What Constitutes Criminal Harassment?

I thank you for joining me today, and welcome back to our YouTube channel. I want to ask an interesting question today and answer it, what constitutes criminal harassment? Well, under section 264(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada defines criminal harassment, and I’ll give you a bunch of examples, but if someone repeatedly contacts, follows, stalks, shows up at work, continue to write text messages, phone calls, which reasonably causes fear, both subjective fear, in other words, the person feels fear and that it would a reasonable person would think is fear, that’s criminal harassment, and that’s a very serious crime in Canada. It can attract very serious jail sentences, depending on the level of harassment, stalking behaviors, for example, is very serious. So a person could face, if elected summarily, up to two years less a day in jail. If the Crown elects my indictment, the person could face up to 10 years in jail. Some people who are, you know, serial stalkers, have multiple convictions, and they I’ve seen convictions of three, four or five years in jail for those type of people. 

So what’s the element here? And let me give you some examples. So let’s say a very simple one. Let’s say you’ve been dating someone and they break up with you. So you start texting and calling continually and repeatedly, and they complain to the police, and the police warn you, and you continue that conduct, well, that’s going to cause reasonable fear, and even though they’re not necessarily threatening messages, eventually you’re harassing the person so much that they could have subjective fear. That’s reasonable, even on that. My rule of thumb that I tell people, look, it’s called a breakup, text and phone a couple times to get back together and let it be. In fact, doing that you might have a better chance of getting back together, as opposed to continually harassing the person. Obviously stalking behavior, where you’re sitting outside of someone’s home or following them repeatedly is harassing behavior, but it can be there’s a whole bunch of slew of things and direct threats is harassing behavior. You’re doing this, you’re following, you’re making indirect threats. Harassing behavior as well contacting other people about a person and making threats and harassing in that way, you could be charged with criminal harassment. So it’s a it’s a very wide range of contract section 264(1), one of the Criminal Code. It can be minor harassment. I mean, I suppose making some repeated phone calls is more on the minor side. And let’s say you’ve made 10 phone calls in a row to someone over a few days, which causes fear that type of offense is going to track a certain, perhaps non jail term, up to some serious stalking behavior. And in our Criminal Code really treats this seriously, I mean, especially in domestic type situations. But the real key takeaway is some situations don’t attract reasonable fear. Like, even though this person might have subjective fear, like, let’s say, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you broke up with a girlfriend. She broke up with you, and you make four phone calls over a couple days. There’s no threatening behavior, she reports to the police and says, I’m fearful. Well, that fear may not be reasonable. You stop. It ended. There’s a fine line. The line’s hard to describe and you know, but that gray area of lines certainly cross when you just keep making phone call and phone call and phone call after phone call, especially if you’ve been warned. But even you don’t even need a warning, there’s some situations that it just crosses the line. So that’s it. It’s a serious Criminal Code offense. It can attract serious penalties. There are cases that are defendable because the objective fear is not there. Maybe even this subjective fear is not there. But the Criminal Code asked the judge or jury who’s looking at a case like this, and think about this, it’s a simple question to say, would a reasonable person be fearful in that situation? And you don’t have to make direct threats. Threatening is a different section too, but threats can lead to, of course, criminal harassment charges too, but it’s threatening behavior in a sense, isn’t it? In the sense that it’s causing a person reasonable fear, where you’re stalking them, when you’re repeatedly phoning them and whatnot, there’s other sections of the Criminal Code where you’re just making repeated telephone calls to a person can lead to a charge where, even though there’s not subjective fear, but so criminal harassment has a particular definition. Now the accused itself, they must know that they’re what they’re doing, their behavior, that there’s mens rea of their guilty mind and being reckless, in other words, not caring as to whether it’s causing reasonable fear. So you don’t have to know is causing fear, but behavior itself, per se, cause fear, and would cause fear in a reasonable person. Well, that’s it, the bottom line in a nutshell, I guess the key takeaway is, if someone breaks up with you, make a couple phone calls and let it go. It’s called our breakup. Thank you for watching our video. We are absolutely committed to bringing you the best possible criminal and DUI educational videos. If you found this video helpful, please like it and subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you’ve been charged with the criminal offense in Ontario and require our services, please click on the link in the description below.