S4-Episode 5: Addressing intimate partner violence: Information sharing, trust, and privacy

Patricia Kosseim:

Hello, I'm Patricia Kosseim, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, and you're listening to Info Matters. A podcast about people, privacy and access to information. We dive into conversations with people from all walks of life and hear real stories about the access and privacy issues that matter most to them.

Welcome to another episode of Info Matters. Thanks for tuning in. Today we'll be addressing the topic of intimate partner violence. This topic can be distressing for some listeners. And if so, we encourage you to seek out help from the family violence services in your area. We've included links to these various resources in the show notes to this episode. Intimate partner violence is a pervasive problem affecting thousands of individuals across the country, transcending age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Here in Ontario, some have declared it an epidemic.

Without question, it's a topic that demands our attention, our understanding, and our action. In situations involving intimate partner violence, sharing timely information is vital, particularly when there's a risk of serious harm to a person's life, health or safety. At the same time, maintaining the trust of victims and survivors is crucial to allow them to come forward to seek out help and resources. In this episode, we'll explore the various dimensions of into intimate partner violence and how sharing information at the right time and in the right way can help save lives. Our guest today is Priya Shastri.

She's the Director of Programs at WomanACT. Based in Toronto, WomanACT is a charitable organization that works collaboratively with others to end violence against women, through community mobilization, coordination, research, policy, and education. Priya, welcome to the show.

Priya Shastri:

Thank you for having me.

PK:

As someone with more than a decade of experience helping protect women against violence in both Canada and in the UK, you've obviously had to work on the front lines in shelters and behind the scenes managing programs. So I'd like to know if you can share with us what led you to specialize in such an important line of work.

PS:

I've been working in the anti-violence or violence against women's sector for about 15 years, and I spent, like you said, about 10 of those years in the frontline supporting survivors of domestic violence. My upbringing and identity, I think, as a racialized woman, a daughter, a sister, definitely stirred a passion in me for women's safety and equity. My father passed away when I was young, and I am the second oldest of six sisters. I was raised in a woman-led household. I have this amazing mother who really modeled what it means to be a confident woman and what my expectations should be from society about how it treats me.

And so I think there was always a village of diverse women around me that were kind of raising me. And I understood quite young that women were treated differently from men and that women with certain identities such as Black or racialized, single mothers, women from certain income levels were treated and viewed differently by society in a day-to-day. And I had this need to understand this reality, and it motivated me to work in gender equity and gender-based violence because we can't have equity unless we're also addressing experiences of violence for women.

So I think that's really what moved me in the direction of this work. I think those realities that women face and then equities that they face in unemployment, housing, health and family services, these create risk factors for violence. And so to address gender equity, we also need to be addressing gender-based violence. I've had the privilege of working in different regions. I've worked in the north in Nunavut, and I've worked in the UK and London. And no matter where I've gone, intimate partner violence, family violence, sexual violence are pervasive issues experienced by women from all walks of life.

PK:

Well, thank you for that background. That certainly helps explain the tremendous passion you bring to your work every day. To level set for our listeners, I think it'd be important to explain what is intimate partner violence?

PS:

So gender-based violence is violence directed against a person because of a person's gender. And what we know is women are disproportionately impacted by gender-based violence in Canada. There are elevated risks of violence for women who identify as women with disabilities, indigenous, visible minority, two-spirit, LGBTQ. Intimate partner violence or what I will call IPV is one of the most prevalent forms of gender-based violence. So intimate partner violence comprises multiple types of abuse by current or former intimate partner or spouse. Intimate partner violence includes physical abuse, sexual abuse, harassment, stalking, financial and economic abuse, emotional and psychological abuse, coercive control.

And one of the more newer forms of abuse that's come into play is tech facilitated violence or cyber violence. So according to data from the government of Canada, about 44% of women or 6.2 million women, age 15 and older have reported some kind of abuse in their intimate partner relationships. Survivors of intimate partner violence are often experiencing multiple forms of abuse, and this has immediate and long-lasting impacts on health and social and economic consequences. It negatively impacts all aspect essentially of a survivor's being their physical, their mental, their reproductive health.

