Thanks. It is really an honour to be here speaking to this committee. I'm coming to you from St. Thomas, Ontario, and I'm here to represent my agency, which is Changing Ways, and the work that we do in Ontario, both locally and provincially.
Changing Ways is a social service agency that specifically focuses on people who cause harm in their intimate relationships. While we do focus and do some work with women who have been caught up in the criminal justice system because of offences, the primary focus that we work on is with men causing harm in their relationships as well as men who are exposing their children to abuse and causing harm. Our head office is in London but we have offices in St. Thomas and Chatham so we are a southwestern Ontario service provider. I just saw Ms. Vecchio's face when I said that. Yes, this is where we are.
I'm happy to be here. In addition to that job, which is an awful lot to do, I'm also a service manager at the Children's Aid Society of Oxford County, and I manage a specialized embedded service that works with people who have experienced harm in their intimate relationships, both survivors and children and men who cause harm, in addition to supports for women who are using violence as well. That's me. That's what I'm coming here to talk to you about.
I'm not going to repeat everything that everyone said and I couldn't do it anyway. When I looked at who was on the list of speakers here, I was excited to be here and also I have to say my heart sunk a bit because the association of working with men who cause harm or people who cause harm and the criminal justice system is one of the issues and one of the problems that we're dealing with in trying to address this issue earlier on.
The reason I want to bring that forward is this. I've been the director of Changing Ways for 23 years. I've worked there for over 30 years, and trying to actually look at moving the intervention to prevention further upstream has been a constant problem for us. Right now, for most places in Ontario and across the province, the threshold to actually access services for men who are causing harm is a criminal offence, so the implication for that is that there's nothing happening prior to police involvement. From my perspective, police are an amazing service. They are a last resort that we need to be doing, so what I want to throw out to this group is to start considering what prevention would look like and what a national strategy on prevention would look like.
Without taking up a whole lot of time, I've just sat in awe over the last two years on what a national strategy to prevent a virus could look like. When I think about the intentionality of that work and the intentionality of a federal government engaging in working with provincial governments to actually take on an incredibly invasive issue, I don't see intimate partner violence as any different from that. What I would implore the federal government to think about doing, in terms of a strategy, is that, looking at criminal justice as a response, it can't be the only response that we have here. We need to look at ways in which we can engage broadly across the country, provincially, in municipalities, locally, all of those things, and have a focused look at what we're doing here.
The health care system does an amazing job of thinking about prevention. Again, the way it attacked this COVID pandemic we had is a really good example of how, if we actually pull ourselves together and think about this and then look for local efforts to end violence against women and intimate partner violence, I think we can get there.
I'll surrender the floor.