Finally recognizing femicide

Lais Gomes was just six years old when her father killed her mother in their home. 

A judge in Brazil and a former police chief, her mother had been in an abusive relationship for a long time. More than once, she’d tried to leave. Twice her family had tried to rescue her.

“My father would be violent, and then he would ask for another chance. We would go for vacation, everything was fine again, and then the cycle would start all over,” Gomes says. 

“I don't remember, remember a lot of things, but I remember the cycle of violence pretty clear.”

In 2001, her mother left again and sought help from the police. The problem was that her husband was the local police chief. At the time, intimate partner violence was considered a private problem, and officers weren’t trained to handle situations involving it, so there was little help to be found. 

“My father had resources to find her, and also he knew how to coerce people,” Gomes says. 

After three days, her mother returned home to pack, determined to leave for good. Her husband invited her to have one more conversation. It was a tense Sunday morning, and Gomes and her brother were in the house while their parents talked in the bedroom. 

At one point, Gomes went into her parents’ bedroom, but her mother did not move or speak. Despite being so young, Gomes sensed they were in danger and got herself and her brother out of the house. 

“We left and started running, and that's when we just heard the shots,” she says. 

Looking back, she knows her mother was drawing on her police training in the face of danger to stay calm, avoiding sudden movements and eye contact, in an attempt to protect her children and give them time to flee. 

“My father left a letter; he’d planned everything,” Gomes says. 

“My mother saved my life and my brother’s life. She is a hero.”

Possessive and jealous, her father had always been suspicious of her mother, even when she did something as simple as wearing lipstick. In the letter he left, he’d accused her of cheating. 

Call the crime by its name

In the wake of her mother’s death, Gomes says people tried to justify what happened and called it a crime of passion.

“This is not a passion crime. This didn’t happen because someone was out of their head,” she says.

“I went through a lot of family alienation because both sides of the family were destroyed, and my father’s side of the family was trying to protect the image of the family.”

Now a Master of Laws candidate at the University of Toronto, Gomes says one reason this happened is that there was no definition of the crime.

“When you don’t name something, it is minimized, and people don’t talk about it, especially because it’s taboo. Families like to protect their reputation. It’s one of the reasons why many people don’t want to recognize this crime.”

With its latest criminal justice bill, the federal government is looking to change that. If passed, Bill C-16 will see femicide recognized in the Criminal Code. It will also criminalize coercive controlling behaviour within an intimate partnership. 

The move is most welcomed by Gomes, who has pushed for femicide to be formally recognized in this country.

“Naming the crime is essential because only by recognizing violence for what it is we can understand the logic of control, the impact on those who survive as collateral victims, especially children, and the silent heroism of women who face impossible situations,” she says. 

“When the crime is not called by its name, part of the truth is lost, and public policies and protective measures remain insufficient. Recognizing the crime is giving voice to reality and creating ways to prevent future tragedies.”

While this has long been called for and there is praise for the progress that this bill represents, some experts have concerns about the legislation, including how femicide is described.

The tabling of the legislation in December coincided with a report from the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women, which calls on the federal government to criminalize coercive control and to create a separate offence for femicide and the killing of an intimate partner in the Criminal Code. The committee called for them to be classified as first-degree murder, except in circumstances involving self-defence, coercive control and other mitigating factors relating to a history of violence or abuse.

Gender neutral language falls short

Myrna Dawson, the founder and director of Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability at the University of Guelph, and the director of its Centre for the Study of Social and Legal Responses to Violence, says that while naming femicide makes Canada one of the first similarly situated countries to do so, she wishes the legislation had gone further and made it a standalone offence.

“As a first step, it’s a cautious one for the federal government, but we can go further if there is more discussion about it,” she says. 

Gomes agrees that naming the crime is just one step and believes femicide should be classed as a standalone crime. She says classifying femicide in the Criminal Code beyond sentencing measures “makes visible an already existing pattern, allowing the state to recognize, investigate, record, and prevent this specific and recurring form of lethal violence.”

The bill’s gender neutral language has raised concerns. Femicide is only described as “committed against a female person” in the summary and not in the text of the bill. There, it is headlined “femicide, including of intimate partner, and other aggravating circumstances,” and ties the death to a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct, and includes motivation on “hate based on colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability.”

Dawson says the government could have gone further, particularly because gender-neutral laws have often worked against women. She also notes that sex-motivated hate is one of the least-reported types of hate in Canada, so she questions how it will play out in the context of a murder.

“We’ve had femicides where hate was clearly evident—the Renfrew County killings, the Toronto van attack—but hate was never mentioned in those, so are we going to see it in less high-profile killings?”

