I think police need to be better educated about the circumstances of women who have experienced sexual violence. There are some very basic things: being given a comfortable room, a private space, in which to give statements; being able to choose the gender of the investigator; being able to develop a rapport with that investigator before actually having to delve into the minutiae of what happened during a sexual assault; preventing sexual assault victims from having to testify in the presence of their assailants; offering them adequate protection, knowing that if they come forward with a complaint that a restraining order will actually be enforced; and having what I flippantly call a sexual assault midwife, somebody who will guide sexual assault survivors through the criminal process. The Province of Quebec does this particularly well in terms of having a centre that sexual assault survivors can go to once they have reported, and they are actually assigned a counsellor who will take them through every step of the process and will keep them apprised of where their case is at.
The other thing is timing. If you make a report of sexual assault to the police, it can be six months to a year before you see any response to that report. That's a long time for a survivor to wait to have to tell and retell her story.
There are a lot of basic things we can do to make the system more approachable for survivors, but we also have to keep in mind that the judiciary needs to be educated as well. We now have two extreme examples in Canada of the judiciary making it very clear that survivors are unwelcome and will not be treated respectfully in a court of law, those being the Ghomeshi decision and the case in the Prairies. Judicial education is also key here in terms of respectful engagement with survivors.