Status of Women Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2024

[Dr. Lisa Heslop, Associate, Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children, Western University]

Thank you for inviting me to attend on behalf of the Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children, CREVAWC. I have experience in the matters being debated. I worked for 30 years as the head of a clinical crisis intervention team at a large urban police service and within the family court system for over 13 years. I was a member of the national framework committee on proactive community policing responses to intimate partner violence and have done extensive longitudinal research on police contact with persons with mental illness.

Over the past few years, I've co-led projects related to family violence within the family court context here at CREVAWC. One of these projects, funded by the Department of Justice Canada, responds to the 2021 changes to the Divorce Act that name family violence, including coercive control, as factors for consideration to the best interests of children involved in family litigation. We have built an online guide that will aid family court professionals in developing parenting plans that account for the nature, severity and impact of family violence, including coercive control, on survivor parents and their children.

Coercive control is significant and devastating, and at times has lifelong consequences for survivors. It often extends, as you've heard, long past separation, and can include litigation abuse in family court and other tactics that are intended to overwhelm and deplete the survivor's financial and emotional resources.

At the centre, we work across sectors, including justice systems, with allied professionals, survivors and police, and we can confidently say that there are significant gaps in knowledge related to coercive control that place survivors and their children at risk and contribute to low rates of reporting and to inadequate responses from professionals across sectors.

We add our voices to others who've cautioned against the criminalization of coercive control without a multipronged survivor-led approach that includes significant investments in services and resources for survivors, interventions for perpetrators that address violence initiation and escalation, and education on coercive control for all social service, justice and health professionals. We strongly support the conclusion of the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission that criminal solutions to gender-based violence are effective only to the extent that they are part of a broader, community-based response.

Since other submissions have focused on these topics, I'll spend the remaining time talking about a key concern with the bill as crafted, and particularly about the inclusion of threats of suicidality as a form of coercive control. We have two major concerns.

The first is we have spent a long time trying to disentangle the mental health and criminal justice systems. Police are not mental health professionals. These are complex situations that are not likely to be easily sorted out on scene. When the police get it wrong, a person in a mental health crisis is charged criminally instead of getting the treatment they require.

Second, labelling suicidality as a form of coercive control holds a strong risk of oversimplifying this complexity. For example, I was involved in a situation in which a man made a number of threats to kill himself during the process of separating from his partner. These were experienced by his partner as attempts to get her to stay in the relationship, a view that was supported by the police and may well have been his intent. However, weeks later, this man took a knife from the kitchen, slit his throat in front of his partner and died.

We recommend great caution here. These things can coexist. A person can use suicidal threats to keep his partner from leaving, and he can also be suicidal. It's important to remember that one-third of femicides are femicide-suicides. Try also to imagine a scenario where a survivor expresses suicidal thoughts to her partner during the process of separation. He calls the police, alleging her suicidal ideation is coercively controlling. Will she be charged? This is how we go backwards.

For the legislation on coercive control to have the positive impact intended, safeguards are needed. We recommend that, at the very least, Canada follow in Australia's footsteps, delaying the time at which it comes into force. The delay will, among other things, allow time for considerable education, training and consultation with police, criminal justice professionals and stakeholders and with the frontline sector. An implementation task force should be set up to manage the introduction of changes in the Criminal Code. This task force should consider necessary education and training, and also provisions that can be put in place to protect against the misuse of these new provisions.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you, and thank you to all of the witnesses for your opening remarks.

At this point, we will move to our first round of questions. I'd like to begin with Michelle Ferreri.

You have six minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much to our witnesses here today.

Obviously, this is some very deeply upsetting testimony that we've heard as we study coercive control. It has been a kind of sidebar for me personally, about parental alienation and reunification camps, which I'm learning more about and which I think a lot of people don't know about.

It's also pretty timely for a lot of people who are pop culture folks watching Netflix, if they're watching The Menendez Brothers, as a lot of young people are. I see you guys shaking your heads.

Tina, your testimony that nobody believed you were abused is pretty shocking. That's a very shocking story and shows how far we've come in that time frame to now believing young men are capable of being sexually abused.

I think it's timely to reflect on the notion that you don't know what you don't know. There are a lot of people who truly do not understand coercive control, as was the case in a lot of that.

I want to start with Ms. Mercer. You have done some incredible research, and thank you for the work you do.

These psychologists and therapists are mandated by the courts and receiving funds for these therapy programs, these reunifications. Who's mandating the qualifications of these therapists? Who's overseeing that?

[Prof. Jean Mercer]

As far as I understand it, people can call themselves reunification therapists without any particular training. However, people who call themselves that are very often involved with essentially corporate structures, organizations that specialize especially in a couple of the reunification therapies that are well known and present themselves to the world as having this capacity for dealing with children who are avoiding one parent—

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

I'm sorry. I don't mean to cut you off. I have only five minutes,

I just wanted to get more of that from you. There seems to be a serious profiteering that is happening. To me, it's a follow-the-money situation in terms of who these therapists are. There seem to be a select few—many of them aren't even Canadian—and there seems to be some sort of insider trading, for lack of a better term.

To get back to my earlier point about understanding coercive control, these judges, who obviously aren't educated, are mandating these therapists that you say have no necessary qualifications under a board. Are they not overseen by anyone?

[Prof. Jean Mercer]

Therapists who are licensed are overseen to a certain extent in that they have to continue their professional education. To be a reunification therapist means nothing in particular. Now, you can have a person who is, in the United States and, I think, in Canada too, a board certified specialist in a particular kind of psychological work. For example, you could have a board certified forensic psychologist.

