relationship. Yet, there are many laws and policies that do just that.

It was hard to decide how to prioritize which laws and policies I wanted to speak to today, but l am going to speak in some detail about the ways in which recent changes to immigration and refugee law impede a woman's ability to leave an abusive relationship safely. Women are most at risk when they leave relationships. In fact, nearly 60% of all dating violence happens after the woman has broken off the relationship, and 25% of all women who are murdered by their spouse had left the relationship already. Creating safe conditions in which women do not fear for their safety, fear for their children's safety, fear that they will be deported, that they will be homeless, or that they will lose custody of their children is absolutely essential to the prevention of violence. Best practices show us this.

There are a number of recent immigration law and policy changes that place women at risk. In looking at best practices, these changes are clearly worst practices and must be reversed. Let's start with the safe countries of origin scheme. The designated countries of origin, the DCO list, is a list of 35 countries that Canada has deemed to be safe countries for refugees. ln cases where a claimant comes from one of these designated countries, her process is fast-tracked, which cuts the time that she has to prepare for a hearing in half and compromises the claimant's ability to gather evidence and prove her claim. A claimant in this circumstance is also denied eligibility for certain procedural protections, such as access to an appeals process, which are afforded to claimants under the regular system and are essential to ensure procedural fairness in an administrative law process.

Under the DCO scheme, the minister has sole discretion to designate a country as safe. The minister considers rejection and abandonment rates of claims from the country in question, as well as the country's governmental and judicial institutions, but does not consult with human rights experts.

The DCO places women at risk. For example, violence against women is a massive problem in Mexico, and its legal structure is insufficient to keep women safe, as recognized in the 2014 world report of Human Rights Watch. For example, they have laws that make the severity of punishments for some sexual offenses contingent upon the chastity of the victim, which contradicts international standards, and similar standards have been condemned by Canadian courts as contrary to the rights of women. While Mexico has been designated as a DCO, it is dearly an unsafe situation for women experiencing violence in that country. A woman fleeing violence to Canada will face minimal procedural protections, no right of appeal, and little time to prepare for her hearing, all because Mexico is a democratic country and Mexican refugees face a high rate of rejection by our refugee determination process. The DCO list clearly puts women at risk of greater violence.

This practice of designating safe third world countries should be discontinued for all women making gender-based discrimination claims. At the very least it must have a more accountable form of decision-making for who does the designating of the country as safe. It must include an examination of the record of that country on how it deals with violence against women.

Turning to conditional permanent residency, a change that was made in October 2012, the federal government amended Canada's immigration regulations by introducing the status of conditional permanent resident for spouses. Spouses must, as a condition of this permanent resident status, cohabit continuously in a conjugal relationship with their spouse for a period of two years after they receive their permanent residency, except where the sponsoring spouse engages in abusive or neglectful behaviour, or if the spouse is deceased.

This exception for violence is not sufficient. The threat of deportation has been consistently documented as a tool used by abusers to keep their victims quiet about their violence. Making permanent residence conditional puts vulnerable women and children at greater risk of abuse by creating barriers for a woman to leave that relationship.

Tying immigration status to remaining in a spousal relationship poses a number of possible risks to vulnerable groups even with this exemption. For example, women with language and cultural barriers may not understand that there is an exception, and the exception is not broadly publicized. Abusers can use the threat of deportation to keep a woman from leaving. Abusers can threaten to tell the immigration officer that the woman is lying about the abuse, or that their whole relationship is a fraud. Many women aren't willing to take the risk. They will lose their status given that there is no guarantee that a CIC officer will agree that they fit within the exception.

It is clear that this policy puts women at risk by undermining their ability to leave an abusive relationship, and it must be repealed.

I want to flag a number of points for follow-up questions. I won't go into them in a lot of depth.

The first is economic security. Others have already spoken about this here today. Women face significant obstacles in leaving relationships because of a lack of economic security. In various places across our country, there has been success in providing a safety net for women leaving relationships through the provision of legal aid, day care, housing security, and sufficient income security. In other places there are significant gaps in services such as the significant gap in legal aid in B.C. There are no national standards in these areas to ensure that women are able to be financially independent enough to leave an abusive relationship and support themselves and their children while dealing with the fallout of a relationship breakdown.

For example, federal transfer payments are no longer regulated so that they go to legal aid. They're no longer tied to legal aid as the federal government used to do. This would help to ensure that women had access to a lawyer to deal with custody, access, child support, and property division. If they knew they had access to a lawyer, or housing, or employment, they would be more supported in leaving.

