Status of Women Committee on April 12th, 2016

[Yvan Clermont]

If I may suggest, that would be a good question for INAC or round tables looking at that. I'm sorry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Then we will move along.

Ms. Vandenbeld, for five minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to go back to self-reporting or under-reporting, particularly under-reporting to police or authorities. There are media articles that show there are 16 universities that, in the last six years, have not reported any sexual assaults or had them reported to them. Another one says fewer than two out of every 10,000 students actually report sexual assaults to campus authorities. On cyberbullying, the 6% in your survey sounds quite low, just anecdotally from what we know day-to-day.

Do you think there is a significant amount of under-reporting? What would the reasons be for that? Is there a way we might remedy that?

[Yvan Clermont]

I will start the answer. I will invite my colleagues to jump in afterward.

Regarding cyberbullying and the prevalence that we were able to measure using the GSS survey, this was the first iteration of the GSS where we specifically asked these questions. In the next iteration in 2019, when we conduct the survey again, we'll probably see different numbers. I don't know. Maybe the questions are going to be tweaked differently, or we may have different questions, too, because this is an area that is evolving very fast with the technology, and we need to adapt.

In regard to what's happening on campuses, we can provide some information, certainly, regarding where these victimizations occur. We do have numbers that we can provide to the committee. With the GSS, it's very hard to see if, by using campus alone as a location, we would have enough information that would be reliable enough to publish. The thing we know is that when we compare students with non-students overall, and we control for age, there's not much difference in victimization rates.

However, the locations where we find that sexual assaults seem to happen most often are bars and restaurants. Private residences would come a close second. Commercial or office buildings are the third location. Of course, where these people have gotten to know each other before, that's another issue; this is only for the location where the victimization occurs.

We can look for more and provide the committee with some of these numbers.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Do you have any statistics when it comes to the under-reporting in regard to the reasons people give for not reporting? I'm thinking particularly of online violence.

I was speaking to a teacher and her young daughter, who is less than 10 years old—Ms. Savoie talked about the normalization of some of these things—and the daughter had shown her some texts she received and some Facebook messages. As a politician who's used to having things posted on my Facebook that are not pleasant, even I would have been very troubled with them, and this is a young girl of 10 who doesn't have the capacity to deal with that. Yet the answer from the teacher was that, well, there are no consequences.

I know that there are legal remedies. There are certainly legal remedies when it comes to criminal harassment or online violence, but there seems to be a lack of awareness of those remedies, even amongst teachers, and I wonder if that's been reflected in the statistics at all.

[Yvan Clermont]

Maybe I can start with the cyberbullying itself. You mentioned earlier that the numbers seemed low, but I'll give you a contextual piece of information here. It was only measured for people 15 and over; we don't have figures or numbers for children under that age. That is one thing.

On the reporting thing about cyberbullying and the reasons why it's under-reported, it's reporting to the police, not reporting to the victimization survey, because they're reporting it to us. There could be various reasons why. We could check the numbers to see if we can tell you why specifically they decided not to report to the police.

I don't know if my colleagues want to add something on the reasons for not reporting. Samuel?

For cyberbullying, we would not know why they didn't report it. It's only for the more serious types of offences.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We're out of time.

We're going over to Ms. Vecchio, who I think is going to share her time.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Yes, I'll be sharing my time.

As Karen Ludwig indicated, it is very courageous when you report, but when a person makes a first report, do you gather any data on any violence or any sexual assault that may have taken place prior to that? When you are doing these studies or collecting this information, are there any questions asked to find out whether this person has already been sexually assaulted once or twice or violently?

[Yvan Clermont]

Yes.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Yes? An outright yes? Do you have any data on that as well? I think that would also give us an idea of what was unreported. Is that also indicated in any of your statistics?

[Yvan Clermont]

On the repetitive nature of the sexual offence I believe we do have numbers and we can provide those to the committee.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Okay.

[Samuel Perreault, Analyst, General Social Survey on Victimization, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada]

What we will have is the number of victimizations in the past 12 months, because we do ask for that. But if someone was victimized prior to that 12-month period then we will know, unless it was before the age of 15, because we also ask for abuse during childhood.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I have question with regard to aboriginals.

I'm just wondering if you can comment on the statistics on the ability of the police to solve crimes against aboriginal women and girls versus non-aboriginal women and girls.

Is there a gap in the ability to solve these different crimes?

[Rebecca Kong]

We only have, as you saw from the deck in terms of the police report information, the aboriginal identity of victims for homicide incidents. That was part of our homicide survey.

In terms of the clearance rate there was not a big difference. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I do recall the percentage point in terms of clearance rate was actually slightly higher for homicides involving aboriginal females.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

With regard to cyberbullying—and perhaps you cannot comment on this—I'm wondering, do we see a new form of bullying that isn't seen elsewhere, so it's exclusive to social media?

[Yvan Clermont]

As I've already mentioned previously, self-reported stalking or criminal harassment went down except for emails and texts being sent. And there was also identity theft when it came to young boys; it was more about that and sending compromising stuff, taking their emails. That would be a new form we've seen that is increasing.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I want to take this back to the reporting stage.

As we indicated, you said, yes, that all of that information is in the data—and you may not be able to answer this question, but maybe the data is available to us—do you find more people who are over into the teenage years report when there is a first-time abuse situation or do you find it's more likely that they report because this is something that is impacted by what they had gone through as a child as well?

Do you have that comparison available?

[Rebecca Kong]

Are you referring to reporting to police?

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Reporting to police and things of that sort. Is there anything to show that people have grown, that this has happened and this is just who I am, or is it people for whom this has happened to them the first time and they say, I'm immediately going to report it?

Is there any way of getting data on that?

[Rebecca Kong]

In terms of the police-reported information we don't have an indication of whether it is the first time or not. We do have information, and I don't know if it would be useful to try to get at that question, in terms of the lag time between when the incident happened and when they decided to report to the police.

That might be an indication in terms of delay or comfort level of coming forward, but we can't assume that there was repeated abuse in between the incidents that they're reporting and when they reported.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Mr. Fraser.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you very much, both to our witnesses and to our analysts for preparing a lovely report to brief us in advance. I found it very helpful.

When our witnesses from Status of Women were here earlier they mentioned that an area we don't know a lot about is hyper-sexualization. Are there any statistics that you have on hyper-sexualization of youth such as access to sexually explicit material?

[Yvan Clermont]

No, we don't have that information.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

There's nothing on the radar to seek information on that topic by any chance is there?