Evidence of meeting #28 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:20 p.m.
Liberal
4:20 p.m.
Policy Analyst, University of Victoria Students' Society, Anti-Violence Project
Yes. I'm sure all of us work really closely with residences.
4:20 p.m.
Liberal
Karen Ludwig Liberal New Brunswick Southwest, NB
How much sharing is there of data or any kinds of statistics that are collected among different residences and different schools?
4:20 p.m.
Sexual Violence Support and Education Coordinator, Ryerson University, As an Individual
We're talking more, but I think it matters as to the university. Ryerson was like, “Yes, here's all our data; we're not going to be ashamed of the sexual assaults that happen on our campus.” Whereas other universities, I think, reported zero sexual assaults on their campuses.
4:20 p.m.
Policy Analyst, University of Victoria Students' Society, Anti-Violence Project
As was our case.... We had zero, which is not true.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you to all of the witnesses for being here and for your compelling testimony.
I have a few different places I want to go, starting with Ms. Khan and Ms. Kurchik.
You talked, Ms. Kurchik, especially about the experience of being a survivor and going through the system. I wonder if you could suggest some substantive reforms on the criminal justice side that we might be able to propose.
You talked about better informing survivors, which I think we'll very much take to heart as the process goes on. But there are other possible changes that one could think of, such as changes to the prosecutorial rules in terms of how a prosecutor decides which cases to prosecute and which not. My understanding now is that they consider the likelihood of conviction and things like that. Are there changes that you would propose along those lines, questions and standards of proof, these sorts of things? I'm curious for your perspective on that.
4:20 p.m.
Sexual Violence Support and Education Coordinator, Ryerson University, As an Individual
One of the things we like to look at is the Philadelphia model, where they actually have a VAW advocate and community case review, where they actually look at the cases that police have named as unfounded and relook at them to see what actually they could include.
We also think that having informed consent is really important, and Hannah can speak more about that. Well, she did so eloquently say that we don't have all the information oftentimes when survivors are going through the system, so it's actually having an advocate there.
4:20 p.m.
Student Advocate, Healing Justice Advisory Committee, As an Individual
Having an advocate would be instrumental in making informed decisions. When I went to the meetings with my crown attorney and the detective assigned to my case, it was the crown attorney, the detective assigned to my case, and me. I was sitting there with two professionals who knew everything about the processes...well, not everything, but a lot more than I did, and it was incredibly intimidating. It was very easy to convince me that I was being taken care of when I really had no idea what was going on and what was the right thing to do and what was the best for me in that situation. Having an advocate present would be very important.
4:20 p.m.
Sexual Violence Support and Education Coordinator, Ryerson University, As an Individual
I don't know if people have looked at David Tanovich's work, but David Tanovich and Elaine Craig have some fantastic work. They talk about rape culture myths that are embedded in the criminal justice system, and how within the criminal justice processes, things like Justice Robin Camp said are not uncommon. He said, “keep your knees together” to an indigenous woman who was sexually assaulted.
It's thinking also about how we look at that research and actually implement some of the changes that they've said. I think they're better to look at that work.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Okay. Do you think that those changes would make a difference in terms of conviction rates, or are there still a large number of cases which, just because of the standard of proof that exists...?
We know that in a variety of crimes there are guilty people who walk free just because of the way we set the standard of proof. Do you think these types of changes would make a substantial difference in terms of conviction rates or are there additional things that are required?
4:20 p.m.
Sexual Violence Support and Education Coordinator, Ryerson University, As an Individual
We have to have trauma-informed courtrooms, too. I think there has been a move to create trauma-informed courtrooms, or even trauma courtrooms. Also, it's how we look at domestic violence, having separate courtrooms for domestic violence. We could look at sexual violence courts. We could look at court support worker programs for sexual assault survivors, so there are not only the four hours of free legal advice, but actually support advocates throughout the whole process.
