Status of Women Committee on April 5th, 2022

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I would like to call this meeting to order.

Welcome to the 13th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on Tuesday, February 1, the committee will resume its study of intimate partner and domestic violence in Canada.

Per the directive of the Board of Internal Economy on March 10, 2022, all those attending in person must wear a mask, except for members who are at their place during the proceedings.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to state a few rules for witnesses and members.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are participating by videoconference, click the microphone icon to activate your mike. Please put your mike on mute when you aren't speaking.

For the interpretation, if you are participating in the meeting by Zoom, you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either floor, English or French. If you are participating in person, you can use the headset provided and select the channel you want.

I would remind the members and witnesses that all their comments must be addressed to the chair.

Before we welcome our witnesses, I would like to provide a warning. We will be discussing experiences related to violence and assault. This may be triggering to viewers with similar experiences. If you feel distressed or if you need help, please advise the clerk.

I now want to welcome our guests to today's first panel. We have, as an individual, Geneviève Lessard, a professor at Laval University. From the Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association, we have Rekha Gadhia, manager, family services department. From the Centre-Femmes de Bellechasse, we have Marjolaine Montminy, director.

We will begin with opening remarks. You will each be provided with five minutes for your opening remarks. When you see me twirl my pen, I'm asking you to wrap it up, and I ask that you take 10 to 15 seconds to say your last words.

I am now going to turn the floor over to Geneviève Lessard.

Geneviève, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Geneviève Lessard, Professor, Laval University, As an Individual]

Good afternoon. Thank you for your invitation.

My name is Geneviève Lessard and I am a professor at Université Laval and director of the RAIV, an acronym referring to applied and interdisciplinary research into intimate, family and structural violence. The RAIV is one of the five members of the Alliance of Canadian Research Centres on Gender-Based Violence.

On December 6, 1989, a young man murdered 14 young women at the École polytechnique de Montréal. That tragic event led to the Canadian government's mobilization to fund infrastructure for research into violence against women. This resulted in the creation of our Canadian alliance, which is still active, 30 years later, and conducts a number of projects in which the RAIV researchers in Quebec are actively involved.

The RAIV was formerly called CRI‑VIFF, the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la violence familiale et la violence faite aux femmes. I mention this for the benefit of those who have been involved in this issue for a long time. We changed the name in 2020 when we received a new infrastructure grant that allowed us to expand our academic programming to study structural violence as well, in addition to violence against women and children, again adopting the same partnership and interdisciplinary research approach.

The RAIV includes about 30 full-time researchers who are attached to six universities in Quebec, some 40 national and international collaborators, and a number of students and practice partners. We have two teams funded by the FRQSC, the Fonds de recherche du Québec pour la société et la culture: one team on spousal violence, which I lead, and another on structural violence and social justice, led by my colleague Catherine Rossi.

Like myself and a number of other experts in the field, you have probably observed that the pandemic has exacerbated and accentuated intimate, familial and structural violence. Nor do we foresee a decline in violence in the post-pandemic period. In fact, we expect to see many more disclosures after the fact by individuals who have tolerated violence for a long time or who have endured more serious violence because of it being more difficult to access resources during the pandemic.

That is why opting to emphasize investment in research into violence seems to us to really be a good solution. It will enable researchers who specialize in the field to continue to support not only practice partners, but also decision-makers like you who want to be part of the solution in order to improve prevention and the way assistance is provided to the people affected. This is, in fact, what we are doing today at this meeting.

These efforts enable us collectively to reduce the social costs, which are enormous. According to the available figures, it costs $6 billion per year, in Canada, to help victims of violence. That valuation actually precedes the pandemic, so that means that the costs are even higher today.

In the last two years, practitioners that specialize in spousal violence have faced a double challenge: first, they have had to respond to the rise in requests for help, and, second, they have had to adapt their resources to comply with public health rules. The history of the research done in the last 30 years in the area of violence shows that given this kind of challenge, researchers and practitioners have to work together to achieve social innovations. So I welcome your initiative. Thank you for the great idea of doing a national study of violence. It will enable us to contribute to this together and continue to make progress toward the dream of greater social justice and more egalitarian social relationships.

