Evidence of meeting #42 for Status of Women in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was violence.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
NDP
Djaouida Sellah NDP Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Katz, thank you for the excellent work you are doing to prevent violence against women.
NDP
Djaouida Sellah NDP Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
I am delighted that you are contributing to our committee's work.
I would like to follow up on what Ms. Crockatt just said since she just stole my question.
I have had this experience. I can tell you that my daughters think that I am not too with it when it comes to current celebrities. One of my daughters has been dreaming of a certain celebrity ever since she found out about him. This celebrity is coming to Canada in February, and I bought tickets for my daughter so that she could go and see him. However, when I learned that my daughter's idol had been violent against women, I was reluctant for her to see him.
I heard you speak about your experience with organized sports teams. I don't naively think that you went to work with these clubs because of their masculine aspect and culture of identification, strength and challenge. We can draw a parallel with the work you are doing. With your experience, what would you do in my place, as a mother who loves her daughter? She is an adolescent, and I don't want to deprive her of seeing her idol. That is my first question.
My second question is this: do you have any suggestions for the federal government? What can we do—step by step—to raise awareness and tell people that they do not need to remain passive when a woman, child or man is attacked like this?
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
Thank you. Those are two important questions.
You probably didn't want to say the name of the artist. You don't have to, but maybe I could. This is just one parent to another, if you will. Everybody has to make decisions. I never tell people what they need to do. Everybody has to make decisions. I can just say what we do in my house. For example, I can't prevent my son from listening to certain kinds of music, and I don't want to. I don't want to be that person who says, “You can't listen”, but I can say, “In my house, you're not going to have an Eminem CD. If it comes on the radio, we are turning it off in my house because I don't appreciate this. It is abusive toward women.” I appreciate that people have the right to be artistically creative in whatever direction they want, but I have the right, in my house, to turn it off. I wouldn't pay for it. I wouldn't pay for him to go to a concert of somebody who I think is offensive in that way, and I wouldn't give him a present of a CD or whatever. He can do it on his own, but it's not going to be with my support. That's the line I would draw. Everybody has to make their own decisions.
NDP
Djaouida Sellah NDP Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
The style is not like Eminem's. He is very sentimental. That's the difference.
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
I appreciate that, but some of these sentimental people also have two sides, right?
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
I probably know who you are talking about, but we can't be perfect. We can just do what we can. These are global problems and they are trans-generational problems. We're going to live and die and they are still going to be huge problems. We just have to figure out what we can do in our time, and in our familial, professional, and political spheres of influence.
I think the federal government can do a lot. Can I just say this, because I have this opportunity? It's a great opportunity. I'll start with the United States. I think every member of Congress should be trained in all these issues. Every staff member of every member of Congress should be. It should be an expectation. If you are going to be a legislator making laws about issues like this, you need to be trained not just by hearing a briefing or reading a pile of papers, which are important, but you need to be in training.
I would also say that the connections between gender-based violence and virtually every other major social problem have been researched for decades. For example, we know there are all kinds of intersections and overlaps between issues of homelessness and domestic violence and issues of alcohol and substance abuse. Victims and perpetrators are much more likely to develop alcohol and drug addictions and other forms of self-medication against the effects of trauma. A big part of the transmission of HIV has to do with men's sexually coercive behaviours, because they refuse to wear condoms, and they pass on the virus. Their sexually coercive behaviours relate to HIV transmission. With depression, we know that perpetrators and victims have higher rates of depression.
Think of all the money the Government of Canada pays in direct and indirect costs for law enforcement, incarceration, and all of the law enforcement side of the house as well as treatment programs for alcoholism and drug addiction and the effects of secondary violence and criminality that result from some of those drug and alcohol dependencies. Think about the millions and billions of dollars that are spent every year.
By the way, one way to think about this, Madam, is that there is no peace on the streets if there's no peace at home. There is no peace in the community if there is no peace in the family. So if you want to deal, for example, with gang violence, gang violence is a big problem—
NDP
The Chair NDP Hélène LeBlanc
Thank you. I'm going to have to interrupt you. That is very good though. It gives us a lot of food for thought at the federal level.
Madam Bateman, you have four minutes.
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I am delighted to be a member of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women again.
