Thank you very much.
I hope I can add a different perspective from what Jane provided, which is so compelling.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear today. I'd like to share with you some of the best practices drawn from our international programming and policy experiences. I hope these lessons will offer practical steps to help shape a comprehensive and coordinated response to any violence against women and children, including girls here in Canada.
My name is Rosemary McCarney, and I'm the president and CEO of Plan lnternational Canada. With over 75 years of experience, we're one of the world's oldest and largest international development agencies in Canada and overseas. Without political or religious affiliation, all the work we do is founded on children's rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the human rights instruments and documents in practices that exist here in Canada and overseas.
Women and men, girls and boys all have the same rights but face different obstacles in accessing them as a result of inequality. In our conversation before the committee hearings we talked about how inequality isn't working for boys and men either, and we need to address this. But the challenges faced by women and girls are unique, and girls versus women are unique. Girls require specific attention because their vulnerability stems from the fact that they're both young and female, a very dangerous intersection for girls everywhere.
As the organization behind the Because I am a Girl campaign, we welcome your decision to conduct this study, but Because I am a Girl is a global initiative for gender equality, to promote girls' power and rights so that girls themselves can lift themselves and their communities out of poverty. In Canada the campaign has inspired a movement of over one million Canadians committed to creating a safer, more prosperous world for our girls and the girls of the world.
Access to safe, quality education is central to that campaign. What gets in the way is the persistent, systemic, and endemic incidents of violence in schools and universities in Canada and around the world.
I'd like to start by highlighting a global report that we did, "A girl's right to learn without fear", which has been submitted to the committee for consideration. Together with the University of Toronto faculty of law's international human rights program, we launched this report, the Canadian edition, to bring a focus to gender-based violence in and around our schools. It sets out a global policy framework based on the experiences of best practice, good practice around the world, to end gender violence at the local and national levels.
While the report focuses on the school context, the key lesson we learned was that to be effective, efforts to address violence against girls have to be multi-sectoral and integrated. Jane said the same thing. Schools are only one of the first. Based on the experience of other countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, we found that one-off initiatives do not address a core issue: that many of the victims of violence are from marginalized and vulnerable groups and they're largely invisible or choose to remain invisible, and therefore an integrated, multi-sectoral national action plan is needed to prevent these young women from falling through the cracks.
In Canada there's a range of different types of vulnerability and forms of violence: rape, physical abuse, sexual violence, and bullying, which is amplified by the use of online social media. We know the statistics in this country, but we generalize and we're approximating because we do not have good statistical evidence in the country to be able to bring some of these issues to fruition so we can create an unassailable empirical base. But my view is we do know the statistics and we know the problems are prevalent and pervasive, so these points should not be debatable. I think that's what Jane said as well.
Through extensive research and consultation with global experts and 17 leading organizations across Canada, we put forward eight key principles that we think could guide the work of this committee. These are critical for the recommendations, because they address prevention, response, and then the provision of services. We call for a comprehensive and integrated action plan, effective legislation and regulation, safe and effective reporting for women and girls, evidence-based policy formation on a foundation of statistical evidence, well-supported and well-trained personnel, partnerships across government and local groups, across school boards, police commissions, policing, and police officers, as well as shelters and the experts who are legion across this country.
We're very pleased to see Canada addressing the problem. We certainly recognize that since 2007 about $146 million has been invested to support more than 720 community-based programs across the country. We can celebrate that, but at the same time, I urge the committee to step back from that statistic and ask if we have had a good return on investment for that. While these investments are critically important, they're uncoordinated. It's really a patchwork of initiatives and small projects that permeates this country without any cohesive, coherent approach.
I've said to media and others that depending on where you live in this country, as a young girl or as a woman you will be more or less protected, and you will have more or less access to services. It shouldn't be a matter of where you're born in Canada in terms of the level of prevention and response you receive.
While we applaud the call for a national action plan and support it, we want to ensure this plan considers the needs and rights of, and our obligations to, children, especially girls. In the call for the national action plan to end violence against women, we urge you to consider embracing that whole piece. Violence against women doesn't begin at 18, when they're legally adults. It begins very early on. It begins in the first decade of life. Our little girls across this country know very well what it is to experience gender-based violence in all of its forms.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that Canada, “Develop and implement a national strategy for the prevention of all forms of violence against all children, and allocate” resources to it. This call has been reiterated by the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children.
Furthermore, as part of the ongoing global negotiations toward the post-2015 agenda, the sustainable development goals, all countries are looking at the principle of universality. It's not good enough for us to create foreign policy with respect to the rights and obligations toward girls and women; we also have to address our national context first. That's why Plan Canada calls for a very effective consultation process to develop this national action plan to end violence against women and children. There are very important precedents for doing so.
Experience from other countries has shown that the causes and consequences are interrelated. I've found in my conversations with members of Parliament and others across Canada that often the issue of our federal system is thrown up, that it's too difficult, that the provinces have control over this and the municipalities have legislative responsibility over that, and what can the national government do?
What I'd like to bring to your attention is that we are very much behind colleagues such as those in the United Kingdom and Australia who have complex federal systems as well. ln their respective national action plans, the U.K. and Australia have articulated the respective responsibilities of various levels of government departments at different jurisdictional levels, including status of women, justice, health, and education. They've set out a strategy to support and fund front-line workers, wherever located, law enforcement agencies, teachers, health care workers, and the voluntary sector.
From their experience there's a process we can learn from to develop the plan. What those in the U.K. and our colleagues in Australia have told us is that the process of developing the plan is as important as the content of the plan. That legion of experts, of practitioners across our country, must be consulted in this. Both the U.K. and Australia have demonstrated that this process of meaningful consultation with provincial and territorial governments, aboriginal governments, and front-line service providers will, in fact, inform the substance and content that will work, but that it's an iterative process.
In both countries they have revisited. The U.K. began their process in 2010, as did the Australians, but they have revisited and redrafted, and they continue to think about these 10- and 12-year plans. They will never get it right. It will never be perfect. We learn as we go. But we need to get started, and we need to put this into writing.
On a final note, Plan is an active supporter of the Up for Debate campaign. This campaign is led by an alliance of over 100 women's organizations from across Canada. The goal of the campaign, which you'll be hearing a lot about over the coming weeks and months, is to facilitate a national debate to give party leaders the opportunity to speak directly to the issues identified by women, including violence.
In conclusion, we're a bit behind the times, but we can catch up. While our peers in the U.K. and Australia have the same jurisdictional challenges, they've already undertaken national action plans and national action consultations, and they are now implementing.
The expectations are high, for sure, on this committee, and the national action plan will need to be all of what Jane and I have said—well funded, well thought out, integrated, multi-sectoral, and have wide consultation—because violence against women and children is unjustifiable, but it's also absolutely preventable.
I look forward to your questions.
Thank you very much.