Making Domestic Violence a Crime: Situating the Criminal Justice Response in Canada

Abstract

Domestic violence has been actively responded to as a crime in Canada since the robust “second-wave” activism of feminists, women’s advocates, and grassroots service providers recognized the problem as a political one in the late twentieth century. Over 40 years of activism, research, and public policy have led to aggressive criminal justice interventions, including mandatory arrest and pro-prosecution policies, specialized domestic violence courts, and batterer intervention programs, becoming embedded as the criminal justice response to domestic violence in Canada without adequate attention to the structural, cultural, and gendered underpinnings of this violence. In this chapter, evolutions of naming, understanding, and responding to domestic violence as a crime in Canada are situated within the broader context of critical decolonial feminist praxis addressing systemic violence against women and girls.