A January book launch in Ottawa announced the release of Looking for Ashley: Re-reading what the Smith case reveals about the governance of girls, mothers and families in Canada.
The book was written by Rebecca Bromwich, a lawyer and member of St. Andrew’s, Ottawa. She also represents the Presbyterian Church on the board of the Church Council on Justice and Corrections, an inter-church organization committed to restorative justice.
Looking for Ashley is based on Bromwich’s doctoral thesis, and “addresses the thematic question of how girls and women’s agencies and subjectivities can be made legible to the law,” Bromwich told the Record.
“As a lawyer, I have many times represented all kinds of people, some of them adolescent girls, and the notion of how we represent people as lawyers, and in the texts that make up the formal discourses of the law, is taken for granted and seldom questioned. Yet, we have serious problems as a society when the subjective experiences of adolescent girls, and women too, form part of a legal case. How can girls be understood, believed, made legible, to the law?”
Ashley Smith was a New Brunswick native plagued with mental and behavioural problems that landed her in the corrections system at the age of 15. After several run-ins with the law, being shuffled around between prisons and provinces, and eventually confined to a solitary cell indefinitely, she took her own life while two guards watched at the age of 19. An inquest was launched following her death, which was eventually ruled a homicide, with the court citing that the corrections system was responsible for—and could have prevented—her death.
“The book launch was an opportunity to celebrate the launch of the book, and to remember the girl at the heart of the case, Ashley Smith,” said Bromwich, “who should not be forgotten in Canadian criminal justice and public safety as our new government grapples with the very thematic questions I look at in the book: How can the justice and correctional systems engage more fairly and equally with our diverse populace?”
Looking for Ashley is available through demeterpress.org or as an e-book at amazon.ca.
