Evidence of meeting #30 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 program.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
I call the meeting to order.
We're very pleased today to have with us Harvey Bate, who is the co-chair of the board of directors of the New Leaf Program, and Cathy Grant, who is a director.
We were supposed to have a representative from Babely Shades, but unfortunately, due to illness, they won't be appearing.
This is our first panel for the day, so we'll start as usual with 10 minutes of comments from Cathy and Harvey and then we'll go to our questions.
Harvey, you may begin.
3:30 p.m.
Harvey Bate Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, New Leaf Program
We came in from Nova Scotia this morning. We represent an organization called New Leaf Opportunity for Men. Cathy and I are going to take turns talking about the organization, about what we do, and some of our challenges in doing that.
Cathy will start with our philosophy and a few things like that.
3:30 p.m.
Cathy Grant Director, New Leaf Program
As far as we know, New Leaf is the longest-running men's intervention program in Canada. We opened the doors in April 1987. What was really interesting is Bob Whitman, who developed and ran the program until his retirement a year and a half ago, did it in talks with the community. He recognized there was a huge gap. The women's shelter was seeing all these different women, which is what they were looking to do, but the same names of the men who were abusing them kept coming up. They realized somebody needs to be working with the men or there's only ever going to be a steady stream of victims. Bob felt that's what he wanted to do.
He was really surprised when he was very often told that the men wouldn't come, the men wouldn't talk about their relationships, and men wouldn't change. That didn't sit well with him, because he believed in men very much. He believed that men would come, they would talk, and they would change, because ultimately men wanted to have healthy, safe relationships, but they didn't know how.
It took him four years of operating this program as a volunteer, in church basements, before he finally got core funding, before he proved, really, that men would come. If you build it, you will see them come.
Since those early beginnings, we have evolved into this really amazing program. I'll read our mission statement first:
To provide an opportunity for men to take responsibility for their abusive behaviour and to effect social change so that the underlying power imbalances no longer exist. To provide support, and to mentor males to ensure real and long term change in their attitudes and behaviours towards females and perception of themselves.
All of this is based on the feminist philosophy that women have the right to determine their own lives and to live in abuse-free relationships. Those are the basic fundamentals the program was built on.
We do all of our work in group work. We sit in a circle because we see domestic violence as a social issue. We're a very grassroots program that really supports and helps men learn how to talk to other men about relationships and about parenting in a good way.
We find that as long as you give them this safe place to really talk, they will. We have two open groups a week. The men are required to come to at least one, and it doesn't matter which one. Because we operate in this way, we have no waiting lists. A guy could call us today and be in the group tonight, once we interview him, because we recognize that it's disrespectful to delay someone who is calling in crisis.
By the time the men usually call our program, some pretty unpleasant things have been happening. They're often in crisis. They're afraid and they have nowhere else to go, so we take them in right away. We will do some suicide counselling, some crisis intervention or advocacy when necessary, but mostly we get them right into the group, talking with other men who have gone through very much the same thing and have mostly been in that same state when first coming in.
It's been a really powerful program, and because of our open group a guy coming in for the first time will be sitting in a room with somebody who's been there for weeks, months, and even years. We have no end point; we remain a safe space for anybody. Once they've been in our program, all they have to do is call us and show up and talk about their stuff. We have one client who has been part of the program for longer than I have, and I've been with the program for seventeen and a half years.
We work really hard to have the men take responsibility for their actions. We say you're not 100% responsible for everything that's wrong in the relationship. You take responsibility for the role that you are playing; take 100% responsibility for that.
We work with them over the long term. We try to keep them for six months to a year, because change is a process and takes time. Forty per cent of our referrals come from the child welfare department and 40% from correctional services. A lot of our clients bring in their sons, and they'll bring in their brothers, their co-workers, and their friends, so more and more self-referrals are happening. We do a lot of partner referrals, women's information sessions, case conferences, high-risk coordination meetings, and high-risk file management.
When Bob first started this program, the average age of the men attending our program was 45. The majority of our clients now are under 30, with most being under 25. In many ways that's very exciting, in that we're getting them young, before they do years of damage to their families and themselves. In a lot of ways, we see that as hopeful.
3:35 p.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, New Leaf Program
That's a good segue into what I want to talk about. Because we're trying to effect social change, we try to be preventative. Unfortunately, we don't always have the time to do that.
One of the programs that we've just started is a pilot project called “Changing Male Conversations”. It's funded by the United Way of Pictou County, so it's not part of our regular funding. It was designed to engage young men in discussions around specific topics that are necessary for a young man to develop positive relationships and attitudes about women. It seeks to deal with issues on a more social level, particularly now, when technology and social media create unlimited access to information but also to images and attitudes about women that are very disturbing.