Thank you so much, Dr. Katz. I'm so very pleased with your opening remarks and comments. I just want you to know that I represent a constituency in Winnipeg, Winnipeg South Centre, and it would be my great pleasure to work with the CFL's Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the NHL's Winnipeg Jets to be part of the solution that you propose. I so appreciate your comments about integration and integrating these concepts right into curriculum.
In your remarks, you mentioned that you didn't think this should be a separate area of study in K to 12, or indeed throughout university, but that it should be just a piece of reality that's integrated. Could you expand on how you see that happening, sir?
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
Thank you very much—and I'd love to work with the Winnipeg Jets.
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. The University of Northern Iowa, with which I've been working for a number of years, has the Center for Violence Prevention, where they've started to take some of these ideas and some of my work and my colleagues' work to a different level. They have a school of education at the University of Northern Iowa that trains lots of teachers and secondary education administrators. They've infused into the curriculum, for students who are going to become teachers, training on all this subject matter. In other words, how do you as an educator integrate prevention programming into your curricula, into your teaching, into your leadership in the school? It's also for people who are going through master's degree programs, who will become school administrators and principals at high schools and middle schools, people who will be superintendents of school districts, and people who are going through graduate training on mentoring in violence prevention, the prevention strategies, the philosophy, and other programs.
Once they become professional administrators, they won't have to just start from scratch; part of their education, part of their graduate training, will be in understanding how to integrate these ideas and pedagogies into the curriculum and into the leadership of the school. The goal of this program is to create a model that can be replicated in universities throughout the world, really, because we need to build this into the education system in a structural way, not just, as I've said, an add-on program that's in addition to the existing curriculum in the school.
Conservative
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
I appreciate that. One way is through the training of the educators on the front end before they get to the school. Another way is to build it into the curriculum itself—in other words, not just an add-on class but in health, in the social sciences, in life skills classes.
But you have to have trained people doing it. I think the problem we've seen in the world here is that the people who are trained in this area tend to be working for domestic and sexual violence programs. They get provincial funding to do educational outreach, but that tends to be inadequate when there's only one program for 50,000 students in a district. One salaried person goes around to school after school for 30 or 40 minutes and then they walk out. The resources aren't there for the ongoing educational work that needs to happen.
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
Thank you very much.
Madame la présidente, do I have a little bit more time?
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
Thank you.
Dr. Katz, please expand on your comments regarding not being a bystander. I know you were cut short in your opening remarks, and I very much would like to hear those comments.
PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies
Well, thank you. The bystander concept, if you will, really has applications at all different levels. It means that everybody in a given community needs to be part of the solution.
By the way, if you're a principal of a high school, you have an enormous platform of influence. If you don't do prevention programming for your staff, faculty, and students, and if you don't engage with various domestic and sexual violence programs in the community and have them come in and do their work, etc., then in a sense you're being a passive bystander in the face of abusive behaviour that's going on. We know that abusive behaviour, I'm sorry, is going on. We know that a number of girls in that high school have already been victimized, already have sexual abuse histories. Sometimes they're in abusive relationships in high school right now. If you are not doing anything proactively as a leader in that school community, then in a sense you're being a passive bystander.
On a micro level, if you're at a party and you're hanging out with a group of friends at university, and you see a guy you know trying to get a really drunk woman upstairs with him and you know he's going to try to have sex with her, which could very well be a rape, and you don't do anything—you know, “I'm not going to get involved in that, I'm just going to go over here”—then in a sense you're being a passive bystander in the face of potential abuse and rape. Our whole approach is that we should think about how we can do this differently. Instead of walking away and pretending it's not your issue, how can you in some fashion engage with this and interrupt this?
There are a whole bunch of strategies of what to do. We can't get into that now, but it's a sensibility. It's not just kids; it's adults. A big part of my work is working with adults. For example, there are lots of adults, in adult workplaces, who are bystanders to abusive behaviour and who don't say anything and don't do anything. Part of the reason is that they know there are consequences, potentially negative consequences, for speaking up.
So it's not just 16-year-old boys and girls who are policed into silence because of the consequences of speaking up; often adults are as well. I think we need bystander training in adult workplaces too.
NDP
The Chair NDP Hélène LeBlanc
Thank you very much, Mr. Katz.
Your testimony was passionate, fascinating and full of information. We would like to sincerely thank you for contributing to our study.
We will now suspend briefly to continue the work of the committee in camera.
[Proceedings continued in camera.]
