The Federal Victims Strategy: Reflections of a Policy Researcher over Two Decades

By Susan McDonald, Principal Researcher, Department of Justice Canada

I joined the federal public service in July 2001 and started in the Research and Statistics Division (RSD) at the Department of Justice Canada (the Department). I had just moved to Ottawa, new to the city, new to the federal government, and new to policy research. One of my file areas was Victims. The Victims of Crime Initiative (now known as the Federal Victims Strategy) had begun in 2000 when the Policy Centre for Victim Issues (PCVI) was established as a five-year initiative. As part of that first five-year initiative, there was funding for contracted research and data collection by Statistics Canada and the Senior Researcher responsible for the Victims file, which was not me at the time, had a robust workplan in place.

Having just graduated from a PhD program at the University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, I was well versed in academic research and writing although I had limited experience in the unique world of policy research. I did, however, have both research and lived experience in victims of crime.

This short article will touch on several significant changes that have occurred during my (almost) two and a half decades working on the Victims file. I took on responsibility for the file in 2003. During that time, both in the Department and the federal government, there has been a shift toward a trauma-informed, victim-focused approach to research, as well as to programming and policy development. At the Department, the RSD has developed a better understanding around research with victims of crime – how to include victims as participants in a trauma-informed way and what projects to undertake. RSD also learned more about the role that trusted intermediaries play, and of ensuring that the voices of the victims themselves are heard, so it has put in place ethical safeguards for such projects. There have also been significant developments in data collection on victim issues, many of which are captured in Kathy AuCoin’s article, following this one.

My doctoral thesis was entitled The Right to Know: Women, Ethnicity, Violence and Learning about the Law. I undertook in-depth qualitative interviews with Spanish-speaking immigrant women who had experienced some form of domestic abuse – whether physical, sexual, financial, or emotional. The participants were asked about any serious legal problems that arose because of the abuse, for example, their partner being charged with assault, marital breakdown, or loss of housing. They were then asked how they tried to resolve those problems and how they learned about how the law could help them – or not. One of my professors, Jenny Horsman, had just released a book called Too Scared to Learn: Women, Violence and Education (1999) for which she had travelled across Canada speaking with adult literacy learners. She found that many of her participants had experienced abuse or trauma as children and had never properly learned literacy skills or were in the midst of an abusive relationship and were genuinely “too scared to learn.” Her finding, that trauma impacts one’s ability to learn, was one that I was also seeing among the group of women in my research.

A year or so after completing my research and moving to Ottawa, a friend, and also former doctoral student, sent me a book by Professor Rebecca Campbell, who is well known for her research on sexual assault and women. The book, Emotionally Involved: The Impact of Researching Rape, documented the experiences of her students who were conducting in-depth interviews with sexual assault survivors, and what they felt as they heard and documented their study participants’ traumatic experiences. The text resonated strongly with me because I, too, had documented the impact of researching violence through a feminist lens (McDonald 2003).

The conclusion from my research and the research of others was that trauma impacts learning. Speed forward to the early 2010s and “trauma-informed” had become the new buzzword, making its way into government terminology. Not only was the language about victims shifting, the practices being used to support victims and survivors, as well as the research, were also different. For example, in the 2016 Victims of Crime Research Digest, Issue No. 9, Pamela Ponic and her colleagues wrote about trauma-informed practice.Footnote 1 One of the biggest shifts came in the context of forensic interviewing with survivors of sexual assault (see Haskell and Randall 2019), based on neurobiological research. This research called for criminal justice professionals (police, Crown, judges, victim services) to better understand victims and survivors of sexual assault and their responses to their experiences. The Department worked hard in this area to improve awareness and disseminate knowledge to all the criminal justice professionals.Footnote 2 Only ten years later, a trauma-informed approach is now regularly applied to policy, practice, research, and evaluation in government at all levels, as well as in academe and service agencies.

At the Department, most social science research supporting policy was done in RSD. Yet it was only in 2003 that a formal ethics review process was introduced to both in-house and contracted research projects that involved human subjects. Working with academics and the Panel on Research EthicsFootnote 3 (the Panel), as well as Health Canada, which had established a research ethics board around that time, we developed a set of questions based on the Tri-Council Policy Statement for every research project that involved human subjects. RSD also helped establish an interdepartmental working group on ethics and research that functioned for several years and permitted departmental research groups to share best practices.

