Over the past 20 years as an organization, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter has received between 15 000 to 20 000 calls from women reporting attacks by a man or men. Women have called us from all over the lower mainland, Greater Vancouver and B.C. In 1992 alone, 1421 attacks on women by a man or men were reported to us. We have consistently heard about women's reluctance to use the police; this has not changed. In fact, throughout the years, it has remained that less that 25% of women have contact with the police after an attack by a man or men.

Our statistics on the numbers of women involving the police after an attack are particularly revealing about how women view the usefulness of using the police as a response to male violence. In 1991 and 1992, only 18% of women calling us involved the police. Although from January to March of 1993, the percentage is slightly higher (our statistics indicate between 23 and 24% of women calling have engaged the police), there is still a significant gap between the numbers of women being attacked by men and the numbers of women willing to report these attacks to the police.

Women are unwilling, reluctant, even scared to involve the police. Women have said to us:

"I'm afraid to call the police again."

"They made me feel like I was lying."

"I don't JUST want to use the police. They won't breach him on the restaining order, so I'll take it to the court myself."

"They're not going to do anything anyway."

"I dqn't want to call them because they haven't responded when I've called them before."

"They threatened that if I called 911 again they would charge both of us."

"In front of him, after he broke my nose, they told me 'stop crying, you're faking it."

"They've totally negated my whole experience."

We know that inherent sexist, racist and classist bias in the policing system result in many women choosing not to involve the police and many women getting a poor response from the police. These bias are reflected in the way each call from a woman is responded to by individual officers and police personnel, their policies about how to handle each case, their administrative decisions and their accountability system.

When a woman decides to involve the police as a response to being attacked by a man or men she most often must go through the 911 operator to access them.

Women have told us that the 911 operator has on occasion made -judgements about whether the call warrants calling the police. In one instance, the 911 operator in Vancouver said she wouldn't send the police because she wasn't convinced of the man's criminal intent. She instead questioned the woman on why she hadn't called earlier. She told her that it wasn't a police matter.

The 91l operator has been unclear about what the police would be doing in response to her call. Police have either not come to the scene when the operator has said they will or they have shown up when the woman has not been advised they would. In one case, the operator did not inform the woman that police would be coming to her door. She was startled 45 minutes later when police were banging on her door without announcing themselves at 4 in the morning. The man who attempted to break in to her house an hour earlier had done the same thing.

Women have found it difficult to track down the exact content in the tapes of their call to the 911 operator. We have been tol that 911 tapes are destroyed after 30 days, so women wishing 1, complain about the 911 call after this time cannot verify their complaint and it is our experience that the word of the police personnel will be taken over that of the woman calling.

Women who choose to report an attack by a man or men to the police face secondly the response of the individual officers sent to respond to her complaint. Their attitudes, ignorance, manner and techniques serve to discourage, deter, and even block women's access to justice through the criminal system. Women describe their complaints being discounted, trivialized and disbelieved by individual officers. They are often treated with disrespect, suspicion, and contempt. The initial response and the subsequent investigation is often slow or there is no response at all.

Individual police have demonstrated ignorance of the law and ignorance of the realities of women's experience of male violence.

1. Police make judgements about the woman who is reporting and respond based on these. But too often these judgements are biased and this bias is reflected in the way women are treated by individual police. If she was drinking -no case; if they judge her as hysterical or unstable -no case; if she is thought to be medicated or using drugs -no case. If she has called more than once about the same man then what did she do to cause another attack from this man. As well, if she is his wife or daughter, poor, a woman of colour, a first nations woman, a disabled woman, a sex trade worker or a lesbian she is even less likely to be believed, to have her complaint taken seriously, to get treated respectfully, to be free from the attitude that somehow, she brought it on herself.

We have heard from numerous women about the lack of response from the police. Women have waited hours for police to arrive to take a report and sometimes this is immediately following the attack. Time and time again women have told us that they reported to the police and then never heard back from them again or that the police did nothing or that they said there was nothing they could do.

