Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Good morning, committee members. That was very, very considerate—thank you—for my colleague Bonnie.
On behalf of the Women's Centre for Social Justice, better known as “WomenatthecentrE”, we thank you for the opportunity to make this submission on this very important bill.
Our sexual violence response coordinator, Mandi Gray, and I are here today as women survivors of gendered violence to speak to the need for an informed judiciary who receive continuous comprehensive and effective training on all aspects of violence against women, including sexual assault.
I'll begin by saying that I'm basing most of my comments on a finding from a pilot initiative that we facilitated in 2014-15. We conducted a snapshot review of cases proceeded in several specialized domestic violence courts in Toronto, Ontario. Observations from the court watchers speak directly to the issues being put forth in this bill.
What the public knows are only those high-profile cases that make the press, such as with the retrial presided over by Justice Robin Camp. His egregious and ill-informed comments appear anomalous and occasional, but what we as women survivors know, as well as what we found from our court watch monitoring, is that those types of comments and attitudes are far more pervasive and form part of the everyday misogyny in the courtrooms across the country. The only difference is that, while other judges make similar comments and hold similar victim-blaming views, they are not being observed and oftentimes give no reasons for their decisions. No one is shining a spotlight on them, thus enabling them to continue treating victims in ways that skew the outcomes in favour of the offender with no regard for the victim.
Too many members of the bench have attacked and viewed complainants in far too many sexual assault cases as though they are the wrongdoers. She is held accountable for her attacker's violence. It is like blaming a homeowner for a home invasion. Society simply doesn't do that, so why, therefore, are survivors being held to a different standard? The answer to this question is largely due to the fact that individuals who preside over these kinds of cases lack the education and training needed to understand the fundamental differentiators in sexual assault cases and how these cases need to be handled differently.
Our court watch reports documented many instances where judges failed to hold perpetrators accountable even after they had pleaded guilty. Comments our court watchers documented are as egregious as those of Robin Camp's, the only difference being that we didn't name them, and that's something that we plan on doing in future court watch initiatives.
I'm now going to hand it over to my colleague, Mandi Gray.
Thank you very much.