44 GENDER PERSPECTIVES ON TORTURE: Law and Practice At night he would take me to our country church or an old barn and torture me. He put a cattle prod inside my vagina and shocked me. He tied me up and stuck a gun inside of me . . . . When I was six, my dad took me to a farm that had baby rabbits. I picked up the cut­ est one and hugged it. My dad took the rabbit from me and broke its neck . . . . the look he gave me was clear—this could happen to me. My dad made me watch as he cut the heads off chickens–I sat there in horror as the headless chickens jumped around splattering blood everywhere. My father told me that if I told of the things he did to me, the same thing would happen to me . . . . I was forced . . . to drink the blood and eat pieces of the dead animals and their feces as the other men watched and laughed. I was twelve when my dad and his associates got me pregnant and told me that I had evil inside me . . . . I thought I was dying . . . . They were giving me an abortion and then took the underdeveloped baby, cut it into pieces and made me eat some of it. My dad told me if I ever said anything about what he was doing, someone I loved would be hurt or killed and it would be my fault. He said that the only way I could make him really proud of me was to kill myself. [A]ssault; assault with a weapon causing bodily harm; aggravated assault; sexual assault; sexual assault with a weapon and aggravated sexual assault. It is an inadequate comparison . . . . I can assure you with the deepest conviction I feel there is nothing symbolic about using the word “torture” when naming this bill. To truly grasp and identify the full scope of non-State torture in Canada, there needs to be a law in place that empowers the victims of such torture to come forward knowing they are “finally” protected by the law. They need to be given their human rights to enter a courtroom, face their perpetrators and speak the truth using the appropriate and necessary term to describe the crime committed against them–torture. The Government’s Department of Justice appeared before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights studying Bill C-242 to answer questions (2016a). They stated that the UNCAT is focused on stopping State-inflicted torture and that international law defines the meaning of torture to be State related, thus no legal gap exists in the Criminal Code because existing provisions such as aggravated sexual assault, aggravated assault, and kidnapping would legally address nonState torture crimes. According to Gaer (2012), these are inadequate definitions that dismiss the specific gravity of torture crimes. No mention was made of international rulings such as Opuz v. Turkey, in which the Court referred to Article 3 of the ECHR (“no one shall be subjected to torture”) and held States responsible for such acts of violence perpetrated by private persons. Naming non-State torture, the Department of Justice said, serves more as a denunciatory purpose, and that using existing provisions is easier for police and prosecutors because they do not have to prove that the intentionality of the perpetrators is to cause harm and its consequential severe pain and suffering. This Department of Justice legal position was generally supported by Michael Spratt of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, who appeared before this Standing Committee (2016b). No value was given to denunciation. Knowledge that denunciation can strengthen women’s legal empowerment was dismissed. Women born into non-State torture families lost their childhoods forever; legal restoration can only alter the present and their future. Nowak (2010) learned that people telling their torture stories and being heard matters most, and that public acknowledge­