Even with a current charge pending against a man, women Are told there is nothing they can do about his harrassment and veiled threats unless he threatens her directly with harm or hurts her again. Police have made their own judgements about whether there is enough evidence for a charge and often without a full investigation. They have made comments like her story was inconsistent or unusual, she was drinking and so her story is unreliable, he didn't ejaculate so there is no physical evidence, she doesn't know who it is so there is nothing they can do.

Often when they have responded to a call from a woman, they haven't taken a statement from her, given her a file number, their names or their badge numbers. Women are left unsure about what will happen next in the legal proceedings, if anything, how she can access information about her case, what her rights are, what to do if the attacker comes around again, who to contact to get a response to her complaint. The legal system is left mystified and therefore unaccessible for women to use to get and remain safe from violence. At other times, the police have not even come when she's called because they say it is not a police matter. Police have not followed their own policy of mandatory arrest in cases of wife assault. Often they don't proceed when she wants them to or they when she doesn't want them to but for their own reasons. that women are hounded/stalked up to 18 months after a man who has been abusive. These women in particular require the assistance of the police to keep him away but often they do not get it. From reviewing a year of calls, we see that when women of colours or first nations women report to the police there is less likely to be an arrest or a charge. Conversely, when the attacker is a man of colours or first nations, there is most often a charge and a conviction. This is especially evident in the fact that there is a disproportionate number of men of colours and first nations men in jail.

It is not uncommon for women to call us asking for our help to get police to act on charging a man for breaching a restraining order. Very rarely are women given a copy of the order and so when calling the police she is sometimes record of it and so there is nothing resistant to proceed with charges on because they say there is not enough told that they can't find a they can do. Police are often breaching a restraining order evidence of the man's intent, she can't prove he was actually in violation of the order, it's her word against his. And when a woman doesn't call them every time he calls her, drives by, shows up at her house, her work, harrasses her family or friends because they haven't responded in the past, she is accused of letting it happen and blamed for their lack of response to the harrassment.

In Burnaby in particular, women have described abhorent treatment by individual officers and detectives of the RCMP. A woman who was reporting an attack was told that they wouldn't proceed on the investigation until the woman did the work of finding out exactly where the attack had occured. This woman had no transportation and her attacker had not let her be aware of where he had driven her to. Although the RCMP did not investigate the complaint, the woman was never given back the clothes she gave them for evidence.

The Burnaby RCMP refused to arrest or charge a man with breaching a restraining order when a woman was reporting continual harrassment (he had been calling her 20 to 30 times each month) even to the point of him breaking into her home. She was told by an officer that "if they had anything to do with domestic issues, that's all they would do". They told her they wouldn't honor the restraining order until she went to the Justice of the Peace and got it stamped saying it was valid. When she did this and brought it back to them, they 'still refused to breach him.

In Burnaby, as well as Vancouver, women who have mental disabilities or women who have hearing impairments, even though these women are particularly vulnerable to future and continued attacks by men, have been described as chronic complainers. Their complaints are consistently not taken seriously and they eventually give up trying to get a response from the police.

Although we have recently had a more favourable response from some individual detectives on the Burnaby RCMP, their record for mistreatment of women who have reported to them still leaves women mistrustful and fearful of using them and fearful of complaining against them.

In Vancouver, Richmond, and Maple Ridge, women have reported being patronized, called "girls" and been left with the belief that their complaint was being trivialized and not taken seriously.

Another woman in Vancouver called the police from a block away from her house after being assaulted by her common-law husband. Two officers arrived and after giving her statement to them, one of the officers said "you should have handled it yourself". They didn't get her medical attention even though she said she had felt her neck snap after being hit in the head and thrown to the floor. She was not given their names or badge numbers nor a file number of her complaint. When they went back to her house, there was two more cruisers, a couple of detectives and a paddy wagon there. The man was allowed to leave and later when she called the police to find out about her complaint, she discovered that not one of the officers who attended found it was important enough to file a report. No one in the office could locate the file. This especially created a problem for her when several months later he assaulted her again and she could not use the first report to back up her complaint as there wasn't one. As well, she is having difficulty seeking compensation for the injuries sustained in the first attack because there is no documentation with the police.