We discussed this with community service providers, we gathered research, and we designed a program for a group of young men over a period of time. We saw some community collaboration.
We also went into the schools and started talking to the young men in a social setting, and we built in an evaluation process. Our focus was primarily on positive engagement with the young men in providing information and inviting them into conversations and discussions about what typically would be considered male locker-room talk or “boys will be boys” kinds of topics. We started engaging them. We picked grade 7s and grade 11s to work with over a period of a year.
For instance, some of the topics would cover what consent is, what sexual assault is, what sexual violence is, what respect looks like in a healthy relationship, how an addiction to pornography occurs, what the effects of the addiction are, what the effects of intergenerational violence are, why there is so much male violence in society, what a male can do if he doesn't want to be violent, and how a male can respond to violent situations. Those aren't all the topics that are covered, but they're a good majority of them.
The feedback from the kids has been really phenomenal so far, and the grade 7s blew us out of the water with their openness about the conversations. We're still in the middle of that project.
I see that my one minute is up, so let me say that in terms of some of our main stumbling blocks, funding obviously has been one. We are provincially funded for two staff; however, in order to get the job done, we have to divide that into three part-time staff in order to have the extra body to at least cover the groups and to get some of the other work done.
A current problem we have, particularly with the justice system, is that crown attorneys, legal aid lawyers, judges, justices, and correctional services workers quite often will make plea bargains for men that assault women. For instance, they'll say that if the men attend, say, six sessions of the New Leaf program, they'll stay the sentence. Unfortunately for us, that undermines what we do. We believe that change needs to be longer-term, so that undermines the ability we have to work with the men and create meaningful change.
The other thing is that we don't have time to do more projects like the Changing Male Conversations project. Those preventative ones are really important to us if we're going to make a change in this, so it's about funding and time.
The other thing I wanted to add is that we now have a website. It's www.newleafpictoucounty.ca. We put the “pictoucounty” in because I think there's the NewLeaf airline now, and we were getting too many hits from people wanting to fly somewhere.
3:35 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
3:35 p.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, New Leaf Program
Anyway, I think that's my time.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Yes, your time is up. Thank you very much.
We'll start our first round of questioning with Mr. Fraser for seven minutes.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Excellent.
Thank you so much, Ms. Grant and Mr. Bate, for being here today. Coming from Pictou County, I know the good work you guys do at home. I'm so thrilled that you could be here to share your experience and expertise with this group as we embark on this study to prevent violence against young women and girls.
I'll start on the Changing Male Conversations program, because it's not something that was part of your core mandate. One of the things that's come up in some of the prior testimony and some of the questions we've asked previously is that oftentimes programs designed to impact or influence a culture change among young men aren't necessarily getting the right young guys in the room; that is, maybe on a university campus, the people who come out to watch a video or a presentation about preventing violence are the ones who are not likely to be violent themselves.
Is there any tailoring that you've done with that program to reach at-risk communities?
3:40 p.m.
Director, New Leaf Program
Maybe we both can answer.
We have access to the schools because we've been going into the schools in conjunction with Tearmann for 14 years. It was funded by the Law Foundation. We did presentations on domestic violence. It was not so much dating violence and sexual harassment and those types of things. In this way we already had access to the schools and to the kids, and we were all familiar faces, so in terms of it making sense for us to start with the schools and the young guys—
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Do you do the whole grade when you do grade 7s and grade 11s? Is it universal in its application?
3:40 p.m.
Director, New Leaf Program
We chose two schools because, realistically, with such a small staff, that was all we could handle, but we did all the grade 7s. Initially, we were going to do the grade 11s, but they were hesitant. We ended up doing the grade 9s, because they were more open to spending a certain period of time of their week in it every week. We went in for eight or 10 weeks, I think, for just that group. We're going back again this year to do some evaluations and some follow-up.
In terms of more at-risk communities, this was all we could do in this pilot project, and—
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
You mentioned the follow-up evaluations that you plan on doing. How are you assessing the outcomes of a program like this?
3:40 p.m.
Director, New Leaf Program
I think our priority right now is evaluating the young guys: “Has this been helpful? You took this last year. You've had an entire summer to think about these types of things, your attitudes toward women, about making healthy choices for yourself. Did it make a difference, even over this summer?”
What was interesting is that the girls ended up doing, simultaneously, programs for just them while we were working with just the boys. The boys were so impacted by it that the girls kept coming in trying to figure out what was going on. They actually said to Ron and Don, “You need to do a session with us too.”
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
What is it that you think creates the buy-in among young men? I ask because I find it's hard to get young guys excited about this topic. Is there something about your program that really creates that sort of culture of buy-in?
