The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Pamela Cross: Why Does Intimate Partner Violence Persist?

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Lawyer and activist Pamela Cross has been at the forefront of helping survivors of intimate partner violence for 30 years. She shares her insights on the problems and solutions to addressing IPV in her new book. It's called: "And Sometimes They Kill You: Confronting the Epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence." Pamela Cross joins Steve Paikin to discuss.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lawyer and activist Pamela Cross has been at the forefront of helping survivors of intimate partner violence for 30 years. She shares her insights on the problems and solutions to eradicating IPV in her new book. It's called And Sometimes They Kill You, Confronting the Epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence. And Pamela Cross joins us now for more. Thanks for coming in. My pleasure. This is a hellacious topic to discuss, but we need to discuss it, as you point out in the book. So here we go. Why, despite decades of work on this subject, does intimate partner violence still exist?

I think we've failed somehow to create, first, the public will, which then leads to the political will, to address it. And in part that's because it is such an entrenched and insidious situation. It can happen to anyone. It can happen in any economic grouping of people, any racial grouping of people, any religious grouping of people. And so I think for a lot of people it's just too big to think about. When we start thinking about it in those terms, then we're forced to think to ourselves,

well, I must know somebody who's a victim. Maybe I know someone who's causing harm to someone else. And that's hard for us to think about when we consider our families and our social circles. And so we back away from it. I wonder if part of it as well, you see this with climate change, you see this with poverty, there is so much coverage and we are inundated by discussions

and programs and features and so on, that we may tend to tune it out. Is that part of the story here? I would have said no if you'd asked me that question five years ago, four years ago, because this was a topic that didn't get a lot of media attention. But because the rates of intimate partner violence went literally through the roof during the pandemic, this issue has had a huge amount of media attention and very good media attention, I have to say. Very intelligent, well-informed media

attention. And so maybe now that is the case. It's a bit like, oh, yeah, another woman got killed. I just see that headline in the paper so often, I'm not even going to think about it. That's terrible, isn't it? Well, it is terrible, because we do want media covering the issue. And I think the death of any person

deserves the honor and respect of being paid attention to. But we certainly don't want to numb people to the fact that this is very real. You're a lawyer. Thanks to Perry Mason. Thanks to Perry Mason, yes. What is it about the legal system, however, that makes it challenging for women to navigate getting out of an abusive relationship? There's really two legal systems we have to talk about when I answer that question. One is the criminal law, of course, because some kinds of intimate partner violence are criminal offenses.

Sometimes women report what has happened to the police, and sometimes that results in the partner being charged. But there's also the family law system. And in fact, far more women who leave relationships where they were subjected to abuse find themselves in that family law system. Because if they've got kids, they've got issues to work out. And with an abusive partner, it's unlikely they're going to be able to work those issues out themselves.

So the two systems both have present significant barriers. In the family law system, there still is not a good enough understanding by lawyers, by judges, about what family violence is, about how serious it is and how common it is. The structure of the law and the structure of the court system act as though in the majority of cases the two people are equals. And they're coming in there to argue out some differences that they have when in fact the majority of people who have to turn to that law are not in situations of equality.

They're in situations where one person has much more power and control. But presumably judges and lawyers and the stakeholders in the justice system have some training over the years to recognize and understand this, do they not? Not enough, not nearly enough. And this has been a big advocacy issue for many years, that we would like to see mandatory components in law schools, in bar admissions courses and so on for lawyers. And it's different for judges. Judges have autonomy they can't be told they have to be educated

on a particular topic but we are beginning to see and in fact it comes out of a tragic story about a young girl actually we are beginning to see some more attention being paid to the need for judicial education. Ontario and Canada within a few months of one another, passed laws that are known as Kira's Law, named after young Kira Kagan, who was killed by her father. And those are laws that say, judges, you need to know more about this,

because not only are bad decisions being made, but sometimes women and children are dying because of those decisions. Well, as long as we're doing examples here, how about Dawn Walker? Can you tell us her story? Dawn Walker has, I think, a really interesting story, a terrible story, a story that has a lot to teach us.

