Thank you so much.
I just want to say that whilst I respect Monsieur Lapierre's comments on coercive control, I fundamentally and radically disagree with him. I don't believe that coercive control should be criminalized. I think that if the system is not nuanced enough to even understand physical violence—it can see broken arms and broken limbs—how can it understand the nuances of coercive control?
I think the criminalization of this process of violence is only going to harm certain communities, and I'm talking again about how women are going to be the ones who are going to be criminalized. Women are going to be the ones who are going to be arrested. Women, especially black and indigenous women, are going to be the ones at the receiving end of the criminal legal system's “one size fits all”.
For me, the one bold thing that can be done is to adopt transformative justice—transformative accountability, which is about community accountability. That form of transformative justice actually supports both the individuals who have caused harm and the individuals who have been harmed and does it in a way that does not penalize, does not shame and does not throw people away. It is a way of showing love and bringing people back into their humanity and leading with empathy. That's one shift that I would suggest. It's to move away from the criminal penalization and into transformative justice and accountability.