Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Manning’s bill, Bill S-249, An Act respecting the development of a national strategy for the prevention of domestic violence.

I want to begin by recognizing Georgina McGrath for her work with Senator Manning on this bill and for her advocacy, both on her own behalf and with the goal of furthering the well-being of all women. I also want to acknowledge Senator Manning for his nearly two years of efforts to respond to the urgent need to address violence against women. Bill S-249 represents a call for senators to join together to take action to end violence against women. I hope this is just one of many opportunities that we will have to work collaboratively with Senator Manning and all of you to address this important issue.

This week we mark YWCA Canada’s Week Without Violence, which aims to raise awareness of the violence against women that continues in our communities. As we contemplate Bill S-249, I urge that we remember that Thursday is also Persons Day, a day on which we celebrate the advancement of women’s equality and work to keep the pursuit of substantive equality at the centre of strategies for ending discrimination and violence against women.

Bill S-249 focuses our collective intention on the too-often irreversible harm caused by violence. It calls upon the federal government, in consultation with federal ministers and representatives of the provincial and territorial governments — and it is also vital that Indigenous governments be included here — as well as other relevant parties, to develop a national strategy to prevent and address domestic violence.

Relevant parties include women, grassroots feminist rape crisis and women’s shelters and other community-based anti-violence workers. Those groups have already proposed steps to address this gendered violence that must not be overlooked or ignored in any government action taken in this respect.

In 1993, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the largest national feminist organization of its time, with over 700 affiliated groups, formulated the 99 Federal Steps to End Violence Against Women. NAC recognized that violence against women is fundamentally and inextricably rooted in women’s substantive inequality. Although the strategy recognized that:

. . . poor women, women with disabilities, women of colour, and [Indigenous] women are more likely to be victims of assault, we seem to have difficulty with seeing the advantage men have over these women and how those legal, social and economic advantages become part of the weaponry of violent attacks. Every kind of entrenched advantage (whether because he is of the dominant race or because he is a professional) is too often used to harm women. No program to end violence against women can be effective if it does not disrupt and transform those power relations towards equality.

I continue to quote.

Federal government initiatives must reflect the current facts that it is the vulnerability of women and children, particularly [Indigenous] women, women of colour, women trapped in poverty, and women with disabilities that are the definitive factor in preventing this type of crime. Therefore, monies should be allocated directly to ameliorating those conditions. Monies should not be directed to police, jails, deputizing the community, social worker programs, research on vulnerable groups, or new bureaucratic bodies. Those measures do not reduce violent crime.

Nor do they prevent marginalized women from being victimized.

Today, 25 years later, front-line, grassroots organizations still agree that violence against women is fundamentally an issue of equality. The Blueprint for Canada’s National Action Plan on Violence Against Women and Girls, coordinated by the Canadian Network of Women’s Shelters and Transition Houses and released in 2015, states that:

Violence against women is a form of gender-based discrimination, a manifestation of historical and systemic inequality between men and women, and the most widespread human rights violation in the world. . . . Women’s experiences of violence are shaped by multiple forms of discrimination and disadvantage, which intersect with race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigrant and refugee status, age, and disability.

Both in 1993 in 99 Federal Steps and in 2015, in the Blueprint for National Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Girls, a broad coalition of contributors agreed about the kind of concrete measures that are required to address the disadvantage and inequality that engender domestic violence. The multi-pronged and coordinated approach envisioned by these groups focused first on the material conditions of inequality in women’s lives that increase their risk of abuse. They further recognize that preventing and ending violence against women requires equitable access to institutions, resources and the legal tools all of us should have available to protect our rights. And as so many recent situations here and south of the border have reminded us, sexist, racist and class-biased attitudes and stereotypes about women, and men’s perceived entitlement to use and abuse them, must also be addressed as a priority.

It follows from the recognition that violence against women cannot be effectively ended by a crime prevention or public health model, that substantive equality requires reducing the costs and barriers associated with leaving abusive relationships.

Senator Manning noted that while those unfamiliar with power dynamics surrounding sexual and physical abuse may wonder why women do not simply leave these abusive partners, financial concerns prevent many from doing so. Over 80 per cent of the costs of intimate partner violence in Canada — an estimated $6 billion per year — are borne by victims themselves in the form of medical attention, hospitalization, lost wages, missed school days, stolen or damaged property and pain and suffering.

