Thank you for inviting me to attend on behalf of the Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children, CREVAWC. I have experience in the matters being debated. I worked for 30 years as the head of a clinical crisis intervention team at a large urban police service and within the family court system for over 13 years. I was a member of the national framework committee on proactive community policing responses to intimate partner violence and have done extensive longitudinal research on police contact with persons with mental illness.

Over the past few years, I've co-led projects related to family violence within the family court context here at CREVAWC. One of these projects, funded by the Department of Justice Canada, responds to the 2021 changes to the Divorce Act that name family violence, including coercive control, as factors for consideration to the best interests of children involved in family litigation. We have built an online guide that will aid family court professionals in developing parenting plans that account for the nature, severity and impact of family violence, including coercive control, on survivor parents and their children.

Coercive control is significant and devastating, and at times has lifelong consequences for survivors. It often extends, as you've heard, long past separation, and can include litigation abuse in family court and other tactics that are intended to overwhelm and deplete the survivor's financial and emotional resources.

At the centre, we work across sectors, including justice systems, with allied professionals, survivors and police, and we can confidently say that there are significant gaps in knowledge related to coercive control that place survivors and their children at risk and contribute to low rates of reporting and to inadequate responses from professionals across sectors.

We add our voices to others who've cautioned against the criminalization of coercive control without a multipronged survivor-led approach that includes significant investments in services and resources for survivors, interventions for perpetrators that address violence initiation and escalation, and education on coercive control for all social service, justice and health professionals. We strongly support the conclusion of the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission that criminal solutions to gender-based violence are effective only to the extent that they are part of a broader, community-based response.

Since other submissions have focused on these topics, I'll spend the remaining time talking about a key concern with the bill as crafted, and particularly about the inclusion of threats of suicidality as a form of coercive control. We have two major concerns.

The first is we have spent a long time trying to disentangle the mental health and criminal justice systems. Police are not mental health professionals. These are complex situations that are not likely to be easily sorted out on scene. When the police get it wrong, a person in a mental health crisis is charged criminally instead of getting the treatment they require.

Second, labelling suicidality as a form of coercive control holds a strong risk of oversimplifying this complexity. For example, I was involved in a situation in which a man made a number of threats to kill himself during the process of separating from his partner. These were experienced by his partner as attempts to get her to stay in the relationship, a view that was supported by the police and may well have been his intent. However, weeks later, this man took a knife from the kitchen, slit his throat in front of his partner and died.

We recommend great caution here. These things can coexist. A person can use suicidal threats to keep his partner from leaving, and he can also be suicidal. It's important to remember that one-third of femicides are femicide-suicides. Try also to imagine a scenario where a survivor expresses suicidal thoughts to her partner during the process of separation. He calls the police, alleging her suicidal ideation is coercively controlling. Will she be charged? This is how we go backwards.

For the legislation on coercive control to have the positive impact intended, safeguards are needed. We recommend that, at the very least, Canada follow in Australia's footsteps, delaying the time at which it comes into force. The delay will, among other things, allow time for considerable education, training and consultation with police, criminal justice professionals and stakeholders and with the frontline sector. An implementation task force should be set up to manage the introduction of changes in the Criminal Code. This task force should consider necessary education and training, and also provisions that can be put in place to protect against the misuse of these new provisions.

Thank you.

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