Do I think it will get better? Yes, but I also think that the criminal justice system is only one form of justice. Can we invest in things and evidence-based research into programs like restorative justice and transformative justice? We've seen at Dalhousie University that has worked really well. We can do better. We can do better for survivors by giving them options.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you.
I think I have about a minute left. I want to build on this issue of restorative justice but also alternative processes that exist on campuses.
Sometimes those processes are criticized by a variety of persons because they function outside of the legal system. What kinds of processes do you think should exist, or is it just a case that whenever something happens, it should be given to the police to deal with?
4:25 p.m.
Policy Analyst, University of Victoria Students' Society, Anti-Violence Project
What we really have to start shifting our ideas around on is the survivor-centred approach. Processes of accountability still have to be driven by what the survivor wants from that process. One example that I can give from the Anti-Violence Project is that we had students going through the judicial affairs process, through the non-academic misconduct policy that we have at the University of Victoria. Through working with the survivor it was identified that she wanted the person who had caused her harm to go through some sort of process with AVP.
That can't look the same for everyone. There's no formula for it. For us, what it looked like was one-on-one conversations, a workshop kind of work. You folks will see in the package that we gave you the production of a zine. I think it's called “What to do when you have caused sexualized violence”.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
I'm sorry, but that's your time.
Now we'll go to Ms. Nassif for the last five minutes.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thanks also to the witnesses for their presentations.
Last week, Alexander Wayne MacKay, a law professor at Dalhousie University, gave us a very interesting overview of the terms “sexual assault” and “rape” in our legal system. He explained how these terms have been defined at various levels and how the different types of assault have evolved over the years, depending the needs of society and of the law.
Like many other witnesses, he stated that a change in culture is needed to overcome sexual violence and sexist violence. Although no law can do this, legislation can direct such efforts.
Mr. MacKay later presented a brief in response to a question from a member of my staff. He noted that, even today, the definition of the terms “sexual aggression”, “aggravated sexual aggression”, and so forth do not meet present needs, whether in our legal framework or considering the current views in the society in question.
In your opinion, do our legal terms need to be redefined in order the reflect the different levels of seriousness associated with the terms “sexual aggression” or “rape culture”?
4:25 p.m.
Sexual Violence Support and Education Coordinator, Ryerson University, As an Individual
I can answer one of those pieces.
I would love to see us reopen a conversation about HIV non-disclosure and sexual violence, because too often HIV non-disclosure is categorized as the worst form of sexual violence, whereas it is, I believe, a different issue. That's one piece I'd really like us to look at. Right now it's being categorized as aggravated sexual assault, and I think it's a different issue.
As for language, I think we have to look at language use, but it's not looking at the laws just yet. I think it's talking about how we're even discussing and describing sexual violence.
Here's an example. Our media uses words like “tryst” to describe sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl by a 30-year-old man. That was in an Ottawa paper. It was used numerous times in an Ottawa paper to discuss the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl by a 30-year-old man—I'll just repeat that.
As another example, the most-circulated paper in Canada, The Toronto Star, said in one of their articles about a sexual assault, a gang rape of a young man in a club district, that one man's rape is another man's sexual fantasy.
We too have an issue, then, about how we use language and words. There's a guide called “Use the Right Words” by a group called femifesto, which I'm a part of. We looked at the media for five years and the way in which they report about sexual violence.
It's as though we're not in a place to shift the language in our criminal legal system until we start talking about how we as a society, including the government, are going to start talking about sexual violence and taking it seriously and looking at how we shape the narrative of sexual violence.
Yes, give me a part of our criminal justice system, but it's one system.
4:30 p.m.
Policy Analyst, University of Victoria Students' Society, Anti-Violence Project
In our context at UVic, one of the first things we did when our policy committee came together was to put out a consultation piece to the entire student body, faculty, and staff. The first question on that was something like: The policy committee uses the language of “sexualized violence”. What does this term mean to you, and is there any other term that encompasses what you believe sexualized violence is that's better?
