Search

This article criticises the government's rejection of proposals by the Prison Reform Trust that would have extended self-defence in householder cases to victims/survivors of domestic abuse. The authors argue that the Prison Reform Trust proposals should be enacted, and further supported by novel complementary reform of the option to retreat, and the exclusion of intoxicated mistaken belief in self-defence claims. Specifically, the authors advance a statutory rebuttable presumption regarding the option to retreat in cases involving domestic abuse, namely, an assumption that the victim/survivor was not realistically able to retreat safely, unless it is proven otherwise. The authors also examine the appropriateness of the policy decision to exclude intoxicated mistaken belief in all self-defence cases and advocate for its removal. It should be replaced with a requirement that all mistaken beliefs must be reasonable regardless of the presence of intoxication. Procedural recommendations are also advanced, including amendment of the Crown Court Compendium to include judicial directions on self-defence which adopt a social entrapment approach in domestic abuse cases, and supported by the admissibility of non-medical expert evidence on the nature and impact of coercive control.

By drawing on a range of theoretical traditions emerging from feminism, criminology, and sociology, Women and Gendered Violence in Canadasignificantly expands the conversation on violence against women.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has both serious consequences for its victims and high rates of recidivism. Risk assessment measures are an integral part of preventing IPV recidivism. The use of brief IPV-specific measures is particularly relevant in settings, such as corrections, where resources are limited. The RBAC-VPI is a 15-item IPV risk assessment designed as a supplement to general risk measures, making it efficient to use in various settings. Validity was tested in a sample of 222 men in the province of Quebec, Canada convicted of a violent offence where the victim was an intimate partner. Participants were evaluated using the RBAC-VPI, a general risk assessment (RBAC-PCQ), a standalone IPV risk assessment (SARA-V3), and a psychopathy assessment (PCL:SV). The RBAC-VPI showed acceptable reliability and very strong convergent validity with the other measures, most notably with the SARA-V3 (r = .51), while containing fewer items and being quicker to administer. A Rasch model item response theory analysis further supported the validity of the measure’s items. Items showed excellent model fit and a good difficulty distribution. Only two items were identified as redundant and one as less informative. This suggests that the RBAC-VPI is both brief and highly informative.

For women seeking to extricate themselves from the web of entrapment woven together by the multiple threads that make up the coercive control repertoire of their abusive intimate partners, it is often difficult to avoid engagement with legal systems. Yet, the legal systems they encounter—criminal, family, child welfare, immigration among them—are frequently unwelcoming (if not hostile), controlling, demeaning, fragmented and contradictory. While there has been a recent explosion of interest in “access to justice,” little attention has been paid to how we might conceptualize access to justice in a manner that speaks meaningfully to the circumstances of women who experience abuse in their intimate relationships. For such women, access to justice is curtailed not only by lack of representation, delays, costs, and procedural complexities—the obstacles commonly associated with access to justice failings—but by three inter-related phenomena: the enduring hold of an incident-based understanding of domestic violence; the failure of legal actors to curb men’s strategic use of legal systems to further their power; and the host of complications—contradictory expectations, inconsistent orders, repetitious proceedings, sweeping surveillance—that arise when women are compelled to navigate multiple intersecting legal systems. What is required, I argue, is a conceptualization of access to justice that places women’s safety and well-being at its core.

"The law of torts is concerned with the secondary obligations generated by the infringement of primary rights. This work seeks to show that this apparently simple proposition enables us to understand the law of torts as found in the common Jaw." "Using primarily English materials, but drawing heavily upon the law of other common law jurisdictions, Stevens seeks to give an account of the law of torts which relies upon the core material familiar to most students and practitioners with a grasp of the law of torts. This material is drawn together in support of a single argument in a provocative and accessible style, and puts forward a new theoretical model for analysing the law of torts, providing an overarching framework for radically reconceiving the subject."--BOOK JACKET.

These essays illustrate the advantages of 'reflexive' tort scholarship by contrasting the reflexive scholarship of judicial analysis with grand theory, then applying reflexive scholarship to the tort of negligence. The final essay presents a wider argument about human responsibility and legal conduct.

Intimate partner violence [IPV] causes myriad and gendered harms, but Canadian law has inconsistently provided avenues of economic redress. Although tort law has evolved to allow IPV survivors to seek compensation, tort-based remedies are sought rarely and largely limited to intentional torts such as assault, battery, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress. These torts do not always encompass the harms sustained by IPV survivors, particularly those caused by economic abuse and coercive control. In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, a 2022 family law case, Justice Renu Mandhane responded to this gap in the law by recognizing a new tort of family violence, but her decision was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2023, and the case is now before the Supreme Court of Canada. Our paper provides a feminist analysis of the role of tort law in providing compensatory remedies for survivors of IPV. We situate tort remedies and Ahluwalia within the wider context of Canadian laws addressing IPV and feminist critiques of tort law and theory. This wider context raises issues about access to justice and socio-economic responses to IPV for members of marginalized groups in particular. We also examine how myths and stereotypes have influenced this area of law and the role of lawyers and judges in this respect, including in Ahluwalia. We conclude that recognition of the tort of family violence is an important but limited step forward in compensating the harms of IPV, and we urge governments to do more to systemically remediate these harms.

Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.

"Despite its great achievements, the domestic violence revolution is stalled, Evan Stark argues, a provocative conclusion he documents by showing that interventions have failed to improve women's long-term safety in relationships or to hold perpetrators accountable. Stark traces this failure to a startling paradox, that the singular focus on violence against women masks an even more devastating reality. In millions of abusive relationships, men use a largely unidentified form of subjugation that more closely resembles kidnapping or indentured servitude than assault. He calls this pattern "coercive control." Drawing on sources that range from FBI statistics and film to dozens of actual cases from his thirty years of experience as an award-winning researcher, advocate, and forensic expert, Stark shows in terrifying detail how men can use coercive control to extend their dominance over time and through social space in ways that subvert women's autonomy, isolate them, and infiltrate the most intimate corners of their lives. Against this backdrop, Stark analyzes the cases of three women tried for crimes committed in the context of abuse, showing that their reactions are only intelligible when they are reframed as victims of coercive control rather than as "battered wives."" "Elevating coercive control from a second-class misdemeanor to a human rights violation, Stark explains why law, policy, and advocacy must shift their focus to emphasize how coercive control jeopardizes women's freedom in everyday life. Fiercely argued and eminently readable, Stark's work is certain to breathe new life into the domestic violence revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

'Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices' is a comprehensive account of the scope, foundations, and structure of remedial law in common law jurisdictions. The rules governing the kinds of complaints that common law courts will accept are generally well understood. However, the rules governing when and how they respond to such complaints are not. The text provides that understanding. It argues that remedies are judicial rulings, and that remedial law is the law governing their availability and content.

Daniel Kim, 2025 83-1 University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review 55, 2025 CanLIIDocs 1328

This article examines sentencing for male intimate partner violence against women since the 1996 enactment of s 718.2(a)(ii) of the Criminal Code, which requires that a spousal/common-law relationship between an offender and victim be considered an aggravating factor in sentencing. The article argues that, while in general appellate courts in Canada are taking this violence seriously, cases involving level I sexual assaults still demonstrate the longstanding tendency to treat the intimate relationship as mitigating. Further appellate guidance is necessary on how courts should reconcile s 718.2(a)(ii) with s 718.2(e), which requires that all options other than incarceration be considered when sentencing an Indigenous offender. The author argues that it is important for courts to at least consider the systemic problem of intimate violence against Indigenous women when sentencing male offenders in these cases.