Call for a review of mandatory charging policies

Mandatory charging policies, introduced over 40 years ago, take the responsibility away from survivors for deciding whether to lay criminal charges in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV). Police are directed to lay charges where they believe there is a reasonable likelihood of conviction. The hope when these policies were first introduced was that they would increase survivors’ safety, increase reporting and perpetrator accountability, and improve police responsiveness to IPV.

Unfortunately based on the experiences of the women we support, we know that, instead, some women are criminalized. This is an unintended consequence that occurs when women have contacted the police for help and are misidentified as the primary aggressor. Black, Indigenous, queer, disabled, migrant, transgender, and low-income women are disproportionately subjected to IPV. These same communities are also disproportionately criminalized by police, further contributing to the issue of survivors being criminally charged. This criminal charge can have a disastrous effect on a woman’s family law case, because the family court may view her as the abuser rather than the victim/survivor.

A survivor may reach out to the police to de-escalate the immediate violence without any intention of having her ex-partner charged. There are several reasons why a survivor may not want her partner to be charged – he could be the primary income earner and a criminal charge could affect the family’s ability to meet their basic needs, or it could impact their immigration status. The threat of a criminal charge against either person is enough to discourage some survivors from reaching out for help.  

There is little formal research on how mandatory charging policies have affected those they were intended to protect, even though calls for review have been made over the past 20 years, including:

• In 2005, the Women Abuse Council of Toronto wrote a report that made six recommendations for changes to the then-current approach to mandatory charging
• In 2009, the provincial Domestic Violence Advisory Council called for a study to assess the impact of mandatory charging on women 
• In 2022, the CKW Inquest Jury’s Verdict included a recommendation for the provincial government to: 

“Commission a comprehensive, independent and evidence-based review of the mandatory charging framework employed in Ontario, with a view to assessing its effect on IPV rates and recidivism, with particular attention to any unintended negative consequences.” The province has accepted this recommendation “in part,” also noting: “At this time, the Ministry of the Solicitor General does not have plans to commission an independent review of the mandatory charging framework.” 

• In 2023, at the national level, the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission included a recommendation (rec. v. 10) for: 

(a)provincial and territorial governments [to] replace mandatory arrest and charging policies and protocols for intimate partner violence offences with frameworks for structured decision-making by police, with a focus on violence prevention 

What more do we need to take these recommendations seriously?

The negative impacts of mandatory charging are not going away on their own. The provincial government needs to take action to address this issue. We should not have to wait for another set of recommendations to say what we already know to be true.

It’s time for the government to re-establish the Violence Against Women Roundtable

We ask the Ontario Government to re-establish the Violence Against Women Roundtable, which could lead a comprehensive, independent review of mandatory charging and:

• provide adequate resourcing to the Roundtable to ensure the review is professionally completed.
• have the Roundtable set a timeline for producing its final report and recommendations, to be no longer than 12 months from the time the review is started.
• ensure that this review include meaningful consultations with all stakeholders, including survivors, those who have caused the harm, women’s advocates, police officers, Crown Attorneys, family law lawyers and the judiciary.
• The Roundtable provide its report and recommendations to the Legislative Assembly and publicly.

Next steps

We have prepared a discussion paper outlining the history of mandatory charging policies and how these policies have negatively affected many survivors. We wrote this paper to support our call for a review and to highlight the importance of addressing this issue without any further delay. Read the paper.