Introduction¹

[I]t takes vigilance and courage, both individual and collective, to ensure that human rights are protected at those points where they become most vulnerable. Within Canada, that vulnerability is nowhere more evident than inside penitentiaries.²

In our submission on “Rethinking the Treatment of Federally Sentenced Women in a Substantive Equality Context”, we referred briefly to systemic factors that make it exceedingly difficult for women in prison to disclose practices or incidents of abuse or mistreatment occurring in the prison setting.3 While the issue of barriers to disclosure of abuse was only peripherally related to the substantive equality analysis that was the focus of our main submission, these barriers are necessarily an issue of central concern in the context of an investigation and special report such as the one the Commission is embarked on in relation to the situation of federally sentenced women. Because of the underlying significance, as well as the subtle complexity of this issue, we wanted to take the opportunity presented by this review to address the issue more fully.

The complexity of disclosure in this context relates not only to the many factors that would inhibit women from coming forward with their stories but also to information that in isolation or when taken out of context may appear benign, but when examined through a substantive equality lens and in context is recognizable as part of a pattern of systemic discrimination. Those who are seeking the information need to be sensitive to these more subtle discrimination/equality issues in their investigation, as do those who analyze the information once it is gathered.

We recognize that disclosure issues are matters with which the Commission is extremely familiar; they are integral to the basic work of the Commission. However, we believe that the barriers to disclosure experienced by federally sentenced women are so acute as to warrant specific attention. Given the nature of the prison setting and the already seriously disadvantaged status of most of the women who are sent to prison, federally sentenced women are a complexly disadvantaged group. In this context, patterns and practices of discrimination may be particularly difficult to ascertain. This special report process affords a unique opportunity to raise these complicated disclosure issues in a non-adversarial forum so as to facilitate their fuller investigation and to promote discussion and dialogue on these matters.