Women are experiencing intimate partner violence often also experience isolation and a breakdown or disconnection from family, friends and support systems. IPV is also one of the leading causes of homelessness and housing instability in Canada for women. So it really impacts their entire life and it shakes that system to the core. And in addition to the woman, if there's children involved, it's also impacting the children's health and wellbeing. So the negative impacts of intimate partner violence on survivors or victims is all encompassing.

PK:

So often we think about intimate partner violence as a situation involving individuals, but can you tell us a little bit more about the broader systemic issues associated with IPV?

PS:

Addressing violence against women on a larger scale I think really involves changing larger systems that survivors engage with. So the health system, the legal system, the services that women are engaging with or acknowledging and replacing the frameworks which built those systems. So most of these systems built on the frameworks of patriarchy, histories of oppression and white superiority. And these are approaches that are likely to re-traumatize or introduce new levels of trauma to survivors. So I think that level of system change currently is what really motivates my work.

Recognizing that IPV experiences, yes, they are related to individual circumstances, but there is a lot about those circumstances that are attributed to systematic structural issues. So for example, when I was in Nunavut, it was clear to me how many families had intergenerational trauma due to colonization and residential schooling. And as a result of that experience, the process of having or experiencing healthy relationships was broken and changed for generations. And that history of oppression and colonization really contributing to what domestic violence looks like in the community today.

One of the positive things is I see a lot of people and entities today working towards improving these systems by replacing patriarchy with a gendered lens. So considering gender when creating policies, processes and programs, replacing that approach of white superiority with trauma-informed, anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches, promoting and acknowledging the understanding and impact of trauma so that we can work in ways to prevent retraumatization. So I think that is really where my focus is at the moment. It is around creating system change from these systems that survivors are engaging with.

PK:

So we know that intimate partner violence intensified during COVID-19 with many calling it a shadow pandemic. What factors contributed in your view to this increase of intimate partner violence during the pandemic?

PS:

So I think here it's important to remember that public health emergencies typically lead to rises in violence. We know this is the case globally. There tends to be an increase in these stressors that lead to violence such as housing precarity, poor mental health, income and economic insecurity. And these pieces nurture high risk environments for violence. So emerging research has shown that COVID-19 was no exception, and what we saw was an increase in observed violence against women based on hospital, police, crisis report and self-reported data from survivors.

And so pre-COVID the systems that support survivors of intimate partner violence such as the anti-violence or violence against women's system, legal, housing, health. They had challenges in collaborating to address IPV. There were challenges such as long wait lists, access to services, no space in shelters, and overwhelming lack of lawyers to support with the legal needs. So COVID comes along and what it does is intensify and exacerbate any of the existing challenges and issues that we were dealing with in collaborating to address IPV. In addition to that, there's this larger message in the community in the immediate, the onset of COVID and during a lot of COVID that's telling people to stay at home and isolate.

For survivors, this meant staying in an abusive situation because they could not access shelter or safe and secure housing services in the same way that they were doing previously. So COVID-19 as an infectious disease played a role in coercive and controlling dynamics within abusive relationships. So for instance, now you have a woman with children who is stuck at home with a partner who will use the knowledge that she can't go anywhere to now control her movement and what she's doing. Due to the mandates and the fear of transmission, you also saw shelters needing to implement infection prevention protocols that isolate women in their rooms for long periods of time.

And this really did serve as a deterrent, I think, for many women accessing shelter. Women were scared to go access shelters because of the transmission of the actual disease. Additionally, a lot of services had to shift into a hybrid model. And what you saw was a lot of survivors having challenges accessing this virtual model, especially if they're in the same space as their perpetrator or abuser. For a lot of survivors who might've been in high risk situations, the hybrid modality wasn't safe for them to use.

So with health and social services being overwhelmed and courts being closed in many places and services and supports being harder to access, you definitely saw all across the board challenges being intensified and exacerbated by the pandemic.