As Senator Manning also pointed out in his speech:

On a single day, 379 women and 215 children are turned away from shelters in Canada . . .

Shelters, transition houses, rape crisis centres and their programs must be an economic priority of the federal government. Women attempting to leave abusive relationships should have the power to do so. Adequate federal funding is required to meet the demand for emergency short-term housing, as well as permanent, affordable long-term accommodations and income support for women and their children.

If leaving an abusive relationship is costly to the abused woman and not to the abuser, then she is further disadvantaged and hindered from leaving. Creating opportunities for women to leave abusive relationships can help to correct this power imbalance toward substantive equality.

Poverty is a devastating and compounding risk factor for women who are already subject to violence at the highest rates. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission most recently documented, Indigenous women and girls are more likely than other women to experience violence, as well as the risk factors for violence, which include poverty. Substantive equality also requires providing guaranteed livable incomes, not merely the inadequacy and uncertainty of social assistance, to allow women to move out of poverty.

Far too often, the risk factors for victimization go hand-in-hand with the risk factors for criminalization. Ninety-one per cent of Indigenous women and 87 per cent of all women in federal prisons in Canada have histories of physical or sexual abuse. For most, this underlying and unresolved trauma had a significant role to play in their criminalization, whether due to the lack of support from health and social services prior to being in crisis, or as a result of being charged with a crime while defending themselves or their children from an abuser.

Women who are abused are also far too often held responsible for their own victimization, as well as for protecting themselves and their children. In this manner they are effectively hyper-responsibilized. Worse yet, the same criminal justice system that fails to respond to protect them when they were victimized too often springs into action to criminalize them when they use force to repel abusers.

As highlighted by Elizabeth Sheehy in her groundbreaking research and book, Defending Battered Women on Trial, those who have nowhere safe to go and no one they can turn to for protection are essentially deputized to protect themselves and then interrogated about why they reacted defensively instead of leaving or seeking help or reporting what was happening to them. No matter how fulsome their explanations may be, they too often also then find themselves charged and criminalized for their use of reactive — and often usually defensive — force.

Senator Manning reminded us of this in his speech when he remarked that:

There are many reasons why a woman does not get up and leave. . . . perhaps there is nowhere to go or no one to turn to for support and protection. Perhaps those who have been abused believe that, in some strange way, it is their fault. They are led to believe that they may have provoked the abuse and that the stigma related to the abuse may be too much for some people to deal with on their own. There is always the fear that it could happen again, that the law does not protect the innocent . . .

These stark realities underscore the need for measures like guaranteed liveable incomes, health care and housing options and universal child-care, ameliorative approaches that provide increased options for women to leave abusers.

They also indicate that we should be cautious about the policy of mandatory reporting of suspected domestic violence by medical caregivers that Bill S-249 proposes. In considering the effectiveness of such a policy, we have to think about its particular effect on poor women, Indigenous and other racialized women and girls, those who are immigrants or refugees, women with addictions and criminalized women — women who have too often learned from experience that the justice system will be unresponsive when their rights are in need of protection.

We know that, currently, upwards of 70 per cent of incidents of domestic violence go unreported. Many frontline workers fear that placing an obligation on healthcare providers to report suspected abuse to police, rather than leading to more cases being brought to the attention of police, could unintentionally result in fewer women coming forward to get the medical treatment that they need.

Indeed, following a presentation yesterday in St. John’s, I had the opportunity to speak with representatives of the Transition House Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, a network of provincially funded women’s shelters who highlighted this very concern with Bill S-249. While most appreciative of Senator Manning’s efforts and intentions, they are concerned that the mandatory reporting it proposes might well result in the unintended consequence of decreasing the likelihood of abused women seeking medical attention.

In addition to supporting the need to address the substantive inequality of women first and foremost, they also suggested that, instead of requiring medical professionals to report suspicions to police, all medical professionals be required to fully record the extent of injuries, as well as any professional opinions regarding the likely cause of such injuries, including their concerns about domestic violence in patients’ medical files. This measure, in their view, coupled with additional information about available supports and exit strategies, would create a record of abuse without forcing the person experiencing violence to engage with law enforcement when such engagement may actually place them at greater risk.

Colleagues, let us take this important opportunity to reflect on how best to support and encourage not only health care providers, but all of us, to advocate for women’s access to additional income, housing, feminist anti-violence supports and services and health and mental health services in order to truly address, end and redress violence against women throughout Canada.

Thank you, meegwetch.