In addition to my duties as director of a centre and a team at the centre, the work I undertake in my personal capacity deals with youth: children's exposure to spousal violence, co‑occurrence of spousal violence and familial violence against children, coordination between the help resources concerned, and preventive work with young people.

I have just completed a study of young adults who were exposed to spousal violence in childhood or adolescence. I was saddened to find that despite the seriousness of the violence to which they were exposed, almost none of the young people who participated in our study had had access to specialized assistance in spousal violence when they were children or adolescents. They suffered when they were young, but it was only once they were adults and able to find help themselves that they finally obtained resources. It also takes a lot of effort to find those resources and to find services that are adapted to what they are experiencing now that they have become young adults.

We also know that these young people have fewer resources in their natural network than young people who are not exposed to spousal violence. Often, it is parents who help young people and keep them at home for a long time while they are going to school. In the case of these young people, it is often the opposite: they want to escape the violent home if the parents are still together.

These are major challenges. We decided to transform the results of our research into practical, concrete tools, which we have made available online. We relied on the results of our research to identify the interventions that young people consider to be effective and thus determine what an adult can do when faced with a young person who has been exposed to spousal violence, to help him or her. We designed a website organized by field of activity, so there are sections for young people attending school, living in group homes, and so on.

I see that my speaking time is up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much. I gave you a few extra seconds there and I've put the buzzer on again.

I'm now going to pass it over to the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association.

Rekha, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Rekha Gadhia, Manager, Family Services Department, Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association]

Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for inviting the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, which I'll refer to as CIWA. It is a privilege to be here today to share and to gain further insights on this issue. We are very thankful for all the work being done by this committee to end intimate partner violence in Canada.

I'm calling from Calgary, Alberta, located on the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty No. 7 region in southern Alberta. Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta Region 3.

At CIWA, we work with immigrant and refugee families as our target population, and in our 40 years of experience in working in this area, we believe that there is a huge need to increase accessibility and reduce social isolation and barriers to accessing community services for immigrant women/men and their families living in family/domestic intimate partner violence situations.

Intimate partner violence is growing at an alarming pace, and the pandemic only brought a further huge spike globally. At CIWA, we saw a 57% increase in the clients whom we serve. Immigrant women whom we serve are at a higher risk due to language and culture barriers, poverty and lack of information on available resources.

In our experience, violence occurs among immigrant families due to the stressors related to overcoming the barriers related to settlement and integration, an inability to meet basic needs, unique personal circumstances and vulnerabilities, and the barriers related to premigration, migration and resettlement. Cultural barriers, stigma and role reversals only intensify their abuse experience.

This is further deepened when there is pre-existing trauma in the case of refugees, for example, who come with adverse experiences of war zones, have large families, maybe have disabilities, low to zero literacy in their own language, huge cultural barriers and stigma. Intimate partner violence programs and services that we offer should aim to positively impact immigrant families, as they should anywhere, by addressing these grassroots issues and changing the way people perceive and handle stress, gender equality, equity, family conflict, etc., as they are able only then to cope with all of these barriers.

Community education and awareness are also extremely important in reaching out to victims, perpetrators and family members. Our experience shows that the need to extend the services beyond women to encompass men and boys and the community at large is critical. Very often, immigrant men come from cultures of toxic masculinity, with defined gender roles and cultural norms that do not expect them to be part and parcel of the daily routines, of upbringing and of supporting their partners. They find it difficult to understand this expectation. We have learned that the real empowerment for women and children will truly happen when we engage men and boys.

This learning became much more concrete with our engagement with the University of Calgary's violence research, Shift, and the engaging men learning collaborative. For one, we believe that working with men and boys on prevention will only enhance our collective learning to better understand men's needs and issues and their level of a lack of awareness. This will then enable us to offer concrete support for women and children and holistic services for the entire family and will address the grassroots factors that lead to perpetuation of violence and abuse.