PK:

My office recently released guidance for professionals on sharing information in situations involving intimate partner violence, and we developed this guidance in response to a coroner's inquest into the deaths of three women in Renfrew County, Ontario. In fact, the second anniversary of that inquest was just on June 28th, a couple of weeks ago. As someone who works in the sector, can you tell us why information sharing is so crucial to establishing safety for survivors and victims in situations of intimate partner violence?

PS:

The crucial part of supporting safety for a survivor is holistic support or wraparound services such as housing, health, legal, employment, education, child services. So all these services working together to share information to meet survivors' safety needs. And what that looks like is each of these service providers has a piece of information about the survivor and the perpetrator. Perhaps a health provider has some information about that current physical and mental health state of the survivor and the perpetrator. The education system might have some information about the child safety.

So bringing these different community partners and service providers together to share a piece of the puzzle so you get a full picture and you use that full picture then to create a safety plan. The challenge becomes if service providers and folks are coming together, but now you're creating safety plans on a puzzle that isn't really complete. That somebody hasn't shared a certain piece of information, and that information might change how you respond in the safety plan. So for example, if you're sitting around the table and there's information that a perpetrator potentially is going to be released, but the survivor might not be aware of that and neither might any of the partners supporting the survivors.

And it would be important as part of the safety plan to know that a perpetrator is being released and then you would create the safety plan around that. But sometimes what will happen is there will be a gap in the information and safety plans aren't as effective when there is missing information and it decreases safety for the survivor. And so that is essentially why it's so crucial and important.

PK:

The purpose of the guidance was really to educate professionals about privacy laws in Ontario and really to reassure them that they can legally share some of this personal information even without consent in situations when someone's life or health or safety is in danger. In your view, having worked in this sector, why do you think some professionals hesitate to share that vitally important information?

PS:

So accounting for privacy rights and the needs or wants of survivors of intimate partner violence with the need to share information for the purpose of safety planning can be difficult and not straightforward. In terms of best practice in implementing a trauma-informed approach, ideally, there is consent from a survivor for information sharing in an IPV case. And professionals across systems attempt to gain consent, I think across the board there's an attempt to gain consent, but for various reasons, sometimes they're unable to retrieve the consent.

In these circumstances where consent isn't present, professionals sometimes express being unclear on the information sharing privacy laws like you said. In addition, there is sometimes a challenge interpreting the privacy laws and knowing when you should share and how that applies to professionals in the different systems. If you're a police officer, what that means versus if you are a frontline worker. If I'm being entirely honest, you need a certain level of space and capacity to build your knowledge around privacy laws and keep updated on those changes to privacy laws. There are tools out there right now related to information sharing guidance, but they're not a language that can be understood.

We're not sure how to translate what's written here to actual cases on the ground, and that can sometimes be challenging. It's crucial for organizations and service providers to know Ontario privacy laws and their application to information sharing when supporting survivors and victims of intimate partner violence. I think another key important piece is it's important for organizations and service providers to apply a trauma-informed approach when they're sharing information. You might not always be able to get the survivor's consent, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're not using a survivor-centered approach.

Being transparent around information sharing and the responsibilities around information sharing. When you're a frontline worker and you're considering all of these pieces, I think it's really key to be transparent and it's best practice to be transparent from the very initial meeting with a survivor to let them know, here are our obligations and legal obligations for information sharing. Especially if we know there's harm to a child or that there's imminent risk to your life or to your safety. How I weigh risk to safety might be different than how the survivor or the client is weighing it.

So I think one of the hardest challenges when you are a frontline worker is knowing when to share information for a high risk situation can be challenging if you are defining the situation as high risk and you have a survivor sitting in front of you that's not defining the situation the same way as you. And so that can cause challenges in the relationship between the frontline worker and the survivor.

PK:

In developing our guidance, our office worked with WomanACT among other stakeholders, and I really want to thank you for all your support and collaboration throughout this project. In fact, WomanACT convened a focus group of survivors to provide us with valuable feedback on earlier versions of the guidance. From what you heard in the focus group, but what you know also more generally among women victims and survivors, what's their perspective on this type of guidance and information sharing? What are their concerns or what are things that they want to see represented in the form of guidance like this?

