Mr. Speaker, today I rise to commemorate the infamous day of December 6, 1989. The national horror is incomprehensible, for there are no simple answers, no easy inferences to be drawn. We have an atmosphere of our times which seems to reflect a violent society. It is seen that our crime rates reflect a national psychol-
ogy. At times listening to what is put forward as fact in the House reflects a mood that could kill the soul, for we are so adversarial both in the House and in the community.
As a former worker in the criminal justice system, I dealt too frequently with both the offender and the offended. Violence lessens us all in society. We as a society are all responsible for the permissiveness in general and our lack of courage as a community to denounce perpetrators.
I concur with what has been said in the House today but, with due respect for this day, we must also recognize community trends. In the past crime was far from being an equal opportunity employer between the sexes, but the gap appears to be closing. Although five men were charged with criminal offences last year for every woman charged, a decade ago the proportion was seven to one. A similar trend is apparent in the United States where statistics show that the male:female arrest ratio in 1992 had declined to just over four to one.
Nowhere is the change more pronounced than in violent crime. In 1981 the ratio of men to women charged with crimes in this category which runs the gamut from threatening violence to cold blooded murder was almost nine to one.
People who specialize in the study of crime say that statistics may also reflect a democratizing trend in the application of criminal justice. Maybe it is the end of chivalry. Studies have found differences in the way the criminal justice system historically has treated men and women. For instance, in the U.S. the death penalty has been much less likely to be imposed on a woman.
Another possible explanation is that women are more likely to be charged today because society's growing intolerance of violence means that more people in general are being charged with low level violent crimes such as threatening.
To the extent that women commit less serious violent crimes, there would be a bigger percentage increase. Statistics indicate that 62 per cent of women charged with violent offences involve assaults at the lowest level compared with 55 per cent of men charged.
The fascinating question then is whether women are in fact becoming more criminally active. It is possible the trend is now surfacing in the newer data since there have been indications that the gender gap in crime is closing faster for young women.
A definitive answer would require following the police around and seeing under what circumstances they lay charges. There has been an enormous amount of discretion in the criminal justice system that has tended to screen out charges against women at the street level.
We really do not know what it means until we start looking at specific categories of crime. Does this reflect a real increase in violence or in property crime, or does it reflect a difference in the way in which our legal system processes crime? It is probably a mix of the two: some real change in behaviour and some change about how we count the numbers.
It is important to look at the numbers because our beliefs and then perhaps our legislative responses are affected by what we think is true. The veracity of statistics is fundamental to our beliefs which then brings action.
On November 19 of last year the news media across Canada led with the shocking results of a major Statistics Canada survey. "Fifty per cent of women report assaults", read the headline. "Ground breaking StatsCan survey finds violence pervasive". The findings on wife assault were horrifying: 29 per cent of women who had ever been married reported being assaulted by a current or previous husband. That would mean a staggering 2.6 million Canadian women have been the victims of wife assault.
Other news sources reported the story in much the same way. Maclean's magazine quoted a woman who ``used to wake up with a knife at my throat. Maybe now people will believe it''.
Women's groups expressed outrage. Social services groups said the survey proved how endemic violence is in our society. A federal cabinet minister pledged to meet with women's groups to launch a national campaign to combat violence against women. Commentators, male and female, cited examples of the dangers that women routinely face in daily life. We have heard many of those sentiments today in the House, but I must give at least a murmur of dissent and provide balance so we may move forward more resolutely.
The national survey was delivered with all the credibility of StatsCan behind it. Officials billed it as the most comprehensive of its kind ever conducted in Canada. It cost $1.9 million. It included 12,300 women and, the clincher, its finding included only physical or sexual acts that could result in criminal charges.
No one in the mainstream media did a critical analysis of the StatsCan's findings or compared them with the most authoritative work on the subject undertaken in the United States.
Let us start with the Criminal Code. A StatsCan survey says:
Violence in this survey is defined as experiences of physical and sexual assault that are consistent with legal definitions of these offences and could be acted upon by a police officer.
