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GENDER PERSPECTIVES ON TORTURE: Law and Practice
United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment (CAT), to the failure to provide a ‘victim’s lens’ for a victim-related Criminal Code
amendment, to the denial of women’s ability to take into court their truth-telling of suffering tor
ture committed by non-State actor(s). This adds, at the individual level, secondary re-victimization
harms. Referencing international and human rights case law, human rights treaties, and the need
for a new legally binding treaty addressing violence against women and girls, will ensure nonState torture violations are gendered and recognised.
Twenty-Eight Words is all it Took
At 10 a.m. in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 23, 2012, at the forty-eighth session of the
United Nations Committee against Torture and Canada’s State party report, the following conver
sation occurred:
Mr. Kessel, (Canada) [informed the Committee], it should refrain from asking questions
that fell more squarely within other treaty bodies’ mandates, such as general issues
relating to violence against women or trafficking in persons (Committee against Torture,
2012a, para. 12).
[Responding], Claudio Grossman (Committee Chair) noted Canada’s invitation for the
Committee not to consider acts of domestic violence, but said . . . that was an invitation
the Committee could not affect due to its obligations to the Convention; discriminatory
treatment for women or men that could constitute torture was clearly listed in article 16 .
. . . if the Committee was to do that it would end up only considering acts of torture that
were committed against white males (News & Media, 2012, p. 4).
Twenty-eight words is all it took for the Canadian delegation to reveal structural, legal and
gendered discriminatory-based resistance and oppression when generalizing and rejecting that
violence against Canadian women—against all women—can involve torture, which falls to the
Committee to address. Torture is one of the worst human rights violations a human being can
inflict on another, and States “bear the primary responsibility for implementing international
human rights standards . . . by protecting human rights against interference by private actors”
(Nowak, 2010, para. 2).
This chapter focuses on Canadian women born into families that perpetrate non-State tor
ture, women who constitute a specifically unacknowledged, multi-victimized population. Such
family-based operators also trafficked—sold or rented—them as children to like-minded others
who create the commercialised demand for the global prostitution and pornography industries
(Sarson, 2011; Sarson, 2016; Sarson & MacDonald, 2009; Sarson & MacDonald, 2014a; Sarson &
MacDonald, 2016; Sarson & MacDonald, 2018). When exploited and trafficked into prostitution
and pornography, women and girls can suffer torture at the hands of non-State actors (Bamber
& Korzinski, 2007; Mendez, 2016; Native Women’s Association of Canada, 2014; Office of Drugs
and Crime, 2013). Although the family is recognized for its capacity to have positive influences
on its members and its community (Human Rights Council, 2014), it remains a dangerous site
for its potential to inflict many forms of gendered discrimination and gender-based violence
on women and girls (Human Rights Council, 2016). These forms of violence are endorsed by
sexism, misogyny, misopedia, and inequality. Torture committed by non-State actors within the
context of family is recognized in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women
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