I want to make a brief point about education. It's clear from the recent national dialogue about sexual violence that many Canadians do not understand the law of consent to sexual activity, nor is there widespread understanding of the power dynamics in which sexual violence flourishes. It is vital that this education happen early in life, that it be based on the understanding of the power and balances in gender dynamics and the underlying violence against women, and that it occur comprehensively in schools across the country.

At West Coast LEAF we see first hand the light bulbs go off for young people when we deliver our program called No Means No. This is a workshop for grades seven to nine on sexual consent and the legal rights and obligation that young people and adults have in intimate relationships.

I want to talk briefly about cybermisogyny and the cyberbullying of women and girls which we think is important to understand from the context of gender. Earlier this year, we released a report called “#CyberMisogyny: Using and strengthening Canadian legal responses to gendered hate and harassment online“. We did this project in response to both the number of high-profile and tragic cases of girls and young women facing online abuse and the more invisible, but increasingly common cases of what are called revenge porn sites, the sharing of intimate images without consent, cyberstalking, and online hate speech.

In this report we make a number of recommendations to government and—

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Mrs. Govender, I would ask you to briefly conclude, and we will start with the questions.

[Kasari Govender]

I will for sure. I'm sorry. I'm on my last paragraph here.

In this report we make a number of recommendations to government, including the creation of a new office independent of government, but focused within the federal ministry of the Status of Women to conduct research, to facilitate dialogue, and to make recommendations to government about appropriate legal responses to the challenges of protecting and promoting the equality of women and girls and other vulnerable communities online.

Thank you for your time today. I am happy to answer questions.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

We will now move to questions from members of the committee.

Ms. Truppe, the floor is yours. You have seven minutes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Welcome and thank you for being here and giving us your feedback.

I have a few questions, perhaps for each of you, depending on how our time goes; it always goes so quickly.

I'll start with Ann from the YWCA.

The whole premise of this study is for us to get best practices and promising practices from things that are being done that would be very helpful to other groups or communities across Canada that aren't aware of them. That is why we are trying to get some. I didn't hear a lot from the YWCA, and I know they are such a great organization and are well known across Canada. I was just wondering if there is anything the YWCA has done that you would like to include as a best practice, something you think is such a great thing that would help women and girls that you would like to share it.

[Ann Decter]

Certainly there is the research we got from the “Saying Yes” report, the subtitle of which is “Effective Practices in Sheltering Women with Mental Health and Addiction Issues”. What we're hearing in some of the provinces—not all of them and not so much in the Prairies—is that shelters are seeing more and more abused women with mental health and addiction issues coming to their door. A greater percentage of the women who are coming are those women, and fewer of them are coming directly from domestic violence incidents. There is a strong appetite for increased skills and training around how to deal with that. The report “Saying Yes” lists a number of practices that can help a shelter shift to the model.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Are those in that report?

[Ann Decter]

Yes. I can send you the full report or the executive summary, whichever you like.

Also, BC Society of Transition Houses has been doing research and training in this area for a while. There's really a strong appetite for training and a really a lack of funding to get it there.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

So, training is huge.

[Ann Decter]

Yes. It's training on dealing with those women and supporting them.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Are you familiar with Power of Being a Girl?

[Ann Decter]

I am. Power of Being a Girl is one of our programs. It's an empowerment conference for young girls of, I think, mid-school years. We run it across the country during Week Without Violence. We do consider it a very successful practice for really empowering girls so they can lead in their own lives.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Empowering is very important. I know at Status of Women we've done many things to try to empower young girls, because that has to start at a young age.

[Ann Decter]

Absolutely.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Is there something that came out of this conference that you would like to share which again would help someone else who wants to empower young girls?

[Ann Decter]

It's actually an annual conference that many of our YWCAs run locally. We have a whole tool kit on how to do it, which we are happy to share with anyone at all, really.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Perfect. Thank you very much.

My next question is for Lisa from the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres.

One of the goals of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres is to work for the prevention and the eradication of sexual assault. From everything you've done, is there a best practice you would like to share?

[Lisa Steacy]

I think the most effective force for ensuring that the government meets its responsibility to prevent and eradicate sexual assault is the very existence of sexual assault centres. What we provide every day, 24 hours a day, and have consistently provided since the 1970s is independent accompaniment, advocacy, and information.

I know that recently with sexual assault cases in the news, there's been a lot of discussion about inventing programs, services, or practices to prepare women for what they're going to go through if they report to the police, if the case goes to court. That's something that rape crisis centres are very, very good at and have been doing for a very long time.