Bill C-332, a private member’s bill in the House of Commons, aims to add coercive control as an offence to Canada’s Criminal Code. It’s argued by proponents of the Bill that criminalizing coercive control will provide an “additional tool” for women to leave abusive situations.
In 1990, the government of Ontario attempted something similar. They passed a policy making it mandatory for police officers to lay charges in all situations involving domestic violence (“DV”). In the 33 years since, the domestic problem has only gotten worse.
Now, evidence has come to light that women are being inappropriately charged in situations of intimate partner violence (“IPV”). The increase in women being criminalized when requesting state protection for IPV has been so significant that legal clinics have developed entire projects around a phenomenon dubbed the “criminalization of women”.
As a law student working in different legal clinics, I have spoken to female survivors who had called for help and found themselves facing criminal charges. They were often racialized and low-income women. Many fretted about potential impacts on child custody. Almost always, they reported facing years of abuse before finally deciding to call 911.
What can we learn from mandatory charging in Ontario? I would suggest again what legal feminist scholars have been saying for years: criminalization won’t solve Canada’s DV problem.
In an ideal world, criminalization would be an effective deterrence for IPV. In the real world, the gender biases creating violence against women don’t just exist between intimate partners. They exist between women and the police, women and judges, and women and lawyers, to name a few.
Criminalization policies don’t give effect to this. They see police, judges and other actors in the justice system as somehow being inherently removed from the gendered social attitudes that have allowed IPV to persist for decades.
This assumption of inherent fairness in the justice system is incompatible with the reality that discrimination against women is embedded into our institutional systems. If the same sexist attitudes causing IPV are present in our systems, then how can we expect to rely on these systems to protect female survivors?
Perhaps it makes us feel better when we have a clear provision that we can point at to demand help. As a law student, I understand this appeal well: the law is methodical, systematic and clear-cut. But that should already tell you that we must resist the urge for a simple fix. A complex problem demands an equally complex solution: giving female survivors power over their narratives and giving them justice.
Criminalizing certain conduct may be part of this solution but adding the offence of “coercive control” will not be effective as things stand. What’s critical right now is evaluating how already existing concepts in legal frameworks marginalize women. By pushing criminalization as a solution instead of evaluating its effectiveness, we are ignoring the ugly reality that attitudes bolstering IPV are entrenched in our justice system.
More than 4 in 10 Canadian women have experienced IPV. That means that when you walk into a grocery store, you’re probably around women who have experienced its impacts. They’re not faceless people—they exist around us all the time. Whether they come forth or not, the statistics reflect their truth. In thinking of them, we must demand that our legislators craft solutions that are attentive to the lived experiences of female survivors and their varied ongoing needs. Acts of IPV, by their very nature, rob their victims of control and independence. As a first step to justice, our laws must aim to give it back.