She is, however, encouraged to see the emphasis on intimate partners in the legislation.

“My early work focused on what we called the ‘intimacy discount’ in these types of cases, where men kill women in the context of intimate relationships, it’s often charged and convicted at a reduced offence,” Dawson says.

Concerns about convicting victims

Suzanne Zaccour, the director of legal affairs with the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), says that the organization is concerned the bill’s language may be too specific in needing to kill an intimate partner in the context of coercive control.

“There are two concerns with that. If there is really a femicide, will it make it difficult to prove because you have to prove coercive control if the victim is not there to testify?” she asks. 

“It can be intrusive to have to document coercive control, and presumably they can still charge in the usual way of first-degree murder. But if they go with this coercive control route, will there be cases if they can’t convict because it’s too hard to prove?”

NAWL’s other concern is for women who kill their intimate partner in circumstances where a male intimate partner was an abuser. That’s because research has shown that these women may plead guilty to a lesser offence like manslaughter if they don’t feel a self-defence plea will work.

“Our concern with making it a gender-neutral offence based on coercive control is what about the women who kill an intimate partner who was abusive, but then they are told that they might be charged with first-degree murder because of an intimate partner, so they might be told to plead down to second degree,” Zaccour says.

She points to instances in recent years where family courts have sometimes labelled an abused woman as committing coercive control under the theory of so-called parental alienation. That’s concerning, given the definition of femicide in the legislation requires an element of coercive control.

“The mother discloses violence by the father, and she tries to protect the children. The father says she is trying to commit parental alienation, and the courts have started saying that so-called parental alienation is coercive control,” Zaccour says. 

“So, the abused woman is being labelled as committing coercive control.”

She says some survivors think that criminalizing coercive control and femicide takes this same route. That has some worried that if this issue isn’t fixed, it will be the victims who are convicted. 

Shelley Hounsell, K.C., senior counsel with Presse Mason in Nova Scotia and past chair of the CBA’s family law section, is pleased that the government has built on a previous private member’s bill aimed at criminalizing coercive control. 

“In Canada, we don’t see ourselves as committing murders against our spouses,” she says, speaking on her own behalf. 

“The public perception is we don’t do that because we’re good people. But we clearly do, and it’s part of that continuum of coercive and controlling behaviour.”

Hounsell also welcomed the improved language around criminal harassment, which can be an avenue when there is insufficient evidence for coercive control charges. There are also changes to the language around stalking offences, which no longer require the victim to fear for their safety.

Not included, however, is anything related to non-fatal strangulation, which Hounsell says should have drawn on legislation enacted in Northern Ireland in 2023.

“It’s another approach,” she says. 

“I have a criminal background as well as family law, and everyone assumed that criminal harassment covered the types of behaviour that we needed to protect people from when they weren’t assaulted, but it doesn’t because it’s not broad enough.”

The link between human and animal harm

At Humane Canada, Kerri Thomson, the manager of justice and legislative affairs, is thrilled that animals have been included in the coercive control provisions. Aggressors often use animal abuse — and threats of it — to coerce, control, and intimidate partners, children, and elders into staying silent about their abuse. They use the same approach to prevent people from leaving or to force them to return.

Drawing on the experience of the National Centre for the Prosecution of Animal Cruelty, a group of prosecutors from across the country that Humane Canada works with, she says that unless animals are explicitly included in something, they will be overlooked, especially if there are other areas of human harm.  

“People often don’t understand that animal harm and human harm go together.”

Unfortunately, a law is only as good as its enforcement. Thomson recommends that any legislative changes be accompanied by comprehensive training for law enforcement and justice personnel, so that everyone understands what coercive control is, the many ways it’s used, and how animals are used as tools in these situations.

“It’s not always about abusing the animals in that—it’s more insidious than that,” she says. 

It can include threatening to get rid of or disappear an animal. She points to a study where family lawyers reported examples where partners refused to hand an animal over, used it as leverage to force their partner to give up things in the separation, and instances where abusers told their partner they’d sold the family pet on Kijiji while they were at work. Economic and financial coercion can also come into play when it involves taking a pet that’s been hurt or poisoned to the vet. 

Thomson is also encouraged by changes to criminal harassment offences to include threatening animals, as it’s what abusers do before they harm the animal.

Just the start

Zaccour says government follow-up will be key if this bill passes. She points to the fact that two years after changes to the Firearms Act related to domestic violence received royal assent, they still have not entered into force. 

“It’s difficult for us to trust that everything is going to go great with the investment, the implementation and the follow-through just because of that and other experiences,” she says.

“But we want to be clear with the government that this is the start, not the end of the work on gender-based violence.”

 

* With files from Holly Lake