Status of Women Committee on Oct. 5th, 2016

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Wonderful. That's your time.

I think we have enough time to do five more minutes.

Ms. Harder, it's to you.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Adam, this question goes to you.

You outlined four recommendations for us as legislators, changes that could be made to ease your work as police. I'm wondering if you can break this down a little further in terms of where we go from here. As legislators, we certainly want to see action taken rather than just writing a theoretical report.

If you could break it down and give a fairly detailed yet simplistic understanding—because we only have maybe four minutes left—of the changes that could be made that would assist police across Canada in doing their job more effectively in this regard, that would be a huge benefit to us today.

[C/Supt Jeffery Adam]

First and easiest is the crafting of a reasonable law to allow us to access basic subscriber information on a timely basis where there is limited or no reasonable expectation of privacy. That was R. v. Spencer.

The second one is the resolution passed by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police that would compel the production of a password or a pass phrase to unlock the device or the data held by somebody who is charged with an offence. That would be issued under judicial authorization. It's not a police tool. It would be the judge who would order the unlocking of that device to gain access to the data—the evidence.

On data retention, we need some form of regulation that requires our telecommunication services providers to retain, for maybe two years, the key metadata that would allow us to track a transmission under lawful authority.

Lastly, in an uncomplicated fashion, maybe some re-crafting of the MLAT process, that a warrant issued lawfully under a judge in one entrusted country—the Five Eyes, for example—be equally valid in another, if backed by the jurisdiction in which it would be served.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you very much.

I understand that is very simple, but at least it helps us.

If you were to recommend another witness to bring to the table to further discuss the points you brought up today, would you be able to give us a recommendation?

[C/Supt Jeffery Adam]

There are a wide variety of people I could suggest.

I'm not sure which direction you would go, because I'm kind of “that” representative. It would be very similar.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

You've given us four points here, which I think are very, very good points and something we need to further explore.

If it wouldn't be too much work for you—it would certainly be beneficial to us—would we be able to request that you throw us a list of a number of people you feel would be experts and able to speak to the recommendations you've outlined today?

[C/Supt Jeffery Adam]

I will make every effort.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

That would be awesome.

Thank you very much, Mr. Adam.

Do I still have a minute?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

You don't have to use it, if you don't want to.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Honestly, I'll finish by saying thank you. Each of you has provided us with some very beneficial information today. You came to the table prepared to assist us as legislators, and we certainly appreciate that.

This is something that is very dear to our hearts, something we're very passionate about, taking a stand for women in Canada and making sure they're protected against violence. You're helping to equip us to make the legislative changes that are going to make that a reality.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent. I think that was very well said. We certainly do appreciate your expertise and your sharing it with us.

We're going to suspend at this time for two minutes, so that we can set up the next panel discussion.

Thank you for your participation. We'll be back in two.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I call the meeting back to order.

We're excited to have with us, from Washington, D.C., by video conference, Soraya Chemaly, who is with the Women's Media Center. She is the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project there.

Welcome. We look forward to hearing your opening remarks, for ten minutes.

[Soraya Chemaly, Director, Women's Media Centre Speech Project, Women's Media Centre]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Soraya Chemaly, and I am the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project. Our work is focused on curbing online abuse and on expanding freedom of expression. To that end, we work with technology companies, civil society advocates, and legislators who are, together, trying to end gender-based and intersectional violence. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today about this important topic.

I know that you recently heard from West Coast LEAF. The work they do has been valuable for raising awareness about the scope of online harassment, which really is an anodyne expression for a complex spectrum of malicious behaviours. To reiterate what Kendra said, we believe that online harassment is really inseparable from offline violence, so much so that the taxonomy we developed, which I'm happy to share with anyone if you are interested, is based on the domestic violence Duluth model, which talks very much about power and control.

As the last speaker here today on this topic, I believe, I would like to focus with some granularity on the costs of this harassment, which are often minimized. This impedes our ability to develop effective legal, social, and technical solutions.

