For more than 45 years, the Regroupement québécois des centres d'aide et de lutte contre les agressions à caractère sexuel has been committed to promoting an exchange of expertise among its members, supporting the search for solutions for putting an end to sexual assault and promoting the development of intersectional feminist intervention services for women in Quebec.
For the Regroupement, coercive control is both an individual and a collective problem that is rooted in unequal relationships. We use the expression “continuum of sexist violence” to designate behaviours intended to control and subordinate women in our society by instruments of domination such as violence and discrimination.
As a national group concerned with sexual violence, we would like to draw the committee's attention to the concept of sexual coercion in particular. According to expert Tanya Palmer, sexual violence, in a coercive control context, can manifest itself as chronic sexual violation, that is to say, the gradual erosion of a victim's sexual autonomy over time. The routine nature of most sexual assaults, such as nocturnal rape, constant touching, denial of intimacy and the fact that only one person dictates whether, when and how sexual relations must take place, degrades the victim's sexual autonomy. In other words, coercive control creates a general climate in which it is impossible to give enthusiastic, free and informed consent to sexual activity because refusal to comply may have consequences, particularly when accompanied by other types of violence, such as physical or psychological violence.
Consequently, we must stop viewing incidents of sexual violence between intimate partners as isolated events and start conceiving them as one of the manifestations on a continuum of tactics employed by the aggressor to trap the victim in a situation of violence.
As regards potential solutions, the Regroupement is particularly concerned about the fact that criminalization is currently the government's main strategy for preventing and correcting coercive control. Criminal justice measures should be only one part of a broader strategy.
As you are no doubt aware, only 5% of sexual crimes are currently reported to police in Canada. We also know that individuals most exposed to sexual violence, such as indigenous women, Black and racialized women, women with disabilities, persons with insecure immigration status and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, are more likely to have negative interactions with the criminal justice system and are therefore less inclined to turn to it. Considering that, according to the Canadian Women's Foundation, more than 55% of Canada's population doesn't fully understand the concept of consent to sexual activity, we encourage the federal government to focus more on public education and awareness campaigns in order to prevent violence before it occurs.
The organizations combatting sexual violence are on the front lines of the development and promotion of awareness and prevention programs in Canadian communities. However, the demand those organizations are facing only grows from year to year, and the lack of adequate resources directly results in longer waiting times for victims seeking the care they need to begin healing. Consequently, the federal government must ensure that those organizations have adequate resources to do the absolutely vital awareness and prevention work they do in our communities across the country.
Lastly, one of the main factors that keeps women trapped in coercive control dynamics is economic inequalities, as committee members were just discussing. The committee will definitely continue hearing about the economic inequalities issue during its current study. These inequalities still persist today. Economic insecurity often forces women to relocate or to live in dangerous situations in order to have a roof over their heads and to meet their basic needs.
The Regroupement believes it is crucially important to address the economic inequalities issue to enable women to escape their aggressor. We have recently witnessed the implementation of the national action plan to end gender-based violence, which the Regroupement views in a positive light. However, like the Ending Violence Association of Canada, we believe that the action plan leaves the actors in the fight against sexual violence somewhat to their own devices.
We are asking the federal government to make more policy room and grant more resources to community organizations that provide assistance to sexual assault victims and to stop viewing sexual violence and domestic violence as separate phenomena. Instead it should view them as crosscutting issues. Sexual assault is committed between intimate partners, and that expands domestic violence dynamics. These issues are part of a continuum, not two separate problems. We feel we now have a chance to improve the action plan by conferring a more prominent role on stakeholders in the fight against sexual assault.