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—