And I think before I talk about Dawn, I just want to say, I think that we learn best from stories. You know, I could sit here and rhyme off statistics to you, but when we hear a story... You want to put a face to it. We want to put a face to it, and we can often find a piece of ourselves in that story, so we think, oh, I can understand that. And it is a story that helps us learn a little bit about how

desperate a mother can feel if she has been in a relationship where there's been abuse and she's trying to protect her child but nobody seems to be hearing her. And this is when we see women I say in quotation marks you know take the law into their own hands and despite the fact that there was a court order about the arrangements for the child, Dawn didn't feel those arrangements were safe for her child. And so she removed her child from the situation. Well, she went to the United States. She did.

She crossed the border. She crossed an international border. She took her child. She was deceitful in how she did that. But she did what she did believing for herself that this was the only way to keep her child safe. And what ultimately happened? Of course, they were found.

It's very difficult to disappear nowadays, even harder when you have a child. They were found, returned to Canada. She was charged with a number of criminal offenses. The child is now residing full time with the father, which was the very thing she was trying to prevent. She's dealt with the criminal matters. The family law matters are still underway.

Did she do the right thing? Did she do the wrong thing? I'm not in a position to answer that question because I wasn't living in her shoes. But I've certainly worked with women who have had that same desperate feeling. I've tried everything. I've gone to the police. I've done this.

I've gone to children's aid. I've gone to the family court. My child's not safe. I just don't know what to do. Some women don't know that they are in an abusive relationship. Some women know they are in an abusive relationship but feel they can't do anything about it. Why does that still persist?

A lot of abuse is very subtle and it builds slowly over time. We now are quite comfortable, many of us, I think with this term coercive control. That phrase didn't even exist when I started practicing law, but I saw lots of it. We just didn't have a name for it. And coercive control is that gaslighting kind of situation where the partner who's causing harm is creating a situation often without using any physical violence at all, where the woman is gradually losing power, losing a sense of who she is, and the control becomes greater and greater and greater. Where are you going?

When are you gonna be back? Yeah, tracking. Who are you seeing? Nowadays, tracking through electronic devices. Slowly separating her from her family or from her friends, saying, you don't need a job, I make enough money. You don't need to have your own car. You don't need a bank card.

So a woman might not identify that until it had been going on for so long that she's really and truly trapped. So doesn't know. If I've grown up in a home where my mother was abused by my father, which is not my case, I might not think anything of it. Oh, that's just what a marriage is like. So when my partner starts doing that to me, I don't identify it as problematic.

So that sort of speaks a little bit to the women who don't know that what's happening to them is abusive. The women who know and don't leave, when women leave, they're at the highest risk of being killed by their partner. So those headlines we see, woman killed by partner, often that's during the separation process. And if you read that article and I read that article,

that woman who's thinking about leaving also reads that article and thinks, it's better for me to stay. Ironically, I'll be safer if I stay. And for some women, that's true. That's a very sad truth. I got to put this number to you and you tell me about this, okay? According to StatScan, self-reported data in 2018, I guess the last year for which figures are available, showed that 44% of women who have ever been in an intimate relationship reported some type of abuse.

44%. Do you think that's accurate? Yes. If anything, it's a little bit low. relationship reported some type of abuse. 44%. Do you think that's accurate? Yes. If anything, it's a little bit low. So it could be a one-off, although that's not common. I have certainly worked with women who the first time the partner took a swing at them, they walked out the door and never went back.

But that's the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, that's the reality. Almost half of women are harmed by the person who, at one point, said, I love you. Physical? It could be anything. I think with that number, I suspect a significant number of those situations are coercive control, which, interestingly,

many women report as being more serious than physical violence because it is insidious because often people don't believe them you know I had clients who would say I almost wish he would hit me because then I would have a bruise to show and people would believe me. We were talking earlier about a trip we recently took. Our crew here and I to Sault Ste. Marie to talk to two fathers whose daughters are no longer with us because of this. And as a result, the municipality of Sault Ste. Marie declared intimate partner violence an epidemic.

So let's talk about solutions here for a second. Does doing that move the yardsticks at all? I think it's a huge step. It was the first recommendation made by the jury in an inquest in Renfrew County in 2022, the CKW inquest. And I can tell you, I was sitting in the room when the jury read that recommendation out. And the whole room, it was like we all exhaled at once. It was just such a brilliant idea. They called on the province to make that declaration.

