Thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak this morning about this very important issue.
According to our organization's surveys, many women who choose to file a complaint consider that the justice system's method of handling sexual assault cases is flawed, unfair and fraught with myths and prejudices. Therefore, we think judges and future judges must receive training with regard to sexual assault to counter the stereotypes and prejudices in the legal process and decisions, and to better understand the systemic barriers to fair access to justice.
The Regroupement québécois des Centres d'aide et de lutte contre les agressions à caractère sexuel, or CALACS, emphasized that the judges' training should result in better knowledge of the sexual assault issue and the intersecting contexts of vulnerability, such as addiction, isolation, lack of information, view of the perpetrator toward certain marginalized groups and various forms of violence that may be combined with sexual assault.
The judges' training should make them aware of the various myths and prejudices in our society and institutions, and of how other systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, disablism and other types of discrimination toward members of the LGTBQ community, contribute to myths and prejudices when it comes to sexual assault.
The training should result in the acknowledgement that there are systemic barriers to access to the legal system that make certain victims particularly vulnerable to discrimination as part of the legal process and that there are barriers to fair access to justice.
The training should first address the definition of sexual assault, and the development of this definition to include other forms of sexual violence and to correspond to our modern reality.
The training should address links with other forms of violence, such as racism, homophobia, transphobia and disablism, which can intersect with sexual assault.
The myths and prejudices must be addressed to analyze how some groups are more stigmatized as a result of their ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, gender identity, migratory status, and so on.
The consequences and discriminatory nature of sexual assault with regard to the victims and their needs and rights must be addressed. Certain consequences may be experienced by all victims, while other consequences are experienced only by some more marginalized groups.
For example, victims with a precarious migratory status may jeopardize their right to remain in the country if they report their attacker. In other cases, sexual assault may be associated with a hate crime if the victims were targeted as a result of their sexual or gender identity. Also, victims with disabilities may be denied services if the perpetrator is a guardian or health care provider.
Judges must be made aware of these realities so they can properly understand the complexity of the consequences faced by victims of sexual assault.
The training must first address the particular needs of victims—especially women—who have specific and multiple vulnerabilities, to ensure fair access to justice.
These needs include the implementation of universal accommodation measures in the justice system and access to certain methods, such as the option of testifying outside the courtroom behind a screen and testifying in camera, to make it easier for victims to testify. The specific realities of immigrant women, refugee or non-status women and women with disabilities must be taken into account.
The training should address the behaviours to avoid in order not to further victimize the victims and act in a discriminatory manner. The handling of certain sexual assault cases is biased by racial, sexual, gender, class and other prejudices.
In the Quebec legal system, for example, in some identified and documented cases, culture and racial or ethnic identity were problematized and used as mitigating factors in the court decisions.
In R. v. Lucien, the ethnic origin and race of the perpetrators and the victim seem to have been used as mitigating factors.