Status of Women Committee on April 12th, 2016

[Linda Savoie]

One area that has been very poorly examined is hyper-sexualization and de-normalization of violence in young women's lives. There's probably a bigger gap there than anywhere else in terms of what we have seen available.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Ludwig.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you for an excellent presentation. I have many questions.

Throughout your presentations one of the areas that I found of particular interest was on self-reporting. When we look at the trend of young people reporting sexual violence or sexual offences, it seemed to peak for males at 14 and for females at 15. Why do you think that's the trend, because after that it started to drop off?

[Yvan Clermont]

I don't have specific answers to that, but I think it could be related to exposure to vulnerable situations, such as being mentored or in situations where perpetrators could be a coach, or a teacher, or whatever. That could certainly be related. I don't know, there might be a way of doing cross-tabulation to see if the type of relationship of the perpetrator with the victim could be one way to answer this question.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Do you have any idea why they chose to report? It's a scary situation to come forward and say that action took place. Do we know what gave them the courage to come forward and report that?

[Rebecca Kong]

We don't have that information. The data you're looking at is in terms of rapes and police reported sexual offences by age. It does peak at the mid-teens. In the police reported survey that we have it's basically information that we get from police records management systems. There isn't anything that allows them to record the reason they came forward. We do have detailed information around the incidence that might provide some insight in terms of the relationship, the age of the other individual, where it happened, and the location of the offence. We would be happy to provide that information to the committee.

I think Mr. Clermont did indicate that in terms of those teen girls, where we see high rates of sexual violence based on the police reported data, the perpetrators tended to be acquaintances. That's also the case for young boys of the same age.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I'm looking at it for the young people who went forward and reported. How did that parallel with police training and police response preparation? Was there significant training provided as well over the last 10 years for officers who are first responders when someone came forward?

[Rebecca Kong]

I don't think CCJS Canada can comment on that. We don't have any information on the training. I don't know if colleagues from Status of Women have more information, but there may be other organizations such as Public Safety Canada or Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police that might be able to comment on programming and training.

[Linda Savoie]

I would go in the same direction as my colleague and suggest that Public Safety would be a better interlocutor on this front to describe the types of police training. We know some of these courses definitely provide training of that nature, but they can speak to that.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

On that theme of self-reporting, when people came forward and there was self-reporting, was it anonymous?

[Rebecca Kong]

In terms of the reporting to police, it wouldn't necessarily be anonymous if that's what you're referring to, or the victimization survey that we do.

[Yvan Clermont]

No it's not. The survey is conducted under the Statistics Act, which protects confidentiality of responses. That is made clear to the respondents of the victimization survey. When it starts, Statistics Canada conducts a telephone interview. We can provide the committee with all the methodology, which would go with the information that was asked previously about the likelihood to report and how it is done in the field.

Just to come back to one of the questions you had, I suggest we also provide to the committee the list of upcoming research or information we're going to release soon. There is a self-reported sexual assault study we'll be releasing by the end of the year, or maybe at the beginning of the winter. There could be interesting information for the committee here and also one on human trafficking that is going to be released next month. It's a small study though, very small.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Sahota.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Hello. Thank you for being here today.

I'd like to touch upon a little more of the statistics or information you may have on immigrant populations and violence against young women. I know a lot of the slides that you provided had aboriginal versus non-aboriginal. Are there future plans to do more collecting of data on that, and is there any information on whether Status of Women Canada has been doing any work on that? I know I heard a bit about forced marriages. The population of immigrant women here is over 20%. I think it might even be a lot higher, and we may not know the exact numbers, but it's definitely an important area that we don't have a lot of research on.

[Yvan Clermont]

We can look at what it is we're able to report on when we fall into a small category of respondents. Depending on the sample size and everything, race would be difficult to report especially for certain subgroups, but if we focus more on victimization at large rather than on a specific type of offence for which we could be victimized, we can look at what we have and provide to the committee some numbers about the immigrant population and those who have said they are immigrants to see if there are differences.

Samuel, I think you looked at that factor.... In fact, it would be less. The prevalence of victimization would be less among the immigrant population when we control for all other characteristics.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Okay.

What is the definition from Statistics Canada on immigration?

[Yvan Clermont]

It's born outside the country.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We're out of time on that one. I apologize.

I understand that Status of Women had to leave at 4:30. We will give you an opportunity to make your escape and then we'll resume our second round of questioning.

Thank you.

We will start our second round of questioning with Ms. Harder.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you very much.

Just referring to the report here, on page 3, I'm just looking for a bit of clarification here. I'm looking at a chart with regard to self-reported physical and sexual abuse suffered during childhood. I'm just wondering if you could help me understand the third bar that is provided there, the lightest blue colour. It says that it's the total, and I just don't understand. It's the total of what?

[Yvan Clermont]

It's the total for both males and females for that type of self-reported physical or sexual abuse. The first set of three bars, the dark blue, would be the prevalence of physical abuse for females, and that is a bit above 20%. The physical abuse for males would be higher, at more than 30%, but when you combine both boys and girls, it would make about 26%.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Okay. This question was originally intended for the Status of Women, but perhaps you can shed some light on it as well.

I've been following the Ghomeshi case a little, and one of the things that I've seen is just how it's gone along. In my estimation, and of course this is my opinion, it would appear to me that it's actually devalued the stories of women and their victimization, violence committed against women. It's actually made a bit of a celebrity figure out of someone who potentially committed or did commit a violent or a sexual crime. I'm just wondering if you would see the same thing, and if there is something we could do as a nation in order to actually remedy that.

[Yvan Clermont]

I'm not sure I can answer that last part.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I didn't think so. That's okay. I'll stick more to the stats, then.

One thing I've noticed is that aboriginal women and girls, of course, bear a disproportionate amount of violent crimes committed against them.

Have there been studies done in order to understand the root causes of violence that is committed against aboriginal women and girls? If those studies have been conducted, where would find them and what would they show?

[Yvan Clermont]

There is one coming up in a month from now. We're going to release an aboriginal victimization study at the end of June. We are going to publish in June a full report on aboriginal victimization, and look at the factors associated with that. Of course, within the limits of the information we have.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

It would appear that many of the challenges that are faced by the aboriginal communities are often blamed on the intervention of the federal government, whether past—as in much in the past—or perhaps even closer in timeline to today.

There's some of that and it is certainly related, for instance residential school systems, but also with regard to what was done with many aboriginal children in the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s, when they were taken out of their homes and put in the foster system and such.

Is there a way the federal government can be involved in bringing a solution to the victimization of aboriginals, without going about it in the same way that we have in the past? In other words, in the past it's been a bit of this top-down approach, or matriarchal, if you will.

How do we go about solving this issue without doing that again?