PS:

One of those key pieces that I think stood out from survivors related to information sharing was related to their individual identities. And what it means for different women with different identities when information is shared between different service providers and systems. For instance, we know across the board and across literature that Black and indigenous women experience criminalization at a higher volume than other women as a result of engaging with their criminal system or the justice system related to their IPV. Additionally, we know that indigenous and Black women, their children are more likely to be overrepresented in the child welfare system.

So for indigenous and Black survivors, information sharing can sometimes lead to further oppressions with systems and further disadvantages in systems. And so I think what we predominantly heard, it's not at the point of information sharing that these challenges are coming into play. It's at the point of implementation of the safety plans that this information is based on. That's when survivors start to experience a challenge. One of the things that I thought was great within the development of this guidance was the focus group.

So what we ended up doing was bringing a small group of women together with lived experience of intimate partner violence to review the cases, the case examples that were in the guidance. Survivors were really focused... When they're looking at these case examples and we're thinking about information sharing, really describing how the actions that are taken to ensure their safety can sometimes feel like it's taking their autonomy away, that it's not survivor-centered and choice-based. But I think there's a lot of that that is around trauma-informed practice.

Overarchingly, I think what we really heard was survivors need us to, one, do better at implementing safety plans. So share information, but we need the information you're sharing not to result in further trauma and further harm to us. If you share information and we're not experiencing more trauma and more harm, then it's helpful to us. But if you're sharing information amongst each other and it's causing further harm and trauma to us, then that becomes a challenge for providing consent and for participating in a safety plan.

PK:

Well, I certainly know that that focus group that you led much improved our guidance given the input that we had on some of the examples and making them more relevant, making them more sensitive, making them more culturally appropriate and relevant. That was such a critical step in the development of the guidance, and I'm just so pleased that we were able to work with your organization to make it all that much better and more practical and just better informed guidance overall.

So thank you for that. One of the things that I want to ask you about is by making this guidance available and highlighting the legal provisions that allow information sharing without consent, do we risk making women more fearful about coming forward and seeking help?

PS:

I think that best practice currently is that professionals should be sharing when they're engaging with a survivor from the very initial interactions, their legal obligations around information sharing. I know that across the board professionals do it, especially if a woman has a child. So sharing right away that if there is a risk to the child that there is a requirement to speak with CAS, and also talking about how they're going to do that, what that would look like, being transparent about if you do have to report something or you do need to share information with different partners around the table to ensure safety, that there will be a discussion and a conversation letting them know that they're going to do that.

That you're going to try to do that in a way that you both agree on because it's for their safety and their child's safety. So I think when you're using that trauma-informed approach and you're using and really focusing on transparency with the survivor, it builds trust between you and the survivor. And you'll have a survivor who's more likely to be inclined to provide consent and who's more likely to be able to participate and want to engage in a collaborative process that's there to build safety for them. But I think when we're not transparent about our responsibilities, that then you have a breaking of trust and a disengagement from the service.

And so the plain language guidance, I think what it does is it enables professionals to be able to explain their responsibilities more clearly to survivors. It is a tool that will support professionals to sit a survivor down and say, "These are my responsibilities legally, in terms of sharing information to ensure your safety." It gives the language that's necessary. A language that most professionals probably didn't have before. It's an additional tool, and a toolkit for frontline workers and for professionals to be able to use because information sharing, privacy laws are a complex language. They're written in a complex way.

Professionals have a challenge interpreting and applying them, but having this tool in our toolkit will give us a more simplified language to explain it. In my experience as a frontline worker and I predominantly held high risk cases, women I think really appreciate the transparency around information and privacy laws and what my responsibilities are and how I'm going to share information and that conversation back and forth. I think this guidance is just another tool in the toolkit and that it won't necessarily impact survivors disclosing. It'll just help frontline providers and professionals support women to disclose and give consent.

