When a man convicted of beating and strangling his girlfriend came before the courts again for breaching a restraining order, a Toronto judge told him: “Don’t worry, son, you’ll get over her.”

This comment was one of many uttered by judges in the city’s domestic violence courts that “minimalized and trivialized” a victim’s experience of abuse, according to a report released recently by a non-profit organization for survivors.

Toronto-based WomenatthecentrE, a 600-strong group of survivors, conducted a year-long court-watch project to monitor Toronto’s Specialized Domestic Violence Courts and the way they handle cases.

Nneka MacGregor, executive director of the group, said the results shed light on a “serious, serious problem.”

“To a large extent the courts appeared to be disorganized, under-resourced and lacking in their ability to consistently hold perpetrators accountable for their criminal behaviour,” says the report, titled “Still Unbalanced.”

WomenatthecentrE is calling for a systemic review of the criminal justice system to protect victims. The group also wants judges to receive domestic violence training and publicly condemn violent and abusive behaviour “at every opportunity” in the courtroom.

Earlier this year, the Star highlighted how Ontario’s judicial system has failed to handle domestic violence cases responsibly, including poor sharing of information between the family and criminal courts, and law schools’ failure to implement mandatory domestic violence training for budding lawyers.

Toronto’s Specialized Domestic Violence Courts have been operating for 15 years, but MacGregor said “survivors continue to speak about how the criminal justice system re-victimized and re-traumatized them.”

This frustration, shared repeatedly among the group’s members, kickstarted the court-watch project.

“There’s an expectation that these courts have been working well all this time, but when we went in we realized they actually haven’t been,” MacGregor told the Star.

“There is no oversight around — women are falling through the cracks, and men are not being held accountable.”

Many judges did not understand the power and control abusers have over their victims or the challenges victims face when navigating the criminal justice system, the report says.

“With a cookie-cutter approach, with the same outcomes for a whole range of charges and varying degrees of severity… it seems like there is more concern with getting a guilty plea and moving the case out of the court quickly than holding abusers accountable,” it says.

Some judges used their position of authority to clearly reprimand the offender, while others “remained neutral, or even more disturbing, seemed to go out of their way to support or connect with the offender,” the report said.

Students and volunteers were sent in as “court watchers” to report first-hand on 40 domestic violence cases heard in Toronto in 2013 and 2014.

They reported that many cases were delayed or adjourned because of what appeared to be avoidable problems, and that the judges spoke in a legal language difficult to follow.

In some cases, they saw the accused sit in the dock shaking his head or making loud “tsk-tsk” noises during a victim’s testimony.

One court watcher listened to a case in which a drunk woman went to her boyfriend’s house late on a weeknight and got into an argument with him about text messages she had read on his phone. He asked her to leave, she refused, and the pair got into a fight, where she ended up pinned to the ground with him holding her arms and legs down.

The judge ruled that the woman refusing to leave the man’s house qualified as trespassing and said the man was justified in the use of “reasonable force” to remove her.

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In the report, the court watcher wrote that the Crown “pleaded with the judge, and with increasing urgency, that this case ‘cannot be viewed in the context of a trespassing,’ her voice audibly breaking, but in this judge’s strict reading of the legal definition, these pleas fell on deaf ears.”

The report stated that domestic violence appears to have once again “become invisible to our communities, policy makers and the media.”

“It is our hope that this pilot brings public attention back to this critical issue and highlights the urgent need for a more systemic and comprehensive court watch initiative.”