Growing Concerns

By Patricia Lefave, Labeled, D.D.(P)

Our current Prime Minister is a “˜law and order” kind of guy I think. He also belongs to a section of the political right here which has stated, at least twice, to my personal knowledge, that if they (the Conservatives) get into a position of power, they intend to repeal the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so that individuals cannot base court challenges upon it.Canada is also currently moving towards the legal creation of a separate court for people who are labeled “mentally ill,” just as I was.

This often sounds like a good idea to those who have not (yet) been labeled in such a way. (This label I myself was given is something which still exists by the way, in the government records)The latest from our current Prime Minister is the suggestion of an idea to change the laws pertaining to people defined as “dangerous offenders” by placing the onus of “proof” of status on the offender. That means that prosecutors would not have to prove the offender should be classified, or continue to be classified, as “dangerous” but rather the offender would be required to “prove” to the court he is not or , no longer is, a danger.The alarm bells are ringing for me here more and more often lately. I am of course feeling the effects of my own experience of the system. For rather than requiring psychiatry to prove that what we say is not reality and that we are delusional if we think so, we are first assumed to be delusional, then labeled as such, and then we are required to “prove” to the “experts” that we are NOT delusional, and that what they claim to be true is NOT the case. We are also expected to do this while being invalidated every time we try it. We who are declared to be “delusional” for telling some expert something they decide in ten minutes they simply do not believe, often compare this to the legal system which is currently used in the opposite way. There, the onus is on the system to prove guilt, not on the accused to prove innocence. It is the essence of our justice system, and that of other nations, which call themselves democracies, that a person is considered to be innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. The premise is designed to at least ATTEMPT to avoid conviction of the innocent, even though many mistakes are made even now.

The last thing Canada needs is a legal system which gets redefined as an abstraction in the same way the mental illness system has done it. That is what reverse onus means to me. Oh. It may sound good, especially when the public fears are being soothed by the sound of it, but it is not about evidence or changes that define crime and improve sentencing for violent crime. It is about a kind of political power that can’t quite be qualified or quantified and that is what makes it so dangerous in itself and something of which we need to be fully aware and not kid ourselves about the possible implications of going through with this. I find this parallel to the mental illness system very disturbing.

Let me spell that out as I see through a murky glass. The individual is presumed to be guilty/crazy first and has the label applied. Those who have total control over the prisoner/subject then tell her it is her job now to talk her way out of the situation by convincing her controllers with all the power, as an abstraction without concrete evidence, that she is not guilty/crazy/dangerous, knowing that they don’t believe a word she says anyway. Also, she must not be angry/fearful/resentful because if she is, that will be seen as a ‘sign’ that she is still guilty/dangerous/crazy. So neither the mental illness system not the legal system will be required to prove their case first; is that HOW it is going to go now?

You know what that reminds me of; reverse marketing. We once had an interesting little attempt here to supply everyone with cable T.V. The idea was similar. The company would send you more channels you did not want and did not request and then it was the customer’s job to get it cancelled or they would be obliged to pay for it. The ploy did not succeed. I hope this same ploy will not succeed regarding the legal system either. If it does, I am going to be even more worried about what is going on in my country.

This ‘reverse onus’ bit is not an appeal to rational minds but to our fearfulness. It works by creating and reinforcing a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentalityWe who are labeled have often stated the desire to have at least the SAME rights under our Constitutions, or Charters, as any criminal, convicted or otherwise. In the Brave New Canada which we seem to be headed towards, are we now going to treat criminals by trapping them in the same tautological psychology as that used on psychiatric patients.While I agree Canada needs to have much stiffer and clearly defined penalties with appropriate sentencing for legally convicted, violent offenders, I could not disagree more with indeterminate, open ended sentencing base on “metaphysical” sophistry. Doing so will only leave the identifying of “reality” open to the same kind of “interpretations” of meaning now used in the mental illness system.People who propose such vague and ambiguous nonsense are either incredibly naive or covertly cunning. The fact that either possibility exists I find to be deeply disturbing.If we want to keep truly dangerous offenders locked up for 25 years or for life then we need to do that in a direct, open and legitimate manner based on the crime committed, the concrete evidence of that crime, and the pre-determined sentencing criteria the law provides to deal with it.Justice cannot be a “debate” of abstract concepts, between opposing viewpoints, held by the powerless OR the powerful; not ever. That is not justice and to suggest that it is, causes me to seriously question the thought processes, and the agenda behind those thought processes, in those who suggest such “solutions.” Let’s hope this idea of a”solution” does not become the final one.