PK:

I'm very glad and heartened to hear that because writing this guidance in plain language was one of the primary objectives. I'm happy to hear that it fits the bill in terms of explainability, and it can be used as a tool for some of this honest, transparent dialogue to take place between professional and victim or survivor right from the beginning when they're seeking help. I want to ask you about access to information. Our office sometimes receives access to information appeals from reporters or researchers seeking information about statistics or trends or data about IPV cases in Ontario.

In your view, how valuable is access to that kind of information for centers like yours that have the mandate that you do to research, educate and help protect women against violence?

PS:

So you'll often hear you need to create evidence-based programming, do you take evidence-based actions. And evidence-based to me, is grounded in data that's collected in a certain way that accounts for certain biases. And so that's a structured data collection process or evaluation process. And it's very important, I think, to have those numbers and to have data and information when you're trying to come up with actions to address IPV. I know when we were doing our project called MARAC, our Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Collaboration Project.

And when we were doing the research for that, needing that information on femicides that have occurred was important so that we're able to take that information back and understand what were the realities of the women and identifying those realities and coming up with the actions to address those realities. But we wouldn't be able to come up with those actions unless we had the data that shared those realities with us. So I think data, it is very important, but I think there also needs to be a balance in terms of sharing data with purpose and sharing data responsibly. Making sure that data, if it's survivor data, that it's anonymized to a certain degree.

Again, another area. There is a lot of capacity building, I think, related to data sharing and information sharing that still needs to occur for cross-collaborative work of IPV.

PK:

As you know, our goal with the IPV guidance was to empower professionals in the justice, health and social services sectors to make informed decisions about privacy, confidentiality, and public safety. And so what would be your advice for our office in terms of what more we can do to build on this work in the future?

PS:

I've been hearing a lot of great things about the guidance. The predominant feedback we got was from more training opportunities around the guidance, more community opportunities to train with the guidance. I think collaborative joint capacity building opportunities associated with the plain language tool are important. Ongoing conversations are important. I think tools such as this are living kind of documents that need to then kind of be updated as people are using them. So opportunities for people to take it away, use it, and then come back and provide feedback for how it can be improved and made better.

It tends to come up only at the point of action where you're needing to share information, but it'd be good for there to be opportunities where people are having discussions around information sharing for the purpose of learning and not doing it in that moment where you're trying to navigate a case. And then I think that another key takeaway there is promoting and facilitating cross-sectoral collaborative education and training opportunities around information sharing. So if folks know that they work closely with multiple partners on a regular basis by nature of the cases that they're seeing, so you're working closely with the health community practice, you're working closely with police, you're working closely with a representative from the education sector or CAS.

That you are having these discussions around privacy laws. It'd be great to take out the tool and for everyone to sit around and have those discussions. Make sure that you're all on the same page when you're working collaboratively around privacy laws. So having those discussions with people that you're frequently collaborating with, well in advance of actually sitting down and applying it to a case is another piece that I think would be very helpful.

PK:

So not waiting for the heat of the moment, but having these discussions upfront.

PS:

Yes.

PK:

Well, thank you so much, Priya. That is very wise advice. I really appreciate it.

PS:

Thank you.

PK:

Well, this has been a very important conversation that I hope has helped raise awareness and empower professionals to share information in a timely way when facing these very distressing situations. For listeners who want to learn more about sharing personal information in situations involving IPV, I encourage you to visit our website at ipc.on.ca to get a copy of our guidance for professionals on sharing information in situations involving intimate partner violence. You can also call or email our office anytime for general assistance and information about Ontario's access and privacy laws.

Well, that's it folks. Thank you so much for listening to this important episode of Info Matters and until next time. I am Patricia Kosseim, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, and this has been Info Matters. If you enjoy the podcast, leave us a rating or review. If there's an access or privacy topic you'd like us to explore on a future episode, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a tweet @IPCinfoprivacy or email us at @email. Thanks for listening and please join us again for more conversations about people, privacy and access to information. If it matters to you, it matters to me.