Of the perpetrators we know, none of them have ever been taken to court because the women are too terrified to go to the police because they're not believed. They're seen as mentally ill when they talk about torture in Canada. We only want to think about state torture. If they go to torture centres even, they're told they don't fit because their crime is not state torture.
The husband and those three men, I mentioned, nothing ever happened to him. Nothing's ever happened to any of the parents of women who have come forward. They are well-respected people living in the community— politicians, police, doctors, lawyers, many of them upper class and very powerful. They're still walking the streets, the torturers we know. That's a very tragic story.
If we had a law in Canada, then women might feel comfortable in saying, “Yes, torture does happen to me. I know you believe it because we have a law.”
Then we would start getting the data. We would start educating the police, the judicial system, the health care system, all of the systems and provide services of healing for women and girls who were tortured.
Right now there are no services for them of any kind.