Status of Women Committee on Sept. 18th, 2024

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Chair.

Ms. Rioux, I want to go back to parental alienation. I'll give you an example.

In Manitoba, they have a program called For the Sake of the Children. They had this years ago. I don't think it was a bad program, because sometimes parents can be toxic and divorce, but sometimes there are cases in which parents are raising concerns, not to their children but to others, and there are real concerns in place.

Parental alienation is still in place, and it's still something that can be used in decision-making by courts. What kind of threat does it pose to individuals experiencing coercive abuse to be afraid to leave a situation? Let's say there's a violent parent. They know they're going to be able to look after a child even if they say something because of parental alienation. How does that, in reverse, impact on an individual's ability to leave a relationship?

[Julie Rioux]

I don't have the statistics, but I have heard many women say they would never have left if they had known at what level of risk their children would have been by leaving.

I also heard from a police officer directly who told me that they no longer—they as an individual officer—recommend that women leave if they see that it's not physical abuse. If it's coercive control and emotional abuse, they don't necessarily tell them to leave, because they know that it will get worse, and they know that their children will be at higher risk.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you so much.

This question is for Ms. Jeshani.

You spoke about long-term impacts of coercive control. You spoke about the constant feeling of fear, constant feelings of threat and how it has long-term impacts of post-traumatic stress disorder. I've heard it's very much like what war veterans experience.

Can you expand on that quickly?

[Shelina Jeshani]

We definitely have heard from survivors about the long-term impacts of such behaviour, to a point where they can't make basic decisions for themselves and their children, because all of that power has been taken away from them. They are constantly being told that they don't have the intellect or the competence to make any of those decisions over their own lives. They don't even know how to navigate that anymore. That is over years and years of tearing down that person and their sense of being.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you, Leah.

Michelle, you have five minutes.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much to our witnesses today. This is a very tough topic. Thank you for the work that you do and the vicarious trauma that you have to experience every day. I say that to the people on the front line who are not doing okay. As my colleague Dominique said earlier, as all of these numbers have gone up, so has the responsibility on you to be on the front line to help all of these folks. I really do appreciate what you do.

This study is about coercive control and what we need to do as a government to talk about it, or change policy, or implement policy. I want to keep that at the forefront.

I'll go to the Safe Centre of Peel, and I believe it's Shelina.

Is it you who said there's a strangulation every single day?

[Shelina Jeshani]

Yes, that's correct.

According to Peel Regional Police statistics, we see one strangulation in our community a day. As I said, not all women report, so we know that it is an under-reported statistic.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

That's just shocking, horrific and awful.

Do you know how many of the perpetrators, primarily men, who are doing the strangling are out on bail?

[Shelina Jeshani]

Unfortunately, I don't have that data.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

One thing I'm seeing and hearing in my own community is that police officers are responding, but then their hands are tied because of the justice system. They try to help, but then they're sort of left with a miss because the man or whoever they've picked up is walking free.

There's a case in Newfoundland and Labrador that I spoke of over the summer. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this case, but it was pretty horrific. The young woman who was killed by her husband had five children. The women detectives who were talking to me about this.... There was so much pain and suffering. The consequences of coercive control are so much bigger than what we think. It's the front line, like yourselves, that is also taking this home. They said that they knew this was going to happen. They literally knew.

I can see all of you nodding your heads. You're seeing these strangulations escalate. It doesn't get better, as everyone here today has said.

One thing that I think is going to be very important for this study is an actual definition of coercive control. I think how we define this is going to be really key in moving forward.

I'm going to turn to Dr. Polzin-Holman from Little Warriors.

You guys do absolutely phenomenal work. What you do is actually life-changing work. This stat you said today of an 815% increase of online sexual luring of children is just awful. The sextortion that's happening and the human trafficking.... I've spoken with your organization about parents human trafficking their children, which has been around for a long time.

How would you define coercive control? If not everybody can answer it, could you submit to the committee what you would like to see as a definition? If I could get everybody to do that, I think that would be very valuable for us.

This is the other question I would ask Dr. Polzin-Holman. You've said you rely a lot on donations. Your organization does very well. You have very wonderful, gracious donors to help with a lot of the programming. How have you seen that the economy impacts donations?