The ethics of conducting research with victims of crime raised important questions about the psycho-emotional harm it could cause, how people were recruited, how participants would be reimbursed for any expenses incurred or given honoraria as a thank you for participating. Contractors affiliated with a university or college were asked to use their own research ethics board, and that approval was part of the contract. Independent consultants’ or community-based researchers’ first deliverables were always documentation that included an ethics protocol and letters of information and consent, along with data collection instruments. In one recent project, RSD contracted with a legal ethicist from a Canadian university to review the documentation to ensure that the contractor was doing everything possible to mitigate the risk of further harm to the participants. Having this process in place provides ethical safeguards for our research projects.

At the same time, over the past two decades, in the access to justice research area, the important role that trusted intermediaries play in assisting vulnerable people access help has been documented in studies in Canada and elsewhere (see for example, Currie 2009). A trusted intermediary is someone an individual trusts more than a government figure because they speak the same language, or have had similar experiences, or have been referred by a friend or family member. Or it could be a family member or friend. Often, trusted intermediaries work in social services organizations or health care. Over time, RSD began to work closely with these people so that victims could participate in research projects. For example, we worked with many sexual assault centres to both recruit survivors and to also be available for follow-up support after the interviews, if needed. We worked through other victim-serving agencies such as Child Advocacy Centres and services for those who had exited the sex trade or were being trafficked. The fundamental principle underlying this research has been that victims’ voices need to be heard and that if they choose to share their stories of how they experienced the criminal justice system, we want to ensure that supports are available. Working with trusted intermediaries has become a fundamental part of how the Department carries out research with victims and other vulnerable participants.

Of the many challenges victims research has faced over the past two and a half decades, the primary one has been the difficulty in collecting national data. Provinces and territories are each responsible for administering justice, and each jurisdiction has its own model for delivering victim services, as well as its own definition of who is a victim. This means that the information that is collected in one jurisdiction is not the same as in another. As Kathy AuCoin documents in the next article, multiple attempts have been made to address these differences, with the provinces and territories working closely with analysts from Statistics Canada. Having been part of each of these attempts, I am fully aware of the inherent challenges that come with deciding on a common definition of “victim” or introducing a new data management system. When one’s mandate is to provide support on the ground to victims of crime, the resources – cost, time, people – required to make fundamental shifts seem exorbitant. In the interim, RSD continues to work with our federal, provincial, and territorial partners (FPT) to tell their unique stories about how they support victims of crime going through the criminal justice system. And that has been the essence of the Federal Victims Strategy – under the FVS, FPT partners came together twice a year to meet in person and develop a network of support on victim issues. Now, those FPT meetings are held more often but via MS Teams or Zoom. Research is just one of the many areas that has been examined at regular FPT Working Group meetings over the years. Funding, law reform, and policy development, as well as challenges and promising practises in the different jurisdictions, have also all been topics of discussion.

Developing these relationships in person fostered the collaboration that has been a large part of the success of the FVS, and has allowed RSD to undertake the range of research projects that it has over 25 years. Funding from the Victims Fund has also supported several interesting research studies on victim impact statements, restorative justice, and supporting victims of crime with disabilities and with mental health and addictions issues, to name only a few. The Victims of Crime Research Digest, an annual publication released during National Victims and Survivors of Crime Week, in mid-May, has been showcasing research supported through the FVS since 2008. Through short accessible articles, such as this one, we are able to share new and different research on victim issues and the criminal justice system with a wide audience across the country.

I am genuinely proud of the research that has been carried out over the past 25 years, although at the same time I am acutely aware that much remains to be done. Times have changed. New technologies, such as video, can help, as in allowing witnesses to testify from a safe location. However, those same technologies have introduced a whole new set of cybercrimes that include criminal harassment, online child sexual exploitation, and non-consensual disclosure of intimate images. Identity theft and other scams are rampant and hurt those, such as older adults, who can be particularly vulnerable. Social movements, such as #MeToo, have helped to broaden the public discourse on sexual assault. To ensure all these changes are considered, we need the research, so we have the evidence to support law reform, policy and program development, implementation, and monitoring. We will know that research has made a difference when victims are getting the supports they need and criminal justice professionals are hearing victims’ voices.

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