First of all, I can't really stress enough that this harassment exacts a very steep tax on girls' and women's freedom of expression and on our civic and political participation. It is a form of direct resistence to girls' and women's parity participation in the public sphere and needs to be recognized as such.

Women's artistic, creative, and political speech is routinely challenged by individuals and by mobs but, importantly, is also challenged institutionally in ways I'll touch on. It is sort of moderated off of platforms.

According to global studies, one in five girls and women feel that the Internet is an inappropriate space for them. When other women, girls, and boys witness this public harassment or surveillance, denigration, shaming, and objectification of women, they learn that public space is really not for girls and women.

Women in all areas and stages of electoral politics, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, face pervasive hostility online, including, in some countries, electronically enabled sextortion by members of their own parties, and, almost uniformly, pornification. Women who watch this harassment step away from political participation when they do.

Similarly, women journalists are among the most common targets of harassment. I came to do this work as a writer. Almost immediately upon engaging in social media, the harassment I encountered was very jarring. It was very explicit and violent.

Safety and preventing violence have to be central concerns in this conversation, but the danger of focusing on them solely is that we risk defaulting to paternalistic solutions and approaches that tend to ignore women's freedom of expression.

In the case of public figures, those we are most likely to hear about in the media, anonymity is often cited as the culprit. However, anonymity is not the main problem, and in fact, it can be a dangerous red herring. It is not a factor in the majority of cases of violence that involve women, as is the case offline. Women are harassed online, as are girls, by people they know, including school peers, acquaintances, intimate partners, neighbours, former intimate partners, employers, and in some communities, family, religious, and political authorities. In many cases, anonymity is vital and provides privacy and protection to people who might not otherwise engage.

From a bird's-eye view, the harassment women face online is predictable in that it's just the most recent manifestation of the age-old hostility to women entering traditionally male-dominated spaces. It is, indeed, a digital corollary today to street harassment.

Frankly speaking, it's redundant to use the words “male dominated” when referring to virtually any public sector. Online or off, for example, women in the STEM fields, finance, politics, and sports experience high rates of sexual harassment and resistance to parity participation. This is particularly consequential, however, in the tech sector, not only in terms of women being harassed in these spaces but also in terms of how products are designed and built and how policies are developed in response. For example, there are online harassment tactics that do not violate laws and should not violate laws, but they do violate the terms of service and user guidelines of particularly influential platforms.

Many private platforms, which now have more “citizens” than some countries, are regulating speech and deciding what constitutes safety, violence, threat, morality, and harm every minute of every day. I therefore include in the definition of “harassment” the industry's lack of diversity, moderation policies, and its algorithmic unaccountability.

Second, harassment effectively leverages both women's necessary hypervigilance and societal tolerance for violence that is gender-based, as well as the law's inability to recognize emotional and psychological harms as legitimate. Women do have concerns about their physical safety and the safety of their immediate families, but they also report tremendous and sometimes debilitating psychological distress, anxiety, depression, anger, and post-traumatic stress. Women also incur much higher financial costs related to staying safe. They pay for insurance, therapists, reputation managers, higher travel costs, and other associated expenses.

Third, abuse and its threat limit women's social, educational, professional, and economic opportunities. Threats to women's ability to earn a living are particularly evident when abuse is part of ongoing intimate partner violence and acquaintance abuse, such as stalking or incidents of non-consensual revenge porn. This harassment also inhibits girls' and women's ability in emerging markets and in new sectors of the economy to take advantage of economic opportunities that we know exist.

I am often asked: Why focus on women? Isn't everyone harassed? This is true, and everybody is and can be harassed. But the harassment that girls and women face online is almost always intersectional, which means it's much more likely to occur. Gender is coupled with race, religion, class, ethnicity, disability, and gender identity, making it more likely that women are targeted. In the same way that Muslim women bear the brunt of lslamophobic violence because they are both women and Muslim, women online bear the brunt of intersectional abuse. Many responses to the problem of harassment and hate ignore this reality, so we don't actually end up with solutions that apply to women in the end.

