Thank you very much for the invitation to appear here today. My name is Ursula Hendel, and I'm the president of the Association of Justice Counsel representing about 2,600 federal lawyers, including the prosecutors responsible for conducting sexual assault prosecutions in Canada's north.
Law school prepares us well for the rules of evidence, the burden of proof, and the ethical responsibilities of lawyers, but it does not teach us very much about human behaviour. The common law traditions under which we work presume that triers of fact like judges are supposed to draw on ordinary experience and common sense when assessing human behaviour and when determining matters like credibility and reliability.
I have heard the statistic that one in four women will experience some form of sexual assault in her lifetime but, in my experience, factors of privilege, whether you're white, whether you're educated, whether you're financially independent, and whether you're male make us less likely to experience sexual assault. Ironically or not, those are all the same factors that tend to make it less likely that you'll be a judge.
So, while we're expected to rely on common sense and ordinary experience, when it comes to sexual assault, most of us who work in the courtroom have no ordinary experience. I was not so lucky. As a student-at-law, I was subject to unwanted sexual advances from someone who I thought was a friend. I was a young woman full of confidence, full of privilege, and the world was my oyster. In fact, I was studying feminist legal theory. And yet, when it happened to me, I did not react in a way that I would expect. I froze, and I needed my friends to come rescue me. Fortunately, I was in a public place. I spent many years thinking about that experience, and I think it helped me as a prosecutor present the facts to a judge or a jury because I understood that, unless it happens to you, you actually have no idea how ordinary people would behave when something completely out of the ordinary happens to them. We think that we do—we all think that we do—but I don't think that we do.
I have been a prosecutor for 20 years. In the first 10 years of my career, I estimate I prosecuted over 500 cases of sexual assault. I did not receive training in relation to sexual assault at all for at least the first five years of my career. When I did, it was more about the evidentiary rules and not about the psychology of being subjected to unexpected trauma. That was some time ago. Things may have changed since the Jurassic age, but the truth of the matter is that no training of any kind is actually mandatory for federal prosecutors. While prosecutorial agencies like the one my members work for, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, the PPSC, are very committed to the idea of training, much like the judicial institutes we heard from earlier, our reality is that the service has too little money and we prosecutors have far too little time.
The PPSC has only one formal training session called the school for prosecutors, which is offered once a year for five days. Only a fraction of our prosecutors are able to attend, so many of us struggle to meet our professional responsibilities for training that our various law societies require. It is a real challenge to get any training at all, including what is mandated by the law society. I haven’t gone back to check every year, but at least for 2016, there is no sexual assault training on the agenda at the school for prosecutors.
The regional offices make every effort to find training opportunities—they do their very best—but most prosecutorial agencies are so chronically under-resourced that they can't afford to send the prosecutors away for training, not only because they don't have the money to pay for the training, but even more importantly, because the prosecutors are required in court every day. There are no spare bodies to cover that court and run those trials.
Plus, there are so many topics to cover when it comes to training that I believe it continues to be our reality that we do not get adequate training. We particularly do not get adequate training on the trauma of sexual assault. Since it's our job as prosecutors to present the evidence to the trier of fact in the most logical, persuasive, and coherent way, we are also the link between the criminal justice system and the complainant.
We have court workers now in many cases to assist us, but we are still their voice in court. If we don't understand the experience of the victims, we are going to fall short.
If you really want to bridge the gap you're trying to bridge, we need to train prosecutors in addition to judges. I see in their report there was a recommendation to implement an educational curriculum for crown prosecutors, and I look forward to seeing the government's response to that.
Thank you very much.