3:40 p.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, New Leaf Program
I think it's in part the skill of the presentation.
New Leaf has been working at engaging men for almost 30 years, so it's really the style of how to engage people. When you get that going and you get young men energized and talking about it, the subject matter can be almost anything. You can get them engaged, but it's a skill that's not being widely used in a group setting. As a matter of fact, more and more services have fewer and fewer groups at that level.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
I'll change gears to go to your core programming, just because I have a limited amount of time.
You've noted that your participants are getting younger and younger. Do you think that extending access to New Leaf is actually a good tool to prevent violence against women generally? Do you think by catching them at 25, you're going to prevent people engaging in sort of a lifetime of an abusive pattern of behaviour?
3:40 p.m.
Director, New Leaf Program
I know that 14-year old boys will say, “I can't change now. I've been this way all my life”, and it's funny, and when 30-year-olds say it in the group, the 50-year-olds laugh at them, and when the 50-year-olds say it in the group, the 70-year-olds laugh at them, because it's funny, no matter what.
When the men who get it, especially the older men who are trying to regain the relationship with their children whom they violated in different ways their whole lifetime together, see those young guys come through the door, one of the first things they say is, “I'm so happy you're here now, because if I had come when I was your age, my life would have been happy, my kids and I would have a relationship, and I would probably still be with their mother.”
3:45 p.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Wrapping up, I'll give you a chance to give us your best recommendations.
Just so you know how this process unfolds, after everything we've heard, our group is going to get together and come up with recommendations for the government to implement or not. If we could make recommendations to the government to best support the work you're doing to reduce or prevent violence against women and girls, or to support abusive men in changing their behaviour, what would those recommendations be?
3:45 p.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, New Leaf Program
I think it's not enough just to sentence or punish the men. To get real change you have to work with that group of men.
There are not a lot of men's intervention programs in this country. There are a whole lot more services for victims. You can keep helping the victims, but it won't stop the men from doing what they're doing, so there need to be more services for the men. If that means having a mandated service, so be it.
As we said, one of our difficulties is that it has to be meaningful change. You can't throw six anger-management sessions at a man who's been abusive for 20 years and expect him to stop the behaviour, right?
In this business my job is in child welfare, but recidivism in domestic violence is a given. If it happens once, you know it's happened once, twice, three times, four times, or five times. If we're going to make a change, it has to be real change. If I were to recommend something, that would be one thing I would recommend.
3:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Excellent.
Now I'll go to my colleague Ms. Vecchio for seven minutes.
3:45 p.m.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Thank you very much. I really appreciate your coming in today.
We have something called Changing Ways in London, Ontario. It has done some unique programming with some of the students, some of the young boys who have found themselves in trouble over inappropriate things being done with young girls.
What are some of the key factors? A lot of times, people will say that the children grew up in a violent home and that violence is all they know, so it is recurring.
Do you find that to be absolutely the case? What are some of the triggers? What are some of the things that you feel are creating this violence? Is it because of the way they were brought up in a situation where violence was a norm in their own home? Are there any triggers you see that we should all be aware of as young mothers and spouses so that we can educate women as well?
3:45 p.m.
Director, New Leaf Program
We're all socialized and saturated by music videos. I think part of why we're seeing so many young guys is that this is the generation that has grown up with that saturation of video games and Internet access. I don't know where young people would be able to get meaningful information and opportunities to talk about it.
On top of that is male entitlement. When Bob tried to start this program, people said, “Men won't do it,” because what we've been told about men is that they're not supposed to do this kind of thing.
I think we need to go back to the socialization that teaches that when I get angry and I yell and I behave out of control, people do what I want them to do. There's also the immediate sense of “Oh, goodness; that was unexpected. I think I'll try it again the next time I want you to do something.” I don't think there is one particular reason; there are many.
3:50 p.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, New Leaf Program
From a slightly different perspective, which I gained from my career, we now know that exposure to domestic violence really has a huge impact on children. It's almost to the point where it's likened to fetal alcohol syndrome. They know it's affecting the serotonin levels in the brain. The serotonin levels are basically burning brain cells because of the constant fight-or-flight response in the children.
They can't control that or turn it off. Those kids tend to grow up to be more violent if they have already been socialized in a violent community. You can see how this thing just keeps expanding.
3:50 p.m.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
That's horrific.
Sean mentioned looking at some indicators and potential measurements. After people have moved on from your program, what would you say is the success rate? Do you find that many people come back and say that they need to be grounded once again? Do you get a lot of people returning who recognize what a great product you have but who found themselves once again in a situation, so they're coming back for some more resources? Do you see that very often? Is there a way of measuring that?