There is no such thing as board certification in reunification therapy. The people who are doing reunification therapy on the whole are people who, as you say, will receive a good deal of money for their work. If we keep in mind that when we're looking at the intensive treatments, the so-called camps, we may be looking at $20,000 or more for a four-day session...so you're right: Follow the money.

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

It is wild that we are putting people in charge of children who are probably already traumatized and putting them into a further trauma environment.

I'm going to go to you, Tina. The biggest thing I find when I'm delving into this is family law, number one, with these judges who are appointed. We have this massive shortage. They don't have to have a lot of knowledge in family law. They don't know much. It's mostly criminal.

Where is the line between provincial and federal, and what do you see as the federal government's role in family law in protecting children from this clearly toxic approach?

[Tina Swithin]

I can speak only to the U.S. I'm not familiar with Canada, but I know that our systems are very similar.

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

Does anybody on the panel know about that?

I'm finding a massive overlap with the Divorce Act and family law between provincial.... They overlap, and it causes a lot of confusion, and then nobody seems to want to take responsibility for correcting it.

If you can speak on the American side to what we could do, that's fine, but I wonder if there are any other witnesses who could speak to that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Unfortunately, we have only about 15 seconds. If it could be a tight answer, we could go ahead.

[Tina Swithin]

I can speak to the U.S.

We passed federal legislation, but each state governs its own state courts. I describe family court as the Wild West. There is no oversight, and that is a huge part of the problem. There is no transparency and no recourse if they get it wrong.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you, Ms. Swithin.

At this point I would like to invite Emmanuella.

You have the floor for six minutes.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here to answer some of our questions today.

My first question is for Dr. Mercer.

Can you tell us what some of the harms are that can come from a parent constantly speaking negatively about another parent, just in general, in situations where that may occur?

[Prof. Jean Mercer]

Children are very responsive to and are made very anxious and sad by parents who are speaking negatively on any topic. To talk about the other parent negatively, we would have to think about the level to which this is typical in intact families. Every spouse occasionally says something negative about the other spouse, such as, “Your dad left his dirty socks in the living room again.”

Before we could actually say what the long-term impact was, particularly of talking negatively about the other partner, we would have to have some sort of baseline measure of how often people do this in any case. That would allow us to say what is really constant negative talk. Until we have that, we can't answer your question, except in a general way. Hearing a lot of negative talk is disturbing to anyone, to children as well as to adults.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

You've said that reunification therapy has been found to be largely ineffective, and if anything, in some cases, has made relationships between children and their parents worse.

We are not experts in psychology, so when we hear this.... All we've heard from witnesses is about reunification camps, reunification therapy.

Can you specify what exactly is meant here? What are the conditions required for this to be harmful for a kid? I'm sure that in many instances, therapy is helpful for a child. In what instances is it harmful?

[Prof. Jean Mercer]

I'll try to answer your question by describing reunification therapy.

If we're talking about an intensive form of therapy, not in a psychologist's office but in what people are calling camps, even though they're not really camps, a typical scenario would be that the child is not told that they're going to go anywhere for treatment, but they are picked up by youth transport service workers, perhaps as they come out of school or perhaps at one of the parents' houses.

When they ask what's going on, they're told they'll find out when they get there. They're told that if they don't co-operate, the workers have handcuffs. The workers can chase them down and take them down. Their phones, IDs and money are taken away, and they are taken by plane or some other way to an unfamiliar city, where they will go to a hotel or an Airbnb, not a regular clinic or hospital setting.

Once there, the parent they're avoiding also shows up, and they will spend four days being told that they cannot talk about anything that ever happened before. They can't explain why they don't want to be in contact with the parent. Instead, they have to watch videos that will tell them that they have been totally confused and over-persuaded by the other parent and that they can't trust their own feelings about this.

After several days of this, they are told they are going home with the parent they don't want to be with and they may have no contact with the parent they prefer. If they have any contact with that person, he or she, but mainly she, can go to prison for being in contempt of court. That's the treatment.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

How do we ensure, when we're wording a recommendation, that we don't get it wrong, and that people who are analyzing this and putting it into action are not getting it wrong and are actually including your definition?

[Prof. Jean Mercer]

What we would have to do is not call it reunification therapy and not call it reintegration or reunion or any of the other terms, but instead describe what happens: The child cannot be taken by youth transport service workers; the child cannot be prevented from any contact with the preferred parent; and the child cannot be placed in the custody of someone with whom there is some kind of record that abuse has occurred.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you so much.

I appreciate your answers. For me, and I think possibly for my colleagues as well, it has clarified so much.

Thank you all for being here to answer our questions today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you.

Andréanne, you have six minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for being with us today for this additional meeting as part of our study on coercive control.

Ms. Heslop, in your opening remarks, you spoke about a bill. Were you referring to Bill C-332, on the criminalization of coercive control?

[Dr. Lisa Heslop]

I'm sorry, but I only heard the French question, and I'm not bilingual.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Is there a function on your computer or tablet where you can select the English interpretation?

Let's try that again, Andréanne; I'm aware of the time.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I thanked the witnesses for taking part in this important additional meeting as part of our study on coercive control.

I would reiterate that the idea for the study came from a request by Quebec government MNAs who tabled the rebuilding trust report and who met with experts in various social and legal spheres. That report led to the adoption of major recommendations in Quebec, such as special courts and electronic bracelets. However, one element does not fall under Quebec jurisdiction and that's the criminalization of coercive control.

Ms. Heslop, here is my question.

In your opening remarks, you mentioned a bill. Were you referring to Bill C-332, which is currently being studied by the Senate and which seeks to criminalize coercive control?

[Dr. Lisa Heslop]

Yes.