Girls and women are also the majority of targets of the most severe forms of online assault: mass public shaming, mob attacks, rape videos, extortion and doxing, non-consensual sexualization, stalking, and electronically enhanced surveillance. Harassers derive power from the historical fact that women continue to live with sexist and patriarchal norms of all kinds. They count, for example, on women being judged for their sexual behaviour and humiliated, shamed, and penalized in their communities because of it.

Lastly, there is a direct connection between a lack of diversity in the technology sector and the exacerbation of abuse that marginalized people experience. Demographics determine design, and the design of these socio-technical systems frequently enable harm, instead of understanding, from the start, how to anticipate and reduce it. It is a serious problem in tech companies, the criminal justice system, and in society overall that men with the power to make change—still a remarkably homogenous group—do not appreciate the differences between the harassment they are likely to encounter and the intersectional harassment that most women do. Men are more likely to be called names and to be harassed in one-off incidents meant to embarrass them, whereas when women encounter harassment, it is gendered, sustained, sexualized, and more often than not linked to some form of offline threat of violence. Additionally, the harassment of many people, including men, is often focused on their defying rigid gender and sexuality norms, so, in a sense, it is deeply misogynistic. This is why LGBTQ youth experience online bullying at such high rates, at up to three times the rates of their straight peers.

The Internet is a transformative space for girls and women. However, the very qualities that make the Internet a revolutionary space also enable powerful variations on old themes: violence against women and the cultural policing of girls and women, because we are girls and women. The medium of the Internet presents unprecedented scale and amplification for sexual discrimination and misogyny. Online abuse costs perpetrators next to nothing in terms of time, money, or effort. It is networked, easy to proliferate exponentially, and produces a permanent record that is readily available and manipulated with malice. The norms and laws that we would usually turn to for precedent are woefully inadequate.

The legal scholars Danielle Citron and Mary Anne Franks argue that online abuse is first and foremost a civil rights issue, not only for women but for all historically discriminated against and marginalized groups. “Civil rights laws”, writes Citron in her book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, “would redress and punish harms that traditional remedies do not: the denial of one's equal right to pursue life's important opportunities due to membership in a historically subordinated group.”

Our goal is to increase understanding of the nature and scope and costs of online harassment, misogyny and abuse, in order to contribute to frameworks that will ensure that free speech is a right that extends equally to all who want to and should be part of the public commons. To that end, we are working to design research, create legal responses, advocate for diversity in tech, and develop social networking support systems for people who are targeted online.

Thank you for dedicating your valuable time and efforts to this problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Now we're going to begin our questioning.

I believe we have seven minutes with Mr. Fraser.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Actually, I was going to switch with Ms. Damoff.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Yes, Mr. Fraser, you're right. You did say that. I am sorry about that.

Ms. Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I'd like to share my time with Ms. Nassif.

If you were to look in an ideal world at the most effective response to cyber-violence, I'm just wondering if you could let us know how you think government would work with social media companies, media organizations, law enforcement, and the legal system. I know that's a really broad question, but if you were starting with a blank slate....

[Soraya Chemaly]

Stop me if this is not the direction you want me to go in.

We really need to think in terms of moving from the micro to the macro in the short, medium and long terms, so if you can envision a matrix that includes those aspects on an axis, I think we would need to apply it in very specific areas. Everything has to happen at once. This is a massive social problem that requires a social response, so in terms of government, I don't think there's any one simple response at all. The issues are extremely complicated by the fact that harassment tends to happen in cross-platform ways and there is no centralized way of dealing with that. For example, one practical solution would be that government actually require that these companies fund a centralized collection agency that could help them evaluate the scope and harm of certain cases.

