Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.
Among other things, I'm the woman in the lawsuit Jane Doe versus the Toronto police force. You may recall that in 1998, after an 11-year court battle, I successfully sued them for negligence and gender discrimination in their investigation of my rape and sexual assault generally. I argued that even though police had identifying information about the man dubbed the “balcony rapist”, they chose not to warn women in my area about the danger. In doing so, they violated my equality rights under section 15 of the Canadian charter.
I'm also an author, researcher, and educator. I have developed sexual assault policy in a number of sectors, including with the police. I lecture extensively in Canada and internationally on a topic I call the politics of rape.
I need not remind any of you of the complicated and systemic nature of politics of any sort. When it concerns the growing incidence of sexual assault in our country, the failure of our systems and institutions to deal with it, the low rate of reporting, the minus 1% conviction rate, as well as the sexism that we all agree exists in a rape trial, that's politics of a particular sort.
As a woman who has been sexually assaulted and who continues to use the relative anonymity of the publication ban, I thought that might be a good place to begin today.
Every few years or so and currently, the media and a politician or two opine that women who have experienced sexual assault should report to the police and use their own name when they do that. They argue that if women would just do that little thing and let us know their name and face, we could connect to their humanity. They could speak for themselves. And before you know it, things would change for the better.
Of course, they are right to suggest that women should be able to do these things, but no matter what I say, what scores of thousands of experts have been saying for decades, it doesn't work like that.
We appear to be allergic to the reality that a woman's past sexual, medical, mental, familial and work history, as well as what they read, watch and believe are used to annihilate them in a court of law. That's why we use the ban.
How upside down that we aren't focusing on ending that treatment as a remedy instead of dropping the publication ban. It is simply not safe, civilized, or just to identify as a rape victim. The term itself, rape victim, conjures feminine passivity, helplessness, and lack of agency, or says that we have survived an illness or an injury that has rendered us broken, marked, or even fallen.
In 2008, I travelled to four provinces and I interviewed sexually assaulted women who had and who had not used the publication ban about how their decisions affected them. I have provided you with a copy of that research, which details what I can't say in these few moments. I hope you will have a look at it.
The research overwhelmingly supported that the treatment of the 42 women who do or do not use the ban is itself criminal. It shows that they would not have proceeded without it or that they regret not using it. The publication ban isn't really that effective anyway. It keeps you anonymous from people who don't know who you are. If you live in a more urban area or small town or city, the ban barely works for you at all.
Its stated purpose as it reads in the legislation is to foster complaints by victims of sexual assault by protecting them from the trauma of widespread publication resulting in embarrassment and humiliation. That wording is confirmation of the disgrace and dishonour we attach to a raped woman, and to the manner in which her virtue and body are understood to be sullied and defiled.
Women I interviewed spoke about having their divorce, their abortions, and their pregnancies, as well as any criminal convictions that they might have, any child abuse or other assaults they had suffered in their lives, or any mental health conditions or diagnoses, used against them in a court of law.
One woman talked to me about how her red bikini underwear was used as evidence against her in a court of law and how the accused's lawyer waved it around in court. These and other outrages are reported in the media, and if a woman is using it, her real name is part of the story.
If you really believe that the prohibitive effects of the ban outweigh the scrap of protection it provides sexually assaulted women, what are you doing to make it easier, to make it safer, more dignified for women to use their own names in a court of law? That is what we would like to do, especially for women who are racialized or colonized, who are young or sex-working women, transgendered and disabled women, substance users, immigrant or homeless women, or women who have dated, married, or partnered with the man who raped them.
The ban offers those women a shadow of protection when those very identities that I just mentioned are used against them in a court of law, and they are used against them every day, in any sexual assault trial, in any city, at any time in our country. What Canadian women must deal with in our homes, reserves, and workplaces, in Parliament, on university sites, at our doctors, dentists, in the military, and in sports is a national crisis. We expect women to report sexual assault and use their own names when we all know that the system they asked them to report to, engage with, simply does not and cannot work in their best interest.
Nor can we look at the publication ban in isolation of the other offence of dehumanizing legal practices that women who do report their rapes endure. These are things, for instance, like the sexual assault evidence kit, or the rape kit, which is used only 10% of the time, and which women experience as a second assault; the use of paid and so-called expert psychiatric witnesses who are used to discredit women and who set rapists free; and the fact that judges and lawyers flaunt the law when they allow such practices in the first place. Then there is the police warning or alert that we must regulate our movements, monitor the actions of strange men around us, and avoid shortcuts, transit, or parking spaces when a sexual assault is committed in our area or neighbourhood.
We have to examine the very language that we use to “speak rape”, and on that note, what is it anyway, sexual assault or rape? Certainly with the very legislation, I have led to that contradiction or problem with those terms.
Most critically, if we are at all serious, it is imperative that we take the focus off women and place it on men, the perpetrators of the crime. I'm not talking about lengthier prison sentences as a remedy. I don't believe they work at all. I refer to the need to look at masculinity and the manner in which we are socializing men, our baby boys and youth, who are born to us free of malice or ill will, and how those wonderful creatures are raised and socialized to understand violence as acceptable. We must look at the need to design and support bystander and sex education curriculum that is consent-based and speaks to the pleasures as well as the responsibilities of sex, and it must begin at a very early age. We must understand that nothing can be meaningfully accomplished unless we incorporate issues of race, sexuality, and ability into our dialogue and our actions, and that goes for any politic that we are examining.
Few can deny the issues that I've raised, the need to look at all of the pieces and intersections of sexual assault, and yet we don't. We do not do that. Is that because we are a nation, an institution, or an individual who benefits from keeping things the way they are? Until we examine the multiple and systemic nature of sexual assault, until we spend the money and take the time to do that, the social band-aids that we've been applying will continue to fall off and will result in more crime.
I assure you that there are experts across Canada who work on the front line of sexual assault directly with women who experience it, experts who have lived it, or experts who write, research, and develop policy about sexual assault. That's who we must be consulting with and listening to if we are to draft any policy on violence against women, sexual assault in particular.
These experts, of which I'm a member, are legion, and today I offer you my services to assist you in accessing that expertise in addition to the expertise at the table today in order to consult and organize effectively on this subject that this committee has adopted and is examining.
Thank you.