Justice committee  What I can say is that we are talking here about behaviours that aren't necessarily covered by any other provision. Threatening to destroy someone's property or keeping them away from their friends doesn't really amount to the offence of unlawful confinement, which requires physical restraint of the person.

Justice committee  I would say there are two big benefits. The first is that it permits early intervention because it allows people such as neighbours and friends to go to the police with information, and it's a basis for the police to actually do something. He has taken the tires off of the car and won't let her go anywhere.

Justice committee  Yes, as does Professor Koshan, and I do a lot of judicial education as well. Sometimes that's right. It is about awareness and understanding that behaviours on their own might look either not like offences or like minor offences: things like destroying joint property that's owned by them or the spouse driving erratically and at high speed when the wife and children are in the car.

Justice committee  Thank you. That's a really good and complicated question in a short amount of time. The barriers my work looks at include the unwillingness of those in the first line of response—the police and later Crown counsel—to actually see and to recognize the experiences of women. This is my concern.

Justice committee  There's certainly a connection and the two overlap. I think Ms. Isshak's comments were in this direction. I would discourage you from thinking that somehow coercive control is less, that it's just a step en route to physical violence, which is invariably more serious. Sometimes this behaviour is so enormously degrading and harmful that it eclipses the physical violence in the woman's experience.

Justice committee  Right. What I would say is that, of course, assault requires physical contact. The offence of criminal harassment requires that the victims fear for their safety. If we are thinking about a coercive control offence—and it's distinct from those two kinds of offences—it needs to focus on behaviour, on a course of conduct that has the effect of maybe making somebody fear for his or her safety, as well as create a substantial interference with that person's freedom and ability to carry out his or her day-to-day life.

Justice committee  Yes. That's exactly right. If we limit it, then, to former spouses who are members of the same household, that seems strange to me when you think about the ways in which cyber-violence can be inflicted.

Justice committee  Thank you. It's a very good question, and of course one of the realities of this kind of cyber-violence is that it makes it very difficult for the woman to truly separate from her abuser. The idea of starting over in a new place or having a fresh start becomes very difficult when there are these continued ties electronically.

Justice committee  Yes. That was an immediate concern I had when looking at the draft legislation. I don't want to detract from the fact that most of the time that is what we're talking about, intimate partners, and the way this is drafted it's not required that spouses, common-law or dating partners live together.

Justice committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you to the members of the committee for inviting me to participate in this hearing. As you heard, I'm a professor of law at the University of British Columbia and my research focuses on legal responses to violence against women, with a particular focus in recent years on sexual violence.