It has to be rooted in community first, before we can look at other things. I fear or I am wary of looking at too many terms, because they can create a hierarchy of what sexualized violence is, but as survivors, as folks who experience harm, we know when we've experienced violence. We have responses to that within our body and within the way we are in the world. It's a very complicated thing, but I think it has to be rooted in community first.
4:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Thank you. I think that's it.
That was wonderful testimony. Thanks to all of you for your participation with us today. If you have other comments or things that you'd like to have the committee read, please send them to the clerk.
Again, I want to thank you for your help and for all that you are doing to eliminate violence against women in our country.
We are going to suspend for two minutes while we set up the next panel.
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
We'll get started.
For our panel discussion, we have guests from the South Asian Women's Centre. I want to welcome Kripa Sekhar, executive director; Reena Tandon, board chair; and Marmitha Yogarajah, project coordinator.
Ladies, welcome. We are pleased to have you testifying to us today. I understand you are sharing your 10 minutes among yourselves. I'll let you go and cut you off at the end of your 10 minutes, so we can begin our questioning.
You may begin.
October 24th, 2016 / 4:35 p.m.
Kripa Sekhar Executive Director, South Asian Women's Centre
My name is Kripa Sekhar. I'm the one in the centre. I am the executive director of the South Asian Women's Centre.
We would sincerely like to thank the committee for giving us an opportunity to present our work in the area of violence and abuse against young women and girls.
SAWC is a multi-service agency that was founded in 1982 by a very committed group of volunteers who tried to support women from the community who were trapped in situations of violence. SAWC works from a feminist, anti-oppression, and anti-racism framework and a gender equality lens. This is reflected in all the work we do, whether it is service delivery or research and policy around this issue.
Like many other communities, young South Asian women and girls also deal with violence and abuse. However, the complexity of these issues makes it more difficult for women and girls to even speak about the abuse. Our experience informs us that the issue of violence against young South Asian women and girls is a continuum. It is connected to their mothers, grandmothers, and previous generations of colonization, as well as the years of socialization and patriarchy. However, these are not exclusionary of each other but intersect in fully understanding the complex layers based on the years of violence that immigrant and refugee young women and girls have difficulty even talking about.
Many are married at a very early age, often through a forced marriage. Along with our new and ongoing work in the area of violence against women and girls within the South Asian communities, the collaborative work we do in the pan-Canadian and international context, including our work with agencies like METRAC, Springtide Resources, St. Michael's Hospital, and We Are Your Sisters, indicates the excellent work based on anti-oppression and intersexual analysis.
We would like to state that there is a commitment to end gender violence against women. We must ensure that this issue is framed from a true gender-based, equality lens. Violence against women and girls needs to be viewed as situated in a continuum of macro- and micro-factors of racism, ageism, classism, and sexism, among others.
Young women are intrinsically part of the larger society, where they are embedded in family networks, peer groups, educational institutions, or other socio-cultural groups and workplaces, which are locations and causal factors of violence. In order to address the issues of violence against young women, it is imperative to consider the role of significant others, such as mothers, sisters, mothers-in-law, employers, teachers, friends, and survivors—both male and female.
4:35 p.m.
Dr. Reena Tandon Board Chair, South Asian Women's Centre
This is perpetrated [Technical difficulty—Editor] who are beholders and enablers of the values that present a different context of violence. While we believe that we need to understand the different forms of violence through the experiential lens of young women and girls, what we can say with confidence and based on our qualitative work and research and our ongoing work with the community is that isolating this issue only makes young women and girls more vulnerable and marginalized. Any best practice guide or intervention would need to take into consideration the important impact that mothers, older women in particular, have on the value transfer and information transfer within a large proportion of the families we work with.
