Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise today and contribute to this critical debate. Before being elected, I had the honour of serving on the board of a local organization in my constituency, called Saffron Centre, that works on education as well as on counselling regarding violence against women. Therefore, this is an issue that is very important to me and, I think, to all members in the House, and it speaks to this critical problem of violence against women.
I think there is consensus across parties about the importance of addressing this issue through new strategies and perhaps new legislative mechanisms. This could be a major project of this Parliament, that we not only pass this motion, which by all indications is going to pass with flying colours, but that we also use the resulting study to move forward with some legislative changes that would make a real difference in countering violence against women.
We have the desire to confront these issues in the House. It is so important, in the context of confronting violence against women, that we think about what I would call the sources of false belief that contribute to violence against women. Why do people do bad things, in this particular case in the way that we are talking about? It is probably because in many cases they have false beliefs about those actions. They think that what they are doing or would do is okay. Perhaps they think it is normal. Perhaps they think it would make them happy.
Therefore, when we talk about countering violence against women, we have to really dig into learning what the sources are of these false beliefs and how we can counter them.
Much of the discussion about responding to violence against women, but also other kinds of social ills, talks about the importance of education. Education certainly is very important, but if we have education happening on the one hand, and people developing false beliefs as a result of something else happening on the other side, then there is a kind of push and pull effect. Therefore, we need to deal with positive education, but also the countering of misinformation, and looking at the sources of that misinformation.
I would argue as well that, underneath all that, we need to pay attention to the development of character, because people's tendency to accept false beliefs versus true beliefs is ultimately going to be shaped by their character.
When we talk about the origins of false beliefs, I actually think we have a problem in language, because when we speak in English about education, it always, necessarily, has a positive connotation. We have a word to describe providing people with true, useful, and good information, the process of providing that information being education. We do not really have a corresponding word to describe when people, by viewing images that present distortions or by receiving false information, come to absorb and believe things that are not true, which have an injurious impact on their well-being and on the community. We do not really have a word for this latter phenomenon. One might call it mis-education though, the opposite of education. It is not ignorance. It is absorbing information that is wrong, but coming to believe it, whether through viewing movies or reading books or whatever the source of information might be.
When I think about this distinction between education and mis-education, I think of a quote from C.S. Lewis that I quite like, and I mentioned it at the status of women committee before. He said that education without values is about as useful as making people into clever devils.
Right now, we have a crisis of sexual violence on our university campuses. This should be troubling for the obvious reason, but also because these are supposed to be hubs for the most educated people, for our current and future leaders. However, in the presence of so much education, there is also this huge problem of sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence.
It should give us pause if we think that education about positive consent is the full solution. It is part of a solution, but we need to also look for what the sources are of false belief, because this is the reality that often happens to young boys today. Their first exposure to sexuality is viewing violent pornography at a very young age, often before they have even reached their teenage years.
Over the course of their teenage years, they have viewed significant amounts of violent pornography. They have come to develop these false beliefs about what is okay, about what is normal, about what will make them happy. Yes, they have teachers and authority figures who tell them “consent, consent, consent”, but so much of their formative sexual experience has told them something completely different.
If we just provide the positive education side and do not respond to this mis-education, this shaping of perceptions and beliefs from a false, negative direction, then we will really be missing a critical part of the battle. If we want to address violence against women, and I think all of us in this House do, then we have to ask what the opportunities are for us to provide good and true information about consent. On the other hand, how do we respond to these sources of false belief that are really a central cause of the violence against women we see?
This is what this motion asks us to do. It asks us to start by undertaking a study at the health committee about these impacts. Again, I hope either hon. members though private members' business or the government, will be prepared to take the next step after the study and look for legislative responses.
I want to say that part of the reason we likely have not addressed this up until now is that there are some very legitimate concerns about civil liberties when we talk about possible restrictions on pornography that we might put in place. It is important to have that discussion, because civil liberties are important and need to be protected in the context of any action we take in this respect.
There are a few points I want to make specifically in my remaining time about civil liberties.
The first point is that civil liberties always entail exceptions for children. We do not allow children the same liberties we allow adults. That is because it is important that people, before they are able to exercise their full freedom in the interest of themselves and the wider community, have some degree of personal formation, a sense of the way the world works at a basic level, before they are prepared to fully manage their own affairs. That is fairly obvious, and that is how the world operates on so many other fronts.
For the law to step in and look for ways to protect children, or at least to make sure that children are not accessing certain kinds of material without the awareness or oversight of their parents, I think is a legitimate activity of the law. We are talking about something different if we are talking about adults. The reality is that there is a formative process of absorbing these false beliefs about the relationship between violence and sex that often starts very, very young. In fact, it often starts well before the age of legal consent.
The second point I want to make on civil liberties is that I think we need to recognize the potentially addictive and choice-distorting nature of pornography.
Very often we put restrictions on people's liberty to do certain things if we recognize that, for instance, in the case of drugs, the consumption of a drug will limit the ability to make choices in the future. It can lead to a level of addiction that will make it very hard for them to make a different choice that will be better for their well-being and happiness.
When we talk about the interaction of children with something that is potentially addictive, that is where we can get into a real problem. We can see many of these cases where young boys, before they really have any sense of what they are getting into, go through this process of finding themselves addicted and developing these false beliefs that will have negative social repercussions.
Finally, very briefly, as quickly as I can say it, our intellectual foundations, when it comes to rights, are connected with a deeper conception of justice. That a person has a right to a thing is necessarily rooted in a concept of justice in terms of what is owed them in a good society. We need to start from a place of what a just and good society looks like if we are going to have a coherent conversation about how we apply rights in this case.
Very clearly, a just and good society is not one in which very young boys are getting pornography addictions that are shaping their attitudes about violence against women as they grow older. Again, I look forward to supporting this motion, and I hope that it leads to strong next steps to confront this significant problem.