This turns out to cast a very wide net indeed. It includes offences known in police jargon as level one. Examples could be a neighbour who yells a threat across the back fence or a stranger who makes a belligerent remark on the street. Any remark or
gesture perceived by the person on the receiving end as a threat can qualify as a level one offence.
The most common form of violence, the survey says, is wife assault. In calculating the rate of wife assault it classifies many domestic encounters as violent that most people would not. These include behaviours that do not involve physical contact such as threats and throwing things. Then comes minor contact: pushing, grabbing and shoving. The survey summary, which is as far as most reporters read, lumps all these things together with actions that anyone would agree are clearly violent: beating, hitting with an object, choking, sexual assault or using a knife or a gun to threaten or injure. Throwing a plate has the same weight as a knife attack.
How many women who are or have been married reported incidents that are clearly violent? The answers: 11 per cent say that they have been kicked or hit with a fist; 9 per cent say they have been beaten up; 7 per cent choked; 6 per cent hit with something; and 5 per cent threatened or attacked with a knife or a gun. Because multiple responses are allowed there is a heavy overlap among those answers. They also refer overwhelmingly to former, not current spouses.
StatsCan borrowed its questions on wife assault from extensive U.S. surveys conducted by Richard Gelles and Murray Straus for the National Institute of Mental Health. This work is regarded as a benchmark. Unlike the StatsCan survey, it breaks out the results in a way that distinguishes between minor violence, no injuries or little intimidation, and severe violence, kicking, hitting and worse.
Messrs. Gelles and Straus found that domestic violence, mostly grabbing, shoving and hitting, occurs 16 per cent in U.S. families and that between 3 and 4 per cent of women have suffered at least one act of severe violence by their partners.
Wife assault is a national problem and a deep social evil in Canada. We should do everything to stop it, but this does not afflict nearly one-third of Canadian wives as some news reports said, 29 per cent as StatsCan said, or 2.6 million women.
No one, neither the surveyors nor the media, that reported their conclusions had any intention of misleading the public. They were conscientiously doing their job of spotting and documenting social change. However, if they had drawn a more reasonable conclusion from the violence data-rates of spouse abuse probably have not changed much in the past 30 years and most wives with abusive husbands get a divorce-there would be no real headlines and not much justification for their existence.
Instead the sensational findings dug yet another deep trench between the sexes with their inescapable implication that not just tens of thousands but millions of Canadian men are domestic thugs. Do members of the House really believe this? I do not. Most men were socialized from childhood to defer to girls in play and boys hitting little girls is more severely denounced. That was the character of our social history.
Finally, if we do not have an accurate view of the problem, how can we hope to arrive at the best policies to address it? Surely we do not need to exaggerate the numbers in order to make the case that family violence and violence against anyone is a corrosive social ill?
Surely we do not need to induce national moral panic in order to get attention and action, but many women believe that we do and so they may be upset. Many women believe that the StatsCan survey captures some larger psychological truth about the myriad subtle ways in which women continue to be devalued in the world. The trouble is that there are many important things StatsCan just cannot measure, and it should not try.
We know that more women than men are responsible for child abuse. In domestic conflict more women than men are likely to resort to using a weapon against a spouse. The conclusion about what men or women are doing is not the point. The point is that there is just too much violence. We must all collectively share responsibility for the violence on TV, movies and magazines. The media reflects ratings of what sells. The media are not totally to blame, for they reflect the worst aspects of our society.
The Montreal tragedy, remembered today, will not be forgotten. We can find a vision of a new Canada where a rejection of violence both overt and implied is how we will live.
We must denounce violence and the excuses for it such as intoxication defences or freedom of expression in the performing arts and the mass media. We especially remember today the loved ones of the victims of violence. We must all commit to live to a higher standard where conflict resolution and frustrations are kept under self-control. We each must resolve to live a kinder and gentler life that makes pandering to violence uneconomic for its sellers.
We affirm the positive and resolve to pass on to our children a clear sense of values that preclude thoughts of violence. I have a vision of Canada that we can build, where we can live in peace, restore broken relationships, yet strongly defend our ideals.
