Good afternoon, Madam Chair and committee.
My name is Sherilyn Bell and I am serving as a witness today in my capacity as a retired high school guidance counsellor with 30 years of experience both in the private and public sectors, and currently as a psychologist in private practice in Montreal. My remarks today are based on my professional experience of working with teens between the ages of 12 and 17.
Today I will speak about the more subtle but no less damaging areas of teen relationship violence, which involves control, manipulation, coercion and intimidation, which can take place in both in-person relationships and online relationships.
In my experience, while most teens, including young teens of 12 to 14 years of age, are easily able to identify what constitutes a physically or sexually abusive intimate relationship, there are still challenges to be overcome for many teens, and especially young teens, to easily identify the components of unhealthy intimate relationships that involve manipulation, control and intimidation, especially when they, themselves, find themselves in such a relationship. It is not uncommon for some young teens to misinterpret manipulation and control as care and love, which can then result in the non-recognition of a dysfunctional relationship.
In terms of online violence in teen relationships, with the rapid advancements in technology in the past several decades, the Internet has provided easy access for some teens to insult, denigrate, manipulate and coerce their relationship partners in a public, explicit and scathing fashion. In addition, many of the perpetrating teens will attempt to veil their identity by creating accounts under different names or by accessing and using other teens' social media accounts. Due to the layer of perceived anonymity that using a fake account provides, the language, comments and images that get posted are often much more severe than any comments that would be delivered in an in-person scenario. In terms of the victims, the results of such an online attack can be devastating. Embarrassment, humiliation and shame are common emotions expressed by victims, often resulting in a significant decrease in victims' personal, social and academic functioning.
While controlling and manipulative in-person teen relationships can sometimes be directly observed by parents, which then allows the parents the opportunity to address and perhaps intervene in the situation with their child, it is important to note that parents are often completely unaware if their teen is either a perpetrator or a victim of online violence. Out of fear of the potential consequences, teens will often try to hide this information from authority figures, and it is often only brought to the attention of an adult when the victim or friends of the victim perceive the victim as needing help and/or protection.
According to an online article authored by Deinera Exner-Cortens, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, and Wendy Craig, a professor at Queen's University, published on October 19, 2021, one in three Canadian adolescents between the ages of 11 and 18 experienced dating violence in 2021. This statistic indicates that there is still much work to be done to address the problem of dating violence in teens. Within this same article, the authors remind us that teen dating violence is both a Canadian public health problem and a children's rights issue.
There are existing Canadian resources available that provide information on this issue, such as the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. In fact, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has an excellent online resource booklet entitled “Self/Peer Exploitation—It's Not OK: A Resource Guide for Families”, which provides detailed information on this issue for parents and teens, along with suggestions to prevent and/or deal with an incident after it has occurred. I would be curious to know how widely aware most parents and teens are of this resource.
Based on the remarks that I have presented to you today, my recommendations to the committee are, first, that more resources subsidized by the Canadian government be developed to address and provide information and support for teens concerning healthy versus unhealthy intimate partner relationships; second, that more funding be provided by the Canadian government to existing organizations that address the issues of control, manipulation and coercion in young teen intimate partner relationships; third, that awareness campaigns on this issue be expanded for both parents and teens; lastly, that further information, awareness and prevention programs be developed for preteens, as well as for the parents of preteens, so that children and parents are more adequately educated on the topic of teen intimate partner violence before their children enter the teenage years.