Turning to the experts
As was discussed in last week’s blog, it is critical that judicial education about intimate partner violence be mandatory rather than voluntary. It’s also really important that the development of education for judges, like training for police, health care providers, child protection workers, and all others whose work brings them into contact with the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV), include the voices and expertise of those with relevant lived and work experience.
Leaving professionals to teach themselves about IPV will not produce the results we need and want, because people often don’t know either what they need to know or what they don’t know. It’s easy to miss important details that can only be provided by those who have survived IPV and those who work in the field at the community level.
In my experience, most people – including judges – who get IPV wrong do so with all the best intentions. Almost none set out to do the wrong thing. Almost none deny that IPV exists. They want the family to have a good family law outcome. But, without having access to education that has included the voices of survivors and community-based subject-matter experts, people – including judges – will continue to get things wrong at least some of the time.
I’ve worked in this field for three decades, and I still don’t know everything I need to know. Like most of us, I make assumptions based on my own background and experiences, and that means sometimes I get things wrong. So, back to school I go.
About a decade ago, I was involved with an incredible judicial education seminar. It was built by a planning team of experts that included:
- judges, who reminded the rest of us about judicial limitations and told us what judges worried about the most in IPV cases
- academics, who had conducted research and written on the topic
- community-based experts like me
- frontline IPV workers
- lawyers who had some expertise with IPV cases
- social workers, health care professionals and others
We heard stories from IPV survivors about what had worked well and not well for them in the court system, and we took their expertise into account when we developed the seminar.
The seminar was not a virtual lunch and learn, in which participants are often distracted by their daily responsibilities. It was a multi-day, in-person session of lectures, role playing, panel presentations and discussions, which offered many different approaches to teaching and learning. Conversations were challenging and, at times, heated, and a lot of learning went on for everyone – presenters as well as participants.
A few years later, when Luke’s Place developed a two-day in-person training on the dynamics of domestic violence for Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) staff and per diem lawyers, we loosely followed this model. While we couldn’t bring survivors into the training room, we brought in their stories – in recordings and in print – so that their lived experiences of the legal system were with us throughout the training. We brought frontline workers in for part of each session so participants could hear directly about their clients’ experiences with LAO’s services. We used an interactive training model to allow everyone a chance to air their feelings.
We heard again and again from participants that, while they had been resistant to the idea of the training, by the end of the two days they thought it was the best training they had ever attended on any topic.
Ontario’s Bill 102, Keira’s Law, encourages the use of survivor and community-based experts in the development of judicial education about IPV and sexual violence, but it doesn’t make it mandatory. We all need to speak up to ensure that such consultations happen because involving the experts – whether that expertise comes from lived experience or from education and professional experience – is critical if judges are to learn what they need to know.