At CIWA, we have identified some of the best and promising practices to improve supports and protection for women and girls living in unsafe environments. This includes reaching out to them where they are: when they naturally go out for their daily tasks or congregate naturally in community centres, clinics, English classes and workplaces.

Offering information in a culturally sensitive way and in their first language is critical in regard to the issue itself and to education and awareness, be it tools or resources—everything—as is engaging boys and girls early on in schools through developing and offering a gender-based violence prevention curriculum that we have developed and are offering in some schools.

Also included are healthy relationships; focused education for adults and youth; engaging ethnic communities and faith-based leaders in education and awareness to help reduce the stigma and to talk about healthy gender norms, healthy masculinity, healthy relationships and cross-cultural parenting, and eventually connecting the women and girls with them for accessing cultural supports from within the community because they trust them, and connecting women and girls with the financial resources to make them less dependent, not depending on the partner.

Included as well is having projects like “Find Me a Home”, which we have at CIWA to offer emergency transitional housing and crisis supports so that they can leave the abusive situation, which includes partnering with hotels and motels that we consider safe and having a strong understanding of various intersectionalities with intimate partner violence—the health sector, disabilities, employment—to further address the factors that truly limit the women and girls from leaving the abusive situation and to create customized support services and resources to meet their unique needs.

Having a cross-sector and cross-system coordinated response model is extremely important and efficient. We have an example in Calgary with the police services community-based “Equally Safe” model that CIWA is also a formal partner of. Also important is having in each city and province an initiative based on a collective impact model, such as the Calgary Domestic Violence Collective's Impact Alberta violence prevention framework. Those are some of the examples of cross-system sector collaboration that we have.

I will leave at the end with some of the recommendations that we have come up with. We just wrapped up a WAGE-funded research project called “Employment Security Alliance” and our recommendations are that workplaces should have the culturally sensitive support—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I'm sorry. We're over time there. What we can do [Technical difficulty—Editor] to be sent to our committee. That would be fantastic.

What I need to do is turn it over to our next witness right now. I'm going to turn it over for the the next five minutes to Marjolaine from the Centre-Femmes de Bellechasse.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Marjolaine Montminy, Director, Centre-Femmes de Bellechasse]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

To introduce myself, I am Marjolaine Montminy. I have been the director of the Centre-Femmes de Bellechasse since it was created in 2000.

The RCM of Bellechasse is a large rural area located south of Quebec City. It is composed of 20 municipalities, but there are no cities. It is a beautiful agricultural and industrial region, with businesses and certain community services. In general, it is a great place to live.

We do have access to medical services and we have a CLSC within the regional municipality, but there is always some degree of precariousness.

Public transit exists on a very small scale and does not meet all the needs in the area. It is hard for transit to be viable, since there are such long distances.

There is a workaround solution, the volunteer community transportation service, but it is very difficult to maintain these days. When seniors left, as a protective measure against COVID‑19, this made the most important link in the system, which operates on volunteer efforts, even more fragile.

There is no taxi service in the entire RCM.

There is a police station in the centre of the regional municipality, so when a call for help is made, a patrol car may take as long as 25 minutes to get to the scene of the emergency. The same is true for an ambulance.

Community organizations like ours normally work during daytime hours. We all know that episodes of intimate partner violence happen in the evening, at night, or on weekends. To fulfil the mission of offering effective services to women and men who need help, we have to have adequate funding. This is a major request we have been making to decision-makers for many years.

In our RCM, we are experiencing scarcity in affordable housing. People have to move away from major centres to find rents like that. The municipal housing bureaus in the regional municipality are mainly for people aged 50 and over. A young family looking for housing to get out of a spousal violence situation will probably have difficulty accessing it.

In a small rural community, it is hard to preserve anonymity. A person's entourage is often composed of people all related to one another, and this may make it easier for an aggressor to control his victim, since it will be easier to isolate her.

Internet and cellphone coverage is really not equal everywhere. Some municipalities, especially in the concessions, don't yet have access to these leading-edge new technologies. Exorbitant charges for Internet service mean that some low-income residents have to forego that tool, despite it now being considered to be essential. Imagine a person whose only income is social assistance having to pay the charges for Internet service; that would take a big bite out of their budget.

