Velma Demerson (September 4, 1920 – May 13, 2019) was a Canadian woman who was imprisoned in 1939 in Ontario for being in a relationship with a Chinese immigrant, Harry Yip. She wrote the book Incorrigible in her sixties about her experiences and spent the rest of her life in campaigning for an apology and restitution for all women who had been incarcerated under the Female Refuges Act, the law that imprisoned her for being "incorrigible." It provided a reason that was formulated for police to arrest women who failed to comply with the status quo in Canadian society at the time. In her nineties, she also wrote and self-published a historical fiction book "Nazis in Canada" about the doctor who performed unusual treatments on her and other women in the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women.

Demerson won an apology and compensation from the government when she was in her eighties.

Demerson was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, to a family of Greek ancestry. After her parents divorced, she lived in Toronto in a rooming house on Church Street with her mother, who supported the family by managing the house and reading tea leaves in the parlour under the name "Madam Alice". Her father, on the other hand, remained in Saint John, where he was a successful restaurateur.

At the age of 18, Demerson met Harry Yip in a Yonge Street café, where he worked as a waiter. Eventually gaining his attention, they began dating, and she soon moved in with him. When her father found out that she was involved with a Chinese man, he took a train from Saint John to Toronto to seek the intervention of the Toronto Police.

Demerson, a white Canadian of European ancestry, was arrested at the home of her fiancé, Harry Yip, by two constables after they had entered the apartment with her father who stated, "That's her." Pregnant with Yip's baby, she was convicted of being "incorrigible" under the Female Refuges Act of 1897.

The Ontario law, which was not repealed until 1964, allowed the government to arrest and institutionalize women between the ages of 16 and 35 for such behaviour as promiscuity, pregnancy out of wedlock, public drunkenness, prostitution, or vagrancy. Demerson was incarcerated at the Mercer Reformatory for Women in Toronto for ten months for consorting with a Chinese man.

While incarcerated she gave birth to her mixed-race son, Harry Jr., who, at three months, was taken away from her until her release. She was subjected to several involuntary medical procedures by a "reformatory" doctor, a leading eugenics practitioner who was searching for evidence of physical deficiencies contributing to the moral defectives of "unmanageable women."

Upon her release from the Mercer Reformatory in 1940, she married Yip, but the marriage ended in divorce three years later. Frustrated that her son was also subject to racial taunting at school, she took him to Hong Kong to avoid bigotry and obtained work teaching English and shorthand to Chinese students. She found herself in financial distress, sent him back to Toronto, and returned herself to live with his father, who was unable to care for him and work and gave him up to foster care.