Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
Juripop is an organization whose mission is to improve access to justice for vulnerable people. It has been working with women who are victims of domestic and post-separation violence for several years. More specifically, it represents these individuals in their family law proceedings involving custody, separation, and protective measures.
We've noticed that the victims we represent have one thing in common: coercive control is part of their domestic violence experience.
We know that conversations around coercive control have recently focused more on criminalization.
Juripop would like to draw your attention to an aspect that we feel is still neglected: the impact of coercive control in family law, particularly in divorce cases. Almost every day, our lawyers see that family law courts misunderstand coercive control. This lack of understanding has real and significant consequences for victims.
Too often, the women Juripop represents are revictimized by judicial decisions that ignore patterns of violent and controlling behaviour that manifest as coercive control.
Family law courts can unintentionally perpetuate coercive control through different types of decisions, such as shared custody orders. Shared custody orders may seem common and trivial, but in a situation where coercive control is present, they allow the violent parent to maintain control over the mother and children. For example, the violent parent may refuse to co-operate on decisions related to the children's education, health and activities, or force the victim to remain in contact with them and constantly negotiate all of those things. The abuser may also use parenting time to interrogate the children about the victim's private life or try to turn the children against the victim, which is why we say that children are also victims of coercive control.
It's also important to know that courts tend to reject our requests for accommodation to ensure victims' physical and psychological safety during their testimony because the courts don't understand the difficulties related to coercive control. These measures, such as the presence of an intervenor during a discovery interview or the option to testify by video conference, are automatically granted in criminal matters.
All the situations I just described compel our lawyers to make considerable efforts to educate the court about coercive control: how it's defined, what it looks like and its consequences. The resulting legal workload is heavy, the emotional burden great and the financial cost to victims high, but we believe this could be mitigated if the justice system itself had a better understanding of the phenomenon from the outset.
That is why we believe that legislative reforms are needed at the federal level, specifically through the Divorce Act. We recommend explicitly including coercive control as a factor judges must consider when making decisions affecting children or separation. We believe that such recognition could build on the work that was done by recognizing family violence in the Divorce Act, and it would offer better protection to victims, including children.
We also recommend that training for new judges include a component on coercive control. The current lack of training creates significant gaps in assessing the situations experienced by victims and often makes it impossible to take this reality into account in judicial decisions.
In conclusion, Juripop believes that family law should be a component of the committee's study on the criminalization of coercive control.
Thank you.