In rural communities it is hard to develop a protection scenario with a woman who lives in a concession, since there are long distances between houses.

Women with disabilities and older women are more vulnerable, since they depend heavily on their caregivers. If they are living in an atmosphere of violence, they risk taking much longer to break the silence. They don't want to lose the only help they have access to.

When an episode of violence breaks out, people tend to remind the victim of the importance of preserving family ties, when it has been proved that intervention should focus first on the victim's safety and on holding the aggressor accountable for his choice.

We must never forget that spousal violence is about taking control, not losing control.

When it comes to the judicial process, there is little interest in the history of the violence and the focus is mainly on the event that triggered the process, when the history of spousal violence may have a crucial impact on the aggressor's risk of recidivism.

In addition, the media play a large role in whether violence is tolerated or not. The women's movement has strived to change the language used in situations of serious spousal violence. People talk about family tragedies or crimes of passion, but those terms have nothing to do with the reality of spousal violence. There is no passion involved in someone establishing total control of the person they claim to love.

The women's movement has brought strong pressure to bear to introduce a difference between the words "homicide" and "femicide". The use of this new word leads to a whole different analysis of the situation. When murders of women are submerged in the general designation of homicide, the public does not realize the extent of spousal violence in our lives. The influence that the vocabulary and the media have gets downplayed.

Doctors and other medical professionals have to be trained to do a better job of detecting the various symptoms that a patient who is a victim of spousal violence presents. Women have to feel safe in a doctor's office and they have to be able to be alone with the doctor so they can speak freely. Too often, the treatment focused on is meant to treat the immediate symptoms, and not the real cause of what the person sought the consultation for. Treating only the obvious symptoms unfortunately contributes to increasing the tolerance of what the patient is experiencing. Often, that prevents a victim of spousal violence from initiating a real effort to get out of her unhealthy situation.

If the violence perpetrated against a spouse were instead committed against a perfect stranger, would there be such tolerance? I highly doubt it.

I see that time is running out, so I will skip to my conclusion.

In Quebec, we are doing a lot of work to implement the recommendations made in the non-partisan report entitled "Rebâtir la confiance". My opinion is that this is the way forward.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

We're now going to start off with our round of questions. We're going to start with each person getting six minutes. We'll be starting off with Shelby Kramp-Neuman.

Shelby, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Shelby Kramp-Neuman, Conservative, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to Geneviève, Rekha and Marjolaine.

There's no question that over the course of the study, over the last several weeks, we've been reflecting a tremendous amount, in depth, on what we can do moving forward. Ideally, we as a committee want to be part of the solution, and we can recognize that there are many challenges when it comes to victims of domestic violence and how we end intimate partner violence.

I'll start with Geneviève. How do you see the government stepping up? What is the number one priority, your role, that you see this committee moving forward with?

[Geneviève Lessard]

Thank you for the question. Yes, I didn't have time to finish my presentation and tell you my recommendations.

I would therefore like to present two recommendations that I think are important in connection with my presentation.

First, we have to do more and provide more support for prevention measures, by funding projects that will reach young people in a more proactive way. To do that, we have to take a broader approach to violence, so that we look at violence that may be considered to be a bit less serious, that perhaps doesn't yet correspond entirely to coercive conduct or perhaps does not present very clear indicia of dangerousness. The thing is that we have to defuse violent situations before they take root and become embedded, dangerous and coercive situations. So we need to take a preventive approach—

[Shelby Kramp-Neuman, Conservative, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you very much. If you don't mind, I'm just going to stop you there because of time. I'd like to get another question in.

I just have a few comments. I'm suggesting that this is disturbing and comforting at the same time. It's disturbing that we have to talk this long about it and there are so many groups that have so many horrific stories to share, but it's comforting at the same time that we have this many advocacy groups that are doing what you are doing. Thank you to all of you.

Perhaps I'll ask Rekha or Marjolaine to see if they can address any specific measures that this particular government needs to do to best address this. Some of you have come up with some recommendations, but could either Rekha or Marjolaine provide the committee with any specific measures to help address how we move forward, because a lot of us were talking and there's a lot of advocacy but we need action?