It has yet to do it. It has yet to do it. But almost 100 municipalities have done it. Well, what does it practically do? Symbolically, it's huge. But what does it practically do? Symbolically, it's huge. But on a practical level, it puts intimate partner violence where it belongs, in the public. It's huge. But on a practical level, it puts intimate partner violence

where it belongs, in the public. It's an epidemic. We understand epidemic as a kind of medical word. And we treat health issues seriously. So now we can start to say, if the province will make the declaration, OK, this is a public health issue. We have to address it that way. But it is also of huge importance to

individual survivors of intimate partner violence who often feel very isolated. I'm the only person this is happening to. It's my fault. It's about me. But if I'm that woman and I say, I see, oh, Doug Ford has declared intimate partner violence to be an epidemic or my mayor has declared it to be an epidemic, suddenly I'm not so alone. Maybe I'll be more likely to reach out for help. Let's do another example here. You were an expert witness in Redford County at the inquest into the deaths of three women.

And someone named Malcolm Warmerdam said something that stuck with you. What happened there? So Malcolm is the son of one of the three women who was murdered, Natalie Ormondham. And on the first day of the inquest, Malcolm made a number of very powerful statements. But the one that I think has stuck with me most

was his warning to all of us in the room, including the jury, not to look at the people who engage in abusive behavior as monsters, as though they are different from us. And I think his very words were, there's good and bad in them, just like there's good and bad in us. And if we create them as monsters and set them apart from us, we're never going to do what we need to do

to help them change their behavior. How did you react to that when you heard that? I found it very emotional. I related to it right away. I've never liked this dichotomy of, you know, these are the bad people and these are the good people. But I felt coming from someone whose mother had died as the result of the behavior of one of these men,

it was really powerful. It is difficult to think of somebody who could beat a woman to death as having some good in them though. Would you agree? In that moment, sure. But what do we know about what else that person did? Now, I'm going to sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I'm not, by saying I do get tired when a woman is murdered in

particular and neighbors say oh he was such a great guy he used to help the elderly people over there take their garbage out you know that that doesn't mean that they can't that person can't also be abusive in their intimate relationship so it's not like they get a pass because they've done something nice for somebody but I think what Malcolm's comments challenge us to do is understand that this is a complicated issue. I can be a mean and unpleasant person. It doesn't mean my partner has the right to treat me abusively.

Victims can be unpleasant people as well as sweet and fragile. The same is true for the people who cause the harm. That person might be really great at their job. They might be kind often, but then there are periods of time when they engage in abusive behavior. Many, not all, but many people who grow up to become abusers were themselves abused as children or witnessed abuse as children. So what we've got to do is move upstream.

Let's look at prevention. What do we need to do to intervene earlier so that those boys have the opportunity to grow up and be healthy adults and not engage in that behavior, which is harmful to them as well as to their victims. But you've spent decades working on upstream solutions to this problem and we are still where we are. What's the upstream solution that's better? The upstream solutions are also big and that's where we need this real all of society approach

with really serious public and political commitment because it's going to cost money. We need to start educating children from a very young age. There's no age at which it's too young to talk to children about violence in families. Of course, you talk about it differently with a four-year-old than a 15-year-old. We need to be able to intervene in families early, where there has been some violence, so that the children are given opportunities to heal from that.

We need women's equality. Sometimes a woman stays in a relationship where she's being abused because she can't afford to leave. But haven't you been working on all of these things for 30 years and we're still where we are? We have, many of us have, but we have also been spending a lot of energy

putting out the fires of responding after it happens. I was just talking with a colleague about this this morning. I think we have to start to, obviously we have to continue to respond. But I think what we need is a serious political, economic investment in prevention. So I'm not doing it off the side of my desk, it's my actual job. I get you, but the Ontario Cabinet Minister responsible for this, his name is Michael Parsa, Children, Community and Social Services Minister. He sent out a statement to mark Women Abuse Prevention Month highlighting Ontario's going

