2 nurses to tell UN committee of women’s ‘non-state torture’

Human rights advocates seek to pressure Ottawa

OTTAWA — Canada needs a special criminal charge to cover extended campaigns of physical and emotional abuse that amount to torture, say two Nova Scotia nurses who are in Geneva to try to shame the country before a United Nations body.

Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson, nurses and human rights advocates from Nova Scotia, are appearing before the United Nations Committee Against Torture this week to apply more pressure on the Canadian government to amend the Criminal Code to include “non-state torture” as a distinct crime.

“Electric shocking . . . caging, shackling in basements, water torture in a toilet or a bucket . . . (it’s) done at home or in a private place with tools you wouldn’t think of like a hot electric light bulb or a gun, scissors or knitting needles,” said MacDonald.

Many of the acts are already crimes in themselves, but MacDonald and Sarson argue that protracted abuse is a particular kind of crime that isn’t captured by a charge of, for instance, aggravated assault. Canadian criminal law only recognizes torture as a crime if it’s done by someone working for the state.

The abuse they’re talking about is often perpetrated by victims’ relatives, friends of older family members, human traffickers and johns who want very violent sex. MacDonald said that because nonstate torture is not identified as a crime, there is no data to show how widespread the problem is.

If the numbers at one women’s centre in Ontario are any indication, it could be stunning. Megan Walker, the executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre, said 59 women between January and October fit the description of victims of torture.

Walker said more than once a woman has come to the centre struggling to walk because an intimate partner has shoved a hot curling iron into her vagina.

Women and girls’ stories are so horrendous, she said, they’re terrified of reporting perpetrators to the police because they fear no one will believe them. They also fear that if they are caught reporting the abuse, the terror will escalate.

In Ottawa in 2009, federal public servant Donna Jones died after her husband doused her with boiling water — the culmination of many months of physical and emotional abuse. She went 11 days without medical attention after the scalding, apparently not calling for help even though a telephone was within reach where she lay on a makeshift bed in her basement. She had broken bones and air-gun pellets in her skin when she died of septic shock from her burns. A jury eventually convicted her husband of murder.

In Winnipeg this fall, police said a woman who was being trafficked for sex was regularly locked in a freezer until she passed out from lack of air, and subjected to electric shocks. She was victimized for four months, police said.

Walker said the extreme forms of violence could be considered state torture if a government were responsible.

She wants to see non-state torture identified as a crime so women’s experiences are validated, to establish a data bank where torture can be tracked, and so that law officials and medical providers can be trained to recognize signs and believe women when they come forward with their stories.