While focusing on young women and girls is valuable, to understand certain specific forms of violence that may be unique to that age group, we need to keep in mind the fact that young women, however we define them, live in very diverse contexts. Young South Asian women who migrate here at an early age, or who come here as young brides, experience violence in very different ways. This often isolates them ever more because they have no immediate family, or the only one they know is the one they migrated with.
We have Marmitha to speak about some of the projects.
4:40 p.m.
Executive Director, South Asian Women's Centre
Just to put it into context, in the last two years, SAWC has supported 900 women survivors of abuse. That gives you an idea of where our analysis is coming from. It's very deeply rooted in some very complex issues.
Go ahead, Marmitha.
4:40 p.m.
Marmitha Yogarajah Project Coordinator, South Asian Women's Centre
I'm the project coordinator for In My Mother's House, a story of sexual violence, marital rape, and forced marriage, which was funded by Status of Women Canada. I'm going to be speaking a little bit about the project itself.
SAWC recently completed the research phase, which is the first phase of the project, surveying, interviewing, and conducting group sessions with more than 150 survivors. This included young women and girls, and men and older women as well. Our findings revealed that, of course, young women and girls are greatly affected by the issue, but our research revealed much more than just this. SAWC was actually really shocked and surprised to see, through the research phase, that many of the women who were over the age of 45 were also greatly affected by the issue because they were still dealing with the trauma of their current or previous relationships. This particular population of women, we found, seems to slip into the cracks and seems to go unnoticed, and their well-being is often assumed because of their preference to stay silent on the issue. This is typically meant to maintain family status.
Many of the women who SAWC spoke to revealed that they were child brides and they were getting married at the age of 8 to 17 years old to men who were 10, 20, or 30 years their senior. One of our stories included an 11-year-old Bengali girl who got married to a 27-year-old man, and she had her first child at the age of 14. Oftentimes they were abused their entire lives until their husband's death, or until they feared for their own lives and well-being. It was only then that the cycle of abuse ended and sometimes they were still in that abusive situation. Many of these women immigrated to Canada to live in joint families and depended on their husbands for guidance. This heavy reliance on their in-laws stripped them of their autonomy, resulting in little or no financial independence for them, really no access to their legal documentation, and isolation from their own community at large.
What SAWC noticed about this group is that no one really understood what informed consent was and they felt that they were obligated to accept the marriage and to continue to stay in the marriage in order to maintain their family's reputation. Many accepted that this was their fate, governed by patriarchal traditions and adhering to principles of maintaining the status quo, which was to choose a partner for their children regardless of whether or not there was consent. So of course it's important to recognize that young women and girls experience violence and abuse every day as a result of the entrenched patriarchal traditions. But women over the age of 45 continue to internalize their trauma without support. Ideally we need to create an inclusive best practice to support these women and to consider all diverse groups.
4:45 p.m.
Executive Director, South Asian Women's Centre
I would like to continue from there to say that these projects have been powerful indicators of how much work still needs to be done to ensure that the most vulnerable women, who may not be part of any education system, need to feel supported and less isolated.
Imagine a young bride coming to Canada, and she has no access to education. She does not know what rape is. She has no idea that she has the ability to say no. These are the women who SAWC seeks out to try and help. It takes a lot before they decide to get out of that situation.
This is also an indicator that shows the government has an opportunity to do more for the most isolated women, and that includes racialized immigrant and newcomer women, and to ensure inclusion through a process of meaningful and true consultations at the ground level. While at one level we stand together in solidarity regarding a certain universality of experience, to strengthen the focus on young women and issues of violence faced by them, we would like to emphasize that any policy or best practice recommendations would benefit from cultural sensitivity and acknowledgement of the diverse forms and expressions of violence faced by women.
We have four recommendations: recognize that gender-based analysis must encompass the complexity of women's lives who may be outside that academic realm; ensure an intergenerational integration into all best practices; recognize that isolation is a result of inability to participate due to systemic barriers like racism and government systems and processes that are exclusionary; and provide resources and try to ensure that core funding is provided to organizations that do this work.
Thank you.