Gender-based violence should be declared an epidemic, a review of British Columbia’s system that deals with sexual and intimate partner violence has concluded.
The review, conducted by lawyer Kim Stanton, makes numerous recommendations, including the appointment of an independent commissioner on gender-based violence.
“Gender-based violence has been normalized somehow, but it shouldn’t be,” Stanton said Tuesday.
“It is pervasive, but it is preventable.”
The report includes a number of sobering statistics, including that over one-third of women and girls aged 15 and up in B.C. have experienced sexual violence, and nearly half have experienced intimate partner violence.
More than nine in 10 survivors of sexual assault do not report it to police, while eight in 10 survivors of partner violence do not report it, the report found.
“I want you to sit with those numbers for a little bit,” B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma said.
“That silence isn’t because harm isn’t happening. It’s because too often, survivors don’t feel safe coming forward. They fear not being believed, retraumatized or dismissed.”
The review calls on the province to prioritize resources for prevention initiatives, including public education, to help prevent violence before it escalates to the legal system.
It also calls for more support services for survivors and for men who engage in violence.
And it recommends improving education and training system-wide, including for police, prosecutors, courts and correction workers on the dynamics of gender-based violence and unconscious bias.
It also calls on the province to implement accountability measures to ensure that its recommendations don’t get acknowledged and then ignored.
“There have been decades of recommendations made to address and reduce gender-based violence and to improve access to justice, and yet, as you heard, we still have 94 per cent of sexual assault survivors not reporting and 80 per cent of intimate partner violence survivors not reporting,” Stanton said.
“So the review’s focus was to try to disrupt that cycle of repeated recommendations with non-appreciable outcomes for survivors.”
Asked about a timeline for when recommendations could be adopted, Sharma said the province would take some time to fully digest the report, but would act quickly where it can.
“Right away, we are launching a gender-based violence action committee within government that’s a cross-ministry committee that is going to be tasked with this report and those recommendations,” she said.
“I intend to act quickly on the ones that can be done quickly, and the ones that would take longer, of course, we’ll have to work with other partners in the justice system to do so. And we will have an update in the fall.”
Stanton’s review also recommends reform in the courts and more funding for legal aid supporting family law services.
And it calls for the creation of a “gender-based violence death review committee” to better understand how fatal gender-based violence cases are handled across the system and make recommendations to prevent future deaths, similar to the function of a coroner’s inquest.