Wife Assault and the Canadian Criminal Justice System, Mariana Valverde, Linda MacLeod and Kirsten Johnson, eds., Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 1995. 387 pp.

Abstract

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it began to be more generally recognized that violence within the family was, for many women, a weekly-if not dailyoccurrence. In 1983, Robert Kaplan, then Solicitor General of Canada, wrote to his provincial counterparts urging a new policy, of mandatorily charging the offender, to deal with spousal assault. He suggested that all such assaults would be dealt with as criminal events, which they clearly were, rather than being largely ignored by police and prosecutors, as they then were. Generally, unless there was extreme violence, the official view at that time was that a man and his wife should be urged to patch things up, with some sort of mediation effort, rather than involve the criminal law, which seemed to offer no solution. This book, based on a workshop at the Centre of Criminology of the University of Toronto, contains a series of policy reviews, articles and research reports which provide an overview of the need for, experiences with, and results of the new policy, based on mandatory charging of offenders. It is impossible to do justice to the individual parts of this volume, let alone the contributions of the individuals within each part, in the confines of a review. The issue of domestic assault and the official response to it is obviously extremely complex. This book provides a thorough overview of the Canadian experience, written clearly and by authors who are working in the front line of the challenge to deal with violence within families. Kelly Hannah-Moffat describes the police perspective on mandatory charge policies. Linda MacLeod provides insights from a prosecutorial perspective. We see what happens when discretion is taken from the victim (to press a charge), from police (to report to a prosecutor), from prosecutors (to proceed in court). As is well known, removal of discretion from one actor means that another proceeds to exercise discretion: when all discretion is removed, as appears to happen in the Winnipeg family violence court, it seems that undesirable consequences arise, such as both partners-victim and offender-being charged, in some fanciful parody of gender equality. The role of a probation officer in the Metro Toronto Abuse Protocol Project is outlined by Mary Lynn Ingratta and Kirsten Johnson. Anna Pratt describes the fears of, and risks taken by new immigrant and refugee women who report their husbands for abusing them.