[Rekha Gadhia]

Sure, I can start.

One of the recommendations is.... Of course, the funding is a no-brainer, prevention-based and intervention-based, but there needs to be education. For engaging the men, the workplaces need to have culturally sensitive or trauma-informed training to be happening about the gender-based violence issue itself, how to mitigate that and how they can play a role. Also, a similar curriculum could be offered in the schools. That is one solid thing.

Another is providing employment and financial security so that women are able to truly leave the situation. For that, we would like to also have customized bridging programs and policy changes, even at the workplaces, when women are going through all the violence issues and they want to leave, or even if they have left the situation but they have children, who are typically with the moms. They have to take care of the child care, they have court dates and whatnot, so the employers need to have that understanding. Having policies around supporting the women at workplaces is one of the solid recommendations I can give right off the bat.

[Shelby Kramp-Neuman, Conservative, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you.

Marjolaine, can you reflect on any specific in-depth measures that you would suggest moving forward?

[Marjolaine Montminy]

We're going to have to study everything relating to the laws concerning judgments in spousal violence and sexual violence cases. The perpetrator of the violence has to be held accountable. At present, women who are victims of violence are often the ones called to testify in court. Then they have to tell their stories multiple times, and it is very difficult for them. So these women need to be given help from the beginning to the end of the judicial process.

In addition, the media have to raise awareness of spousal violence in the way they talk about things. The media must not spin violent situations into fairy tales. It is also very important to use the real terminology. In fact, we have seen changes since we started using the word "femicide" instead of "homicide", about five years ago. So it really hasn't been that long.

Education is also very important. We really have to educate our young men about the idea of power. Men have to stop exercising power over their spouses. It's unfortunate, and that really isn't what love is.

[Shelby Kramp-Neuman, Conservative, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We're going to pass the next six minutes to Jenna Sudds.

Jenna, you have six minutes.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to all of our witnesses for joining us today.

I will start with Geneviève.

You spoke a bit about the impact of intimate partner violence when children are present. I'm wondering if you can share with us, from some of the research you have done, what some of the benefits are of early intervention as far as kids are concerned.

[Geneviève Lessard]

Thank you for the question.

One of the benefits would be to enable children to understand what they are experiencing sooner, to take the responsibility off their shoulders and let them know that help is available for them somewhere. I spoke earlier about difficulties in accessing help, but there are a lot of benefits in offering specialized services. When children can talk about what is happening, when they are able to understand the situation, when they can distinguish the violent behaviour from the person engaging in it, when they know it is unacceptable and it doesn't happen in all families, then certainly that will enormously reduce the impact of the violence.

The research that has been done in the last 30 years has shown that the impact of exposure to spousal violence was as serious as suffering the violence directly. This is a well-known fact, but it seems that this information has not been absorbed by the general public and by services that don't specialize in violence. As well, that information doesn't seem to be taken into account in assessing these children's needs. My research with young adults and a lot of other studies have shown that the consequences of exposure to spousal violence last beyond the age of 18.

Services have to be offered more proactively by going and getting the young people where they are, in school, for example. My colleagues have talked about prevention, which is very important. But we also have to offer help when young people disclose the troubles they are experiencing. On average, four to six children in a class are exposed to spousal violence. The school could be a good place to offer proactive services.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Thank you so much for that.

You said something that really caught me, which prompted that. You said that often children want to flee if their parents are still together and they're witnessing domestic violence. Your comments are well noted. We can have an impact if we can get into schools, for example, and give that education at an early age.

My next question will be for Rekha.

Rekha, you didn't speak too much about this today, but I noted on your website that your organization offers employment services for women with formal education who might not necessarily have had access to education in the past. I'm hoping you can speak a bit about the impact of having access to formal education.

[Rekha Gadhia]

That is extremely crucial, because when immigrant families arrive in a new country, typically it's the women who are left behind, as they have to take care of the children. We really take pride in focusing on and prioritizing that.

