Status of Women committee  Hi. My name is Janine Benedet. I am a law professor with the faculty of law at the University of British Columbia, where I teach, among other things, criminal law and the law of sexual assault. I've been researching the legal treatment of different forms of male violence against

Status of Women committee  Sure, yes.

Status of Women committee  I'm not a criminologist, so I have to rely on the work of others in that regard. There's certainly lots of research, and Bev has mentioned some of the studies, to indicate that women who are serving federal sentences for crimes of violence almost exclusively, almost 100%, have th

Status of Women committee  One of the things about the Violence Against Women Act federally in the United States is that it names violence against women and gender-based violence as violations of federal civil rights in a system in which criminal law, of course, is state by state, so you don't have a unify

Status of Women committee  If I had to pick my top three, I guess, in no particular order, I would say tackle women's poverty, which I think is at the root of much of what is happening here. It's simply unacceptable for aboriginal women and children to be living in poverty in such great numbers in this cou

Status of Women committee  I agree with that completely. That was exactly what I was thinking: that it's one thing to say we're accountable to the electorate at the ballot box come election day, but it's another thing to be directly accountable to the women who are most directly affected by what it is you'

Status of Women committee  --and what hasn't been done, and why. What is the justification for not moving on a particular issue? Then it's not just silence you're responding to--you know, next year, when we have more money, if we ever get a majority, whatever the explanation is.

Status of Women committee  I guess what I mean by that is you see that coming up in a variety of different ways. The point I was making specifically is that we have legislation right now that allows us to name criminal acts against women as crimes that are committed on the basis of race or aboriginal statu

Status of Women committee  Sure. In this context, I think that's right. I know sometimes aboriginal communities don't like being lumped in with sort of racialized minorities, but however you wanted to describe that, sort of colonialized and gendered as well, I think in this context that's right. You see th

Status of Women committee  Yes. I think what we know is that in the area of sexual violence, the statistics that we have are generally accepted to be on the low end. There is a persistent pattern of under-reporting of sexual violence for a variety reasons. So I think we can be quite confident that the numb

Status of Women committee  I do think it is generally acknowledged that one of the factors of that climate in Vancouver is that you do get a migration of people from all across Canada.

Status of Women committee  Well, certainly many of the factors, the predicting factors...if you have individuals who are living in poverty, who are trying to survive, they often find it easier to do so here. But I can't imagine that that's a major explaining factor. I don't know if others or if you, Jane

Justice committee  Thank you very much. I'm here today as a law professor and also as a lawyer who has spent the past two decades researching, teaching, and advocating for sex equality under Canadian law, with a particular focus on sexual violence against women and girls, including prostitution.

Justice committee  Not quite, and that's why, if I may, I just want to clarify. I'm focusing on subsection 212(4) that makes it an offence to buy someone who is under the age of 18. I'm saying that no one is making the argument that somehow we'd better repeal that provision because it pushes child

Justice committee  So I'm focusing here not on the child who is selling herself, who is clearly not a criminal in any sense, but the person who is buying that underage prostitute.