Evolving Legal Views on Family Violence

Evolution of Legal Frameworks on Family Violence

• The definition of family violence now includes coercive control, emotional abuse, financial manipulation, and indirect exposure for children, expanding beyond physical harm.
• The Divorce Act changes in 2021 incorporate sociological understandings of family violence into legal proceedings.
• Specialized courts and personnel aim to improve justice outcomes in family violence cases.
• Despite the Divorce Act recognizing coercive control, judicial application lacks consistency due to varied interpretations of "fear," "pattern," or "psychological abuse."
• The inconsistent distribution of specialized courts in Canada creates unequal access to justice.
• Courts tend to prioritize physical violence evidence over psychological coercion, even if the latter has lasting effects.

Reporting of Family Violence

• Immigrant women encounter language, cultural, and institutional barriers when reporting.
• Elder abuse, frequently by spouses or adult children, faces chronic underreporting.
• The Canadian Victimization Survey captures lifetime experiences, but often lacks deeper context.
• The system's focus on reporting overlooks victims, especially elders, who may not recognize themselves as such due to normalized abuse or dependency.
• Framing immigrant women's non-reporting as cultural reluctance ignores structural issues like lack of culturally competent services or fear of immigration consequences.
• Victimization surveys usually don't distinguish between institutional mistrust and personal shame, both of which influence underreporting.

Gendered Patterns of Lethality

• Males are overwhelmingly responsible for the homicide of female partners, especially during separation.
• Risk peaks when women try to leave, a consistent pattern over decades.
• Public policy still considers leaving as the safest option, however, it can be the most dangerous.
• Protective interventions like emergency housing or police monitoring are reactive rather than preemptive.
• Framing homicides as "crimes of passion" obscures structural gendered power in media and court narratives.

Offender Treatment: Promise and Limits

• Counseling programs for offenders can lower recidivism, especially among first-time offenders.
• Increased treatment represents a change from purely punitive interventions.
• The success of offender programs depends on voluntary participation, but coercive dynamics persist meaning abusers may attend to avoid jail, not out of remorse.
• Offender treatment programs lack gendered analysis and use generic CBT models without addressing patriarchal entitlement or control issues.
• Comprehensive handling of repeat offenders is rare, despite their higher risk levels, because of the statistical focus on first-time offenders.

Indigenous Overrepresentation in Criminal Justice

• Indigenous men and women are disproportionately represented in Canadian prisons.
• Almost half of those in solitary confinement in 2022 were Indigenous.
• Dickson-Gilmore connects incarceration to systemic socioeconomic disadvantages rooted in colonization.
• Attributing the issue solely to "poverty" or "community breakdown" masks the historical and structural violence by the colonial state.
• Sentencing circles are sometimes used symbolically rather than representing genuine decolonizing reforms, despite being introduced as culturally appropriate justice.
• Eurocentric assumptions around law undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of community-led options.

Indigenous Women and State Violence

• Indigenous women face heightened violence risk and are often dismissed or ignored when seeking help.
• The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) found that the justice system has consistently failed them.
• Dickson-Gilmore advocates for improving long-term outcomes via better health, education, and child welfare systems for Indigenous communities.
• A need exists to understand gendered colonial violence as an ongoing structure, rather than just a legacy.
• Police often downplay or ignore missing person reports for Indigenous women.
• Systemic failures, including the breakdown between criminal justice, child protection, housing, and health services, cause institutions to pass responsibility rather than collaborate, leaving women unprotected.

Racial Profiling and Policing BIPOC Communities

• BIPOC individuals experience more frequent and aggressive police contact.
• Studies by Wortley & Tanner provide solid evidence of racial profiling.
• Carding, or baseless police stops, is ineffective.
• Racial disparities are not explained by education or class alone, race operates independently in surveillance.
• Even if banned, carding reappears in new forms, like "community checks," highlighting the tenacity of racialized policing.
• These practices disproportionately target Black and Indigenous youth leading to distrust and criminalization of entire communities.

Crimes and Punishment

• Those with power are better able to avoid criminal prosecution, according to conflict theory.
• The system heavily targets street crime, not white-collar or corporate offenses.
• Offenses like tax evasion, environmental violations, and price-fixing are under-policed.
• Crime is often framed to make it more visible among the poor.
• The media sanitizes corporate offenses, while sensationalizing youth crime.
• Enforcement priorities reflect broader inequalities, focusing on the already marginalized while shielding elite wrongdoing within legal complexity.