Making real connections

Victor Boutros was on Parliament Hill unraveling the misapprehended connection between violence and poverty.

“There is a tendency to think that poverty causes violence. Poverty doesn’t cause violence. Violent people cause violence. People in poverty simply don’t have the legal protection from violence that the rest of us are able to treat like the oxygen of our lives,” Boutros said at a May 1 breakfast sponsored by Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer and MP David Sweet.

A federal prosecutor in the civil rights division of the U.S department of justice, Boutros was speaking to the cause championed by International Justice Mission. IJM works to eradicate poverty through — think about this for a moment — the legal system.