2. In many ways women face the implication that she is to blame for being attacked. Police give advice, suggestions about what she should do to change his behavior, get him to stop, protect herself, change her lifestyle and when she has made a different decision, chosen a different strategy to stay safe, to be free from violence she is judged as to blame for the violence done to her. She is condemned for reporting too late or she is judged as overreacting and therefore condemned for reporting too soon.

A woman who reported to the Vancouver Police that a stranger was attempting to get into her house was told by PC 1417 and PC 424 that she can't expect anything different given that she's living in a basement suite in her neighbourhood and she should move. They also told her what they thought she should do to secure her home including advising her to have one of her big, burly male friends install a peep hole for her.

3. Police infantilize woman who report to them. She is patronized condescended to, judged as unstable, and treated as if now after being attacked, she is incapable of making decisions about her own life. These judgements have been recorded and are used against her in deciding whether she will be an effective witness and therefore whether to proceed with the investigation.

In one case the police made the judgement that due to a woman being upset and crying after an attack and because she had been attacked in the past, that she was mentally incapable of knowing the difference between sex and rape.

On many occassions in Vancouver, uniformed officers and in one case Detective Campbell of the Sexual Offences Squad, questioned a woman's mental and emotional stability after reporting an attack to them.

In Vancouver, when on a woman's behalf we were trying to get the police to proceed with an investigation, the Acting Chief Dispatcher said that in their report; Constable Hamilton PC 1354 and Constable McCullough PC 1512 had recorded that there was some concern about the woman's stability or possible alcohol involvement. That she was known to them. They had cleared the case on the computer without doing a full investigation of the woman's complaint. They had refused to take a formal statement from her, to check for witnesses in the area, to take her doctor's report of the bruising that inevitably showed up the next day. It took a great deal of pressure-to get Constable McCullough to reluctantly agree to meet with the woman again the next night with us present. Even after he saw the extensive bruising to her legs, he still maintained that they would not proceed and she instead could write out a formal statement for the Justice of the Peace if she wanted to proceed on her own. When we contacted the officers' supervisor, Sergeant Duthie, he just put us back in touch with Constable Hamilton. Hamilton still refused to send a report to the Crown saying that if any charges were to be laid it would be against her as the attacker had displayed a bite mark on his hand where she had bitten him to get him to stop from dragging her up cement stairs by her neck. The man in question is at least a foot taller than the woman he attacked but the officers still chose to believe his word over hers that she had attacked him. It has taken many phone calls on our part to the Crown Council and the police for the supervisor to finally agree that he will get the officers to send their report to Crown. This just to get them to follow their own policy of a full investigation with a report of this investigation to Crown.

4. In cases in which the attacker is known to her, which is true over 80% of the time, individual officers have colluded with him to discredit her, make her appear foolish, hysterical, out of control. In front of him they may tell her there is nothing they can do, there is not enough evidence for a charge, tell her that she needs to calm down. When they leave, the man is left with the knowledge that the police will not act on her behalf to get him to stop or change his behaviour. He instead may believe that even the police think she was overreacting and that his behaviour was not out of line or they would have done something.

One woman called the police in Vancouver, to help her get her common-law husband out of the house because he was destroying the house and her property. Constable Brian Green PC 1281 and PC 588's behavior demonstrated that they believed him over her as they said they could see no evidence of what she was te'lling them. They would not have him leave nor allow her to take any of her belongings saying it was a civil matter. Instead, in response to her distress, they told her to shut-up several times, blatently laughed at her, and called them both children. This treatment of her in front of the man who was attacking her gave him direct permission to continue his abusive behavior towards her, because even the police had treated her as foolish, out of control and unbelievable. We made a formal complaint on the woman's behalf and they agreed that telling her to shut-up was unacceptable. Although there was at least partial agreement to our complaint, it is significant that in this particular case, we were present and witnessed the officer's behaviour. As well, they agreed that telling her to shutup was out of line with their own policies about conduct. Other women who have complained about individual officer's behaviour have not had similar acknowledgement.

In response to a woman reporting being raped, the RCMP told the woman's husband that she was making it up because she had been caught having an affair. They would not proceed with charges.