[Wanda Polzin-Holman]

First of all, thank you for the kind comments and for the ongoing support and awareness.

In terms of your first question on coercive control, I would be happy to take some time and thoughtfully put something forward.

With regard to the second question, we are definitely seeing a decrease in charitable donations being made. I know that some changes have occurred that have impacted us, but I also think our economy has definitely had an impact.

Little Warriors has been around since 2008. Up until this past year, we have had very little support other than community supporters and businesses providing financial supports for our children and teens to come. My hope is there are some ways to provide more access in a barrier-free way for children and teens for programs like ours and programs like those being represented today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Michelle.

Anita, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you to all of the witnesses here today.

I have a number of questions. I'm not sure I'll get through all of them, but the amount of information you've given us is really incredible.

I would like to start with you, Julie, because some of the things you're describing, to be honest, defy logic. I think every one of us at the table is scratching our head and asking how this could happen, especially in our court system.

I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit. You said something in the beginning about people being sent to the United States and about an industry growing around this.

Could you talk about that?

My concern is that it sounds like the courts might be unwittingly facilitating coercive control without even realizing they're actually doing so.

[Julie Rioux]

I'm going to try to be politically correct. I don't know how unwitting it is when the AFCC is the one doing the training. It is a lobby group registered in California, and they do most of the judicial training. Their stated position on their American site is that they support alienation. Many of their members are the same therapists and social workers who charge over $250 an hour for reunification therapy. They require anything from $2,000 to $15,000 in retainers, so they don't bill like a normal social worker or therapist would. You know, you normally go see your therapist, you pay for your appointment, and then insurance returns it. No, these people just have a blank card.

In the United States, there was a case.... Wilson v. Sinclair, I believe it is. I know the survivor. She was told to bring her children down to the U.S., to New York, to Turning Point or Building Family Bridges. She was told to tell her children that they were going on a holiday. They showed up, and then these transporters took them, and she had to pay over $40,000 Canadian for the pleasure of having her children abused.

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

Just to be clear, these are Canadian children going to....

Who can make...?

[Julie Rioux]

The Canadian court is ordering this.

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

Who pays for this?

[Julie Rioux]

Often the woman is made to pay the majority, or half, and if they don't have the money and they had a family home that was sold and put into trust, that money is used. Most victims are not exceedingly rich.

Of course, the more wealthy the family, the worse it is, but oftentimes, by the time they are done court, they have nothing left for a down payment on a new house.

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

Just to be clear, the court order is to go to this particular form of therapy by this particular vendor, not to say that there needs to be therapy generally and that there's autonomy—

[Julie Rioux]

It has to be reunification therapy, and they will order the particular vendor, and these vendors prewrite the court orders so that there's a 90-day period of no contact, to be extended on the basis of what the therapist says. In one of these cases, I think she was up to about 600 days since seeing one of her children. In another case, it was over a year and a half, and they finally saw the boy. He didn't get on the bus and come to his mother's because he was told that if he did that, his mother would go to jail, so it is threat therapy.

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

How prevalent is this?

[Julie Rioux]

There was talk about Peel. I think that's probably the worst place we hear about it. In the Peel and Brampton area, at that particular courthouse, you're very much at risk of having a parenting reversal and getting no contact.

There was a case around that area of a four-year-old and police enforcement. They removed the child, and the child was screaming and crying, and there were eight police officers. There are not that many of those cases in Ottawa because the Ottawa police send their lawyers to court to ask that the orders not be police-enforced.

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

That goes to my other question, which is about the remedy. You're saying here that from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, these things are different. What would be a remedy, and at what level of government could this be done?

[Julie Rioux]

I think the practice of removing a child from their main caregiver to give them to the other parent, unless there are assault charges or abuse charges or there's a really high risk, needs to be banned. I think reunification therapy, if you describe it in that way, also needs to be banned, because basically what we're doing is similar to conversion therapy. It's an untrained professional with no domestic violence training. There is no regulation. Because parental alienation is not under the scope of practice for psychologists, they let it go, and the College of Social Workers seems to be mute on it, but that's where most of the practitioners are, in social work. If they get complaints, they just continue as unlicensed instead.

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

You're making a very compelling case. I don't know if I have time for questions for the other witnesses.