Right now, the target of harassment, if it is cross-platform—which usually means it's also transnational—has nowhere to go. There is no jurisdictional authority. There is no relief in any way, shape or form. They spend tremendous amounts of time, money, and effort going from one platform to the other, or reaching out to advocates to say “Can you help me?” and one of the things we find is that, by themselves, no one company can respond adequately because they're just seeing their little slice of the harassment and are very much focused on this idea of how to address that one problem. That's just one small part.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Are you thinking of a body? There is a body that regulates lawyers. Are you thinking of something along those lines for the companies?

[Soraya Chemaly]

Actually, the model I am more thinking about is a model that's used for missing and exploited children, which is an international model. Everybody respects it. People understand that if there is an image that depicts the exploitation and harm of a child, it immediately needs to be reported, and it needs to be reported in an international way on all of these platforms. That is not necessarily the mechanism that we need, but it does show precedent for cooperation in the industry for addressing a very specific problem. I think the models exist, but the will does not.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I'll turn it over to you, Eva.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would like to thank Ms. Chemaly for her presentation.

We have heard that the availability and ready access to technology, as well as the predisposition of all young people to the digital environment—and not only of those we consider at risk—, mean there is a greater probability that children will fall prey to sexual exploitation and cyberviolence.

Las week, officials from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police informed us that, in 2016 alone, there were 19,000 complaints of cyberviolence. They also stated that education about the digital environment, consent, sexuality, and healthy relationships is very important in this context.

Can you comment on this and tell us about the programs you consider effective and that we might want to implement at some point?

[Soraya Chemaly]

I think that the best long-term investment in challenging this problem is absolutely in early childhood education. To that end, we need to really be thinking about teaching social justice in the classroom, thinking about how we talk about empathy, and thinking about how we talk to children about performing gender. One of the issues we have is that the ways in which femininity and masculinity are manifested in children tend to lead boys to strip themselves of empathy. A lot of masculinity involves shedding qualities that we think of as feminine.

So empathy, especially cross-gender empathy, is often dissuaded in boys, but we need to be starting at very, very early steps to think about what we're teaching children in terms of their own form of power and their own autonomy. That should lead into the question of consent. How do we talk about consent? How do we talk about sexual relationships, healthy relationships? All of that has to happen, honestly, before children are nine or 10, because what we're seeing is that the interactions they're having online are jarring to adults but part of the fabric of their lives. We need to be able to provide age-appropriate lessons in media literacy, digital citizenship, and compassion, because these technologies really do create unprecedented social interactions, and we are not equipping children to deal with them properly.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

What do you consider to be the most useful in this regard? Is it education or awareness?

In Canada, education falls under provincial jurisdiction. You said efforts to educate boys must start very early, from the age of nine. Do you think it is more important to ask the provinces to include this in curricula or to focus our efforts on awareness?

[Soraya Chemaly]

I think they have to go hand in hand. One of the issues is that people, particularly adults and parents, don't realize the degree to which the habits, the traditions, and the traditional norms that operated a certain way offline become tessellated online and distorted. They actually change in ways that no one can anticipate.

For example, I do a lot of writing about sexualized violence and what it looks like when the structure that enables sexualized violence shows itself in very stark ways online. We know, for example, that many parents are worried about sexting. They are concerned that their children are going to be sharing intimate images, and in the media we talk about that as though sex and technology are bad and dangerous things, but in reality, we aren't really talking to children about either of those things in responsible ways.

When we talk about sexting, a lot of people don't make the distinction between consensual and non-consensual sexting, and what happens is that we end up with a situation in which girls, whom we have told are equal, enter into these situations, and most teenagers who are sexting are sexting with someone they are in a relationship with. They enter this and they think that they are going to have equal respect and reciprocal ideas about consent, and that is not what happens. Boys are two, and in some cases, five times more likely to share photographs non-consensually, so there's a gigantic gender gap in both the exercise of non-consensual sexting and the expectations of autonomy, privacy, relief, etc.