Thank you. I hope she's okay.
There's Monica, whose 16-year-old daughter nearly committed suicide after her sexual assault; or Lucy, who was publicly shamed with unethical tactics used against her to bully her for years after testifying versus Jian Ghomeshi, who sexually assaulted her and choked her; or Dan Jennings, whose daughter Caitlin was beaten to death with a hammer in London last year.
With the permission from each of these survivors, I have struggled to condense these stories to fit into this speech. In all of these cases, there have been multiple police interventions and there have been attempts to leave, negotiate, plead, pray and run, only to be trapped and further abused by the system and in some cases murdered. We as Canadians have charter rights that are essentially a “get out of jail free” card for criminals, but what about survivors' rights? Why are our charter rights never accounted for?
Most survivors try to leave, but that's when it becomes the most dangerous. Seventy-five per cent of murders happen after the victim leaves. When we're not murdered, we are left in the dark in a life that we no longer understand, with the most debilitating implications of physical, emotional, financial, mental and spiritual turmoil. These are not insular struggles. They affect every system of government and every nuance of life—economic, health care, child care, education, housing and so on. Canada spends an under-representative and dated figure of $8 billion annually on the aftermath of IPV alone. This does not account for the violence of human trafficking, sexual assault and the under-reported cases, which are the majority.
The science behind the effects of trauma is endless. Trauma changes the chemistry of your brain. You are not the same person. There is no “getting over it”. Healing happens in community only with proper medical and therapeutic intervention. We know the state of the country as far as health care is concerned right now. Very few have access to these absolutely necessary remedies in a quantifiable way. Sometimes the effects of trauma are permanent. Could you also imagine having a pre-existing disability? A staggering 40% of disabled people have been abused.
If you haven't met a survivor and victim's family, well, now you have. Those are my parents back there.
This is my passport, and I'm damned embarrassed. I can't live in Canada anymore, because it's not safe for me. I have founded an organization here and in the U.S. called End Violence Everywhere, or EVE, a now registered non-profit. We will put survivors first, reform this justice system and better the community. We need to work together, because you cannot leave it up to the abusers. They do not self-rehabilitate. They do not get better. They do not stop. In fact, they are empowered every time they get away with it, and they increase their violence.
We are too late for tens of thousands of people, but we can prevent further atrocities. Canada needs to stop hiding under the guise of the nice country where nothing bad happens. It's bad, and it's happening right now.
Here we present some solutions. Declare IPV and SA a national state of emergency—