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Original article: https://theconversation.com/pierre-poilievres-proposals-on-intimate-partner-violence-will-do-little-to-stop-it-254014
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre recently announced that if elected in Canada’s upcoming federal election, his party would enact tougher sentences for anyone accused of intimate partner violence.
He has also vowed to institute a three-strikes policy for anyone who commits three serious offences, with a minimum 10-year prison sentence with no eligibility for parole.
The proposed actions include creating a new offence of “assault of an intimate partner,” requiring stricter bail conditions for anyone accused of intimate partner violence and ensuring first-degree murder convictions for anyone who kills their partner.
There are many steps policymakers who are concerned about victims could take. For example, they could fund a variety of effective prevention programs. However, the approach articulated by Poilievre does not appear to centre the victim, but rather the offender.
Punishment is often ineffective
Although government policies in Canada and other countries have emphasized punitive actions towards men who abuse their partners, relatively few of these men are arrested, incarcerated or treated.
This is due in large part to the fact that most perpetrators are not reported to the police. In fact, one important factor hindering women from reporting their abuse to law enforcement is that officers often express distrust of victims.
Starting with this survey in 1992, studies repeatedly show that at least one out of every four Canadian female undergraduate students will experience at least one type of sexual assault during their time at university.
Furthermore, at least 11 per cent of Canadian women in marital or cohabiting relationships are physically abused by their male partners in a year, and in the mid-1990s, there was evidence showing that Canadian men appeared to have higher rates of physical violence towards female intimates than their U.S. counterparts.
The prevalence of such violence is unlikely to decrease much if all the men who have beaten, raped or killed their partners are arrested and locked up. Decades of research shows that punishment is ineffective in reducing crimes like violence against women.
Prison and other harsh legal sanctions do not deter abusive men from injuring their female partners any more than they deter the myriad of violent crimes that occur outside domestic or intimate contexts. This has been the conclusion of the majority of deterrence studies conducted in the past 50 years.
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander and sociologists like Loic Wacquant and Bruce Western have outlined how incarceration can actually increase crime and exacerbate other social problems like unemployment and poverty.
This information has been available to virtually every Canadian politician for many years, yet they have lacked the political will to act on this information. However, calls to institute more severe sentences often play into public desires to see those accused of crimes punished.
Improve lives, not punish more
Violence against women is often a key symptom of structured social inequality. Those who want to reduce it must find ways of reducing social inequality. Governments often compartmentalize social problems like violence against women along bureaucratic lines.
In other words, some government departments are expected to handle economic issues and find ways to cut spending. However, those working for these departments rarely consider how reductions in unemployment or cuts to social programs and so on affect rates of abuse.
Rather, the police and courts are often left to respond to male-to-female violence after it has happened. Yet, in real life, jobs, welfare, housing, employment equity, child care, gender inequality and a host of other factors affect the ways men treat women.
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It should be noted that police, courts, prisons and treatment programs play an important role in responding to violence against women. Nevertheless, neither the criminal justice system nor battered women’s shelters should be solely, or even primarily, responsible for dealing with violence against women. Relying only on them to make women’s lives safer is tantamount to “closing the barn doors after the horses have left.”
Calling the police after a beating, rape or femicide does not prevent the crime from taking place. And although shelters are undoubtedly necessary in our society, shelter workers cannot be expected to solve the problem of woman abuse single-handedly.
Therefore, it is time that we move beyond the well-worn path of using after-the-fact approaches. Hopefully, if implemented sensitively, what legal professor Leigh Goodmark refers to as a balanced policy approach will result in major reductions in violence against women.
This approach entails using initiatives such as: putting cash resources directly in the hands of abused women, providing affordable housing and childcare, creating an anti-poverty movement, increased funding for the development and evaluation of community-based prevention programs and encouraging progressive men to be part of the solution.
Will these strategies make a difference? As criminologist Elliott Currie puts it:
“We have tried moral exhortation. We have tried neglect. We have tried punishment. We have even grudgingly, tried treatment. We have tried everything but improving lives.”
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
