Evidence of meeting #7 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 victimization.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
You mentioned policies. Who would be the holder of these policies? Would it be the federal government, provincial government, or the schools? Who exactly would be setting that tone for the students?
Senior Director General, Women's Program and Regional Operations Directorate, Status of Women Canada
The universities.
Senior Director General, Women's Program and Regional Operations Directorate, Status of Women Canada
The institutions themselves. Many are looking into that. There are, again, leaders amongst the pack that are developing best practices. Those are the types of issues and successes that we're trying to document at this moment.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Excellent.
I'll go on to Stats Canada. In 2014, Stats Canada reported to the committee that nine in 10 sexual assaults were not reported. Has this number changed at all, and has there been any progress? If so, what was the catalyst that you saw here?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
I think we can look at the trend in reporting this type of offence, if it has gone down or up, but I don't think it has gone down or up. I think it has been quite stable over time.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
With Stats Canada, do you see a clear relationship between awareness-raising campaigns and a reduction of gender-based violence, or, like you said, is it kind of just an even plateau right now?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
It's hard to establish a relationship between an awareness campaign, which is something happening more at the micro level, and things we observe at the macro level with 30,000 as a sample size. We would first have to ask if they had been in contact or had been touched by some kind of awareness campaign, and we don't ask that question in the survey, so we wouldn't know that.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Finally, to Stats Canada—this is similar to what Eva was asking—to what degree are socio-economic factors important considerations when examining gender-based violence?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
For victimization as a whole, we observed that one of the most important factors explaining victimization later in life was having been a victim of childhood maltreatment. Of course, age plays a factor too.
We looked at drugs habits, alcohol habits, and all these factors, and they all seem to play an important role in the likelihood of being victimized.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
To go back to Status of Women, has any significant progress been made concerning cyber-violence since the appearance at the committee in 2014? At that meeting, it was stated that a number of projects were under way and fairly new. Have you seen any evidence or any discovery of best practices on this?
Senior Director General, Women's Program and Regional Operations Directorate, Status of Women Canada
The projects are either close to the end or in their last year at this moment in time. Already we've seen that some projects have been able to engage platform owners, such as Facebook, to have conversations about measures that can be taken to increase safety of women online, particularly with that platform. There are clear inroads being made.
What does take time, though, is a project that takes place over the course of a maximum of three years. We'll typically spend close to a year engaging with those partners, building trust. At year two, I can say that we have some very definite results.
What's particularly interesting, though, and what we've received so far, is that these project proponents have conducted needs assessments and environmental scans by doing either focus groups with young women or surveys. They've reached out collectively to thousands of young women. It has confirmed for us the breadth and scope of the types of cyber-violence that young women in Canada are exposed to.
Those are the things I was alluding to in my opening remarks. The problem is quite significant in the lives of young people.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Once again, in the report from the special committee on violence against women, we saw clearly some very big stats. When we're dealing with violence against indigenous women, what is the best way to ensure that women feel comfortable reporting instances of gender-based violence to the RCMP?
Director General, Policy and External Relations, Policy and External Relations Directorate, Status of Women Canada
I'll speak from the point of view of Status of Women, the minister being very involved in the engagement process related to the upcoming inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women.
It's something that was spoken about extensively by family members when they were engaged on this issue, how they were uncomfortable with the way various police forces—there are approximately 300 police forces across the country—dealt with indigenous families when they were made aware. It's an issue that I assume colleagues at the RCMP are seized with, given the sorts of comments that were made. How to actually address that is a much more complicated question that will be looked at in the near future, I am sure.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
First, to the Stats Canada team—thanks for being here—our analyst noted that Stats Canada hasn't done a survey specifically on domestic violence since 1993. Is there any sign that it might be a renewed project for the federal government? What value would you give to doing such work again?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
I'll give a very short answer to that. If you would allow me, I would like to perhaps provide a more detailed answer later to the clerk of the committee.
Basically, I would say that the general social survey, which is a victimization survey, covers the role that the domestic violence or violence against women survey used to play in the past. Now we're measuring violence, and we're comparing to the other gender so that we can really establish a comparison. The violence against women survey couldn't do a comparison between men and women. The GSS, I would say, is a replacement for that type of measure that we had in the early nineties.
Rebecca was part of the history. I don't know if she wants to add something here.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Maybe for the sake of time, if you were willing to undertake to correspond with our analyst on that, we'd probably all benefit.
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
Definitely we will.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you.
As other colleagues have already alluded, #beenrapedneverreported is such a phenomenon. How can we look at these numbers knowing that they are so limited by the self-reporting frame that you describe? Is there anything we can do?
How much can we rely on these numbers? I guess that's really what I'm getting at.
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
I can provide more information about the quality of the information we get from the GSS survey. This is a self-reported survey. Questions rely on thorough evaluation and focus groups. We want to make sure that we ask the right questions, in the right fashion, in the right order, with due diligence and good methodology. This is all done to get as much accurate information as possible.
When we ask Canadians about their victimization history, we also ask them if they had reported it to the police. In 90% of the cases, they had not reported sexual assaults or this type of victimization. They tell us if they have been victims. Is it possible that some people who have been victims don't tell us? Maybe, but I don't have this type of information. The GSS would probably be the best vehicle to collect that type of information.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
To the Status of Women team, you mentioned the inquiry on murdered or missing indigenous women and girls. The last time the minister was with us, she alluded to a commitment to implementing some things early, not waiting for the inquiry, because there are things we know we need to do.
I imagine that the announcement on shelter funding on indigenous reserves was one of those pieces. I want to know whether these funds are operating funds or for construction. How are we going to sustain the services at a professional level?
Director General, Policy and External Relations, Policy and External Relations Directorate, Status of Women Canada
The question is best asked of the departments. ESDC, CMHC, and INAC on reserve are responsible for that funding. One of the principles behind the funding was that, by making so much more funding available to the provinces and territories for the construction and the wraparound services around shelters, they may be able to also make more funds available for the parts of running a shelter that are within their jurisdiction.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
I have a bigger-picture question. We have an ambitious work plan for this study, and I'm interested in your department's advice at a general level. Are there pitfalls in spreading in every direction? Do you have any suggestions about making sure we're not repeating other recently conducted work?
Director General, Policy and External Relations, Policy and External Relations Directorate, Status of Women Canada
We talked at length about whether or not this would be a repeat of the best practices study. That was not the goal. It was Status of Women that put forward the suggestion for the study, and the goal was to shine a spotlight on some areas of violence against young women that we know less about, all aspects of the data, how to address them, and what information is out there. We wanted it to feed into the federal gender violence-based strategy that is part of our minister's mandate letter. Getting experts in front of the committee on those issues, I think, would be very helpful.
These issues of violence are not emerging or new. Street harassment, for example, has always been there. It is the ones that have never had the spotlight focused on them in quite the same way. I had an opportunity, for example, to work on forced marriage in the last couple of years. Because the government had not really focused on that issue to the same extent in the past, there were many concrete measures that the government was able to take to address that kind of violence and to engage other jurisdictions in addressing. This was the type of thing that we had in mind when we put forward this study. There are very concrete things to address each different form of violence that I think this committee might be able to shine a light on.