Many immigrant women have different levels of literacy and sometimes no literacy. We first decided to develop the customized programs for different levels of literacy and then different fields of education. Some are even just on cooking. We will have customized modules for those kinds of areas where they can still leverage the skills that they have.

The other important piece is that if they at least have their own language, we are able to provide training to further formalize their training in their own language. Then they can be certified community interpreters and have independence and empowerment, and earn money as a freelancer as well.

Those are some of the small examples. We have customized programs for different levels of literacy for women, particularly when we know that they have family conflict or a domestic violence situation going on. We at CIWA have 50-plus programs. My portfolio in particular includes domestic violence counselling and that kind of stuff. We're making sure that they are all connected. In any program, we do family violence screening as well. That way they are immediately able to be connected.

There are other programs, but the way they are designed, unfortunately, they have to be driven by the funder mandate and be completed by a certain time period. That is why one of our strong recommendations is for a customized program that could run for a longer period. A program running for six months could run for one year so that the women who are going through it, if they're in the process of fleeing an abusive situation or if they've just fled the situation, do have customized time and support. While they're healing themselves, they're also gaining that employment security.

I hope that answered your question.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Yes. That's fabulous.

I believe you also have a program that offers homework support for kids. In the 20 seconds I have left, can you speak briefly on the importance or the impact of that?

[Rekha Gadhia]

Yes, absolutely. We have the after-school homework club and the homework helpline for anyone who is in school and who, because of integration, is struggling and staying behind, or is ESL or ELL. We make sure we connect with those kids and provide that homework support.

We have our staff and we have our volunteers who, again, are able to customize and offer language support to newcomers who have language issues. They provide additional academic support to keep them from falling behind. In line with that, we also offer a gender violence curriculum in some of the schools.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Awesome. Thank you so much.

We're now going to turn it over to Andréanne Larouche.

Andréanne, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to the three witnesses for being with us today to talk about the important subject of intimate partner violence.

Ms. Lessard, Ms. Gadhia and Ms. Montminy, your testimony is really useful for our study.

For my first round of questions, I'd like to address Ms. Lessard.

Ms. Lessard, you mentioned two recommendations or two measures that the federal government should take as a priority. In one of your recommendations, you proposed that it follow the Quebec model in terms of coordinated actions.

Would you like to explain further exactly what this coordination model is and how it could be useful for our study?

[Geneviève Lessard]

Thank you for the question.

As I said earlier, we are a research centre, so our contribution is made in that way, not in the form of direct services to the public.

However, I think that the productive alliance and the collaboration between research and practitioners really are a winning formula for bringing about important social change.

In Quebec, we have the coordinated action component of the Programme de recherche sur la violence conjugale, funded jointly by the FRQSC, the Fonds de recherche du Québec pour la société et la culture, and the ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux. It is connected with the Government Action Plan on Domestic Violence.

I will explain how that could work at the federal level, in concrete terms. The priority actions that would be set out in the federal government's action plan could lead to a call for projects. So projects would then be funded based on targeted actions. For example, projects could be organized around one, two or three focuses. That would require that the projects be carried out in partnership with practitioners and academics. You could certainly count on the collaboration of our organization, as a member of the Alliance of Canadian Research Centres on Gender-Based Violence, to circulate the call for projects widely among the academic communities and practitioners working on violence, so that appropriate projects would align with the government's priorities.

This may be a model that the federal government could use if it wants to play a role in violence research.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

So it is important that multiple actors study this issue in coordination.

I imagine you have also considered the fact that when there is no assault or crime committed, the police and the actors in the judicial system often interpret violence as nothing more than arguments between partners. So they limit their intervention, despite the signs of violence that can be considered to be coercive control, behaviour that is often the precursor of much more physical violence.

So we have to work on multiple aspects. For that, first, should coercive control be criminalized, and second, should training be offered for the police and actors in the judicial system so they understand this kind of situation better and are better informed about the statutory tools available? Do you think that would be another way of working in coordination and expanding the approach, that is, seeing the problem as broadly as possible, as you said in your previous comments?