Status of Women committee  Yes. I would reiterate what Christine said in terms of collaboration between VAC and CAF. I would also say that WAGE needs to be leading a lot of these conversations. We need an important GBA+ analysis, and they are the folks who created that analysis. They need to be included in

Status of Women committee  I'm an expert on bystander intervention, and what I hear from bystanders all the time is, “I didn't say anything because it was just a comment. If he had touched her, I would have said something, but it was just a comment. It was just a joke. Oh, you know how he is. He's old scho

Status of Women committee  I'll let Ms. Wood give you a more specific answer to your question. I personally feel that the importance of this training must be emphasized. In the four sessions that I led, none of the senior officers stayed in the room. So, from the beginning, they didn't send the message th

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. I'm going to go back to the piece around third party reporting, because I think that's a really good, concrete example. When Operation Honour happened, when there was an emphasis on our having to eradicate this behaviour, it was still framed as this: We have to get r

Status of Women committee  First of all, I want to reiterate what I said from the start, which was that the third years were the worst group, which means those are people who have been there for three years. If the first years were unruly, you could argue that we pulled from a bad pool. Third year means th

Status of Women committee  Yes, it's a feeder school essentially. So if you're a third-year student who can say to my face that you didn't listen to me because I'm a woman and a civilian, and I know that 18 months later you are going to be leading troops, I'm concerned, and we should all be concerned. It w

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  We need survivor-directed, survivor-informed bystander intervention mechanisms. I say that because when Operation Honour happened, and the military decided to do something, they did not have bystander training from a survivor-directed perspective. So what they saw was a massive i

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. I can tell you that the highest rate of post-traumatic stress disorder worldwide is among victims of rape and sexual violence. The second-highest rate is in the military. We urgently need to take this seriously. Trauma shouldn't be organized into a hierarchy. When t

Status of Women committee  Christine, do you want to answer that?

Status of Women committee  The first thing to recognize is that the trauma experienced by military members isn't just related to serving in a war, even though we often hear that. Even in my field of work, which involves combatting violence against women, when someone says that they've experienced post-trau

Status of Women committee  First of all you have to build off what Christine said. You have to name the problem. Right away, you have to acknowledge that this is a systemic issue. We need to move away from this “one bad apple, oh it's this CDS, oh no it's this CDS”. Clearly it's a systemic issue. First,

Status of Women committee  Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation to speak today. I'm pleased that the committee decided to take some time to hear from experts in various fields, including me. My name is Julie S. Lalonde. I've been working for almost 20 years to end violence against women in Ca

Status of Women committee  I think that the core of your question is really the nature of the military itself, frankly. I think that it does tie into high rates of people taking their own lives and high rates of trauma within the military. If you have to suppress how you feel because your masculinity and m