to spend a billion four over the next four years along with federal funding. What will that do? Well, we'll see, won't we? Unfortunately, most of that will be project money. So you come up with a great idea of something you want to do. You get money for two years and then the money disappears that is the history of how violence against women work has been funded not just in Ontario across the country for a very long time and it's very difficult to build anything

meaningfully in one or two years that money is largely going to go into service delivery yes we need service delivery but we need dollars that are spearheaded specifically for prevention we need to delivery, but we need dollars that are spearheaded specifically for prevention. We need to bring everybody to the table. We need to work with organizations that support men who have been abused and men who have been abusive. They need to be part of the conversation. We can't silo all of ourselves off and think we're going to figure out the solution that way. There's a federal bill, C-332, an act to amend the criminal code to include coercive control. Are you in favor of that? No, I'm not. Because?

Because we need fewer criminal laws, not more criminal laws. In the past, the criminal law has too often criminalized women, even when it was intending to do the right thing. The example I always use is mandatory charging, which is a policy that's been in place in Canada for 40 years. And it's great intention. The goal of it was to get away from situations where police would arrive at the scene after a 911 call and look at the woman while the fellow is standing right there and say, do you want to charge him? Guess what most women said? No, they were scared.

So the police then were supposed to make the decision themselves. That's what made it mandatory charging. The problem is that over those 40 years, we've seen women charged because the police arrive, it's a chaotic situation, they can't tell who did what. Maybe she's pushed back after he's attacked her, he's got a scratch on his face, they charge her. Created chaos for families and put women in a situation where they face criminal charges when they shouldn't have. I worry about that with the criminalization of coercive control.

Coercive control is so subtle and so nuanced, it would be very easy for an abuser to make himself look like the victim. control is so subtle and so nuanced, it would be very easy for an abuser to make himself look like the victim. I have to tell you, and this may be odd, but one of the most powerful parts of your book I found to be the epilogue in which you are very open about what three decades of doing this work has done to you. So I'm going to ask one facetious question, and then we're going to do a serious question.

The facetious question is, are you a nightmare of a mother-in-law? Well, you'd have to ask a son-in-law, but I don't have one. But I don't think so. Because you fess up that you sometimes, you're looking with more than a watchful eye at things, right? For sure.

I definitely look at my children who are middle-aged now. I shouldn't have said mother-in-law. What I want to get to is I look at my sons very closely because I don't want to be a mother who raised a son who doesn't know how to treat his partner with respect. And that was an interesting learning process for me because at first I thought, well, it's my daughter I have to protect. And of course, we all want to protect our children, boys, girls, or otherwise. But it was as my sons became adolescents and teenagers that I thought, oh, there's a job

for me to do. This is from the book. Let's do this excerpt here. Sheldon, if you would bring this graphic up and I'll read along for those listening on podcast. I developed what is often labeled vicarious trauma while I was a practicing lawyer. I still live with it.

Writing this book made it worse for a while. This means, among other things, that my emotions, never far from the surface, are in a constant battle one with the other. Rage, grief, despair, hope. Some days I'm paralyzed by despair and grief, but more often, so far, hope and rage win out and keep me going. Well the obvious question here is, despite the heaviness of all of this, you keep going. How come?

I consider it to be an incredible honor and privilege to be doing this work, to have been doing this work. I'm not going to say I fell into it, but it's not like I decided at 20 that this was what I was going to do. I have met so many women who are so courageous. In their own situations, I've met so many women who have dedicated their lives to supporting those women. I have seen change. Change is slow. It's too slow.

It's too small. But I have seen when we work collectively, when we work collaboratively, we do have an impact. The inquest in Renfrew County, the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia are two really excellent examples of that. And they happened, you know, very close to one another. And you were an expert witness of both. Mm-hmm. So you think there's a way out of this?

There has to be a way out of it. If I didn't have hope, I wouldn't do the work. You know, people often say, oh you must be so cynical and so angry and so burned out. Sure, some days, but you don't get up in the morning and try to change systems if you don't have hope in your heart that you're going to be successful. Well, it is a tragic topic, but I'm glad you wrote this book because there's a lot of wisdom in here. And sometimes they kill you confronting the epidemic of intimate partner violence. Pamela Cross, thanks for coming in tonight.

Thank you.