Included in our oral report to the Commission was a submission previously given by Ms. Catherine **** as another example of the police colluding with a man or men against a woman he/they have assaulted. To summarize: Ms. Catherine **** was physically assaulted by her former husband during their relationship. In 1991, Ms. Catherine **** was accused by her former husband and former lover of sexually abusing her two year old son. They reported their accusation to White Rock Social Services who determined there was no findings to this allegation. They then went to the Surrey RCMP who refused to investigate. Sergeant Adams of the Delta Police did decide to follow up on the allegations though and he apprehended her son and had her give a statement to him. In this statement, he did not touch on the alleged abuse, but instead questioned her about her relationship to her lawyer. Her son was returned to her only after she reluctantly agreed (on the suggestion of the ombudsman's office) with the findings of a psychiatric assessment of her son which stated that possibly she loved him too much. It was the only condition of his release back into her custody. Oil regaining custody of her son, she attempted to straighten the issue out. She has since written to every MP, MLA, Crown Counsel, Minister, and Ombudsperson who could possibly have an influence in getting the justice system and social services to recognize and account for their mistakes. At this time, she is still waiting.

We have been told of many other incidents of outrageous treatment of women by the police but many women are fearful of coming forward even to this Commission.

Not only have the individual police demonstrated overwhelmingly poor treatment of women who are victims of male violence, they treat feminists who advocate on behalf of women with alarming disrespect and contempt. We have experienced being yelled at, told to back off, being patronized, being told that we have no right to support her in the way we are, defensive responses to our suggestions for change or questions about how they're proceeding, having access to accompany women during interviews blocked, discounting our direction to them about how to best support a woman and access to information to aid a woman calling blocked.

In Vancouver, Constable McCullough PC 1512 yelled at a Rape Relief worker that he didn't want to hear from her, that she didn't have anything to do with this. Another time when the police had been called to stand by and keep the peace while the woman retreived her personal belongings, the officers chatted up the attacker about some ball game and allowed him to get close to her. When a Rape Relief worker asked them to please pay attention to their work of keeping the peace, the officers told her that how they did their job was none of her business. In response to our written complaints about police behaviour, Inspector K.M. Davies has sent several patronizing letters to us saying we don't have a right to receive file information or file a third party complaint. That some organizations did but we didn't.

In Burnaby, Rape Relief workers were physically blocked from participation in the interview with a woman. The detective was hostile and defensive saying she knew a lot more about sexual assault than we did and we wouldn't be allowed in regardless of what the woman wanted.

In Surrey, the RCMP refused to believe our workers when they told them that Surrey Memorial Hospital will just send the woman to Shaunessy if she wants a woman doctor and forensics taken after a rape. As it turned out, both our workers and the women had to turn around and go back to Shaunessy in Vancouver.

Besides the often outrageous treatment of women by individual police, women also face Policing Policies and Procedures which serve to discourage, deter and even hamper a woman's ability to get an effective response from the police.

When reporting an attack to the police, women must follow the police detachment's procedure for how complaints will be handled. If she arrives at the police station or calls them to give a report she may be expected to wait for hours or told to come back at another time or that they will come to her. Women are not given the choice about where they will be most comfortable giving their statement and instead must conform to the procedures laid out by each individual detachment. Each detachment makes their own decisions about whether a woman can have a person of her choosing with her during the interview. They may or may not send the case to other officers to conduct the investigation. In some cases there is a significant time lag between when she initially reported the case and when the investigating officers take over. In some cases they have made decisions that they will not do a composite or release information to the public about a man who is potentially dangerous to other women. They have engaged victim's services personnel to be in on the interview with the woman or contact her when she has not been informed or has wanted their assistance. Women have been threatened with the use of the polygraph test before determining whether they will proceed. As well, they have used the polygraph test on the attacker and then used this information to decide not to proceed further with the investigation.

We have heard from individual officers that they are overloaded with cases to investigate and women have told us that the investigation has often taken months before a decision is made to send the case to Crown Counsel. It is apparent with these complaints that administrative decisions about the priorities of where to concentrate police labour and energy is often not on the calls about male violence against women.

We believe that the current system of police accountability is ineffective in responding to the concerns of women using the police. Women have received limited acknowledgement of their complaints about police behaviour which is inevitable in a system where police investigate themselves. Without a system which is public, women's complaints will continue to go unheard.