Sexual Assault Cases in the Supreme Court of Canada: Losing Sight of Substantive Equality?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The equality guarantee contained in section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has prompted reforms that protect women as complainants in sexual assault cases. This paper considers the effectiveness of these reforms. Part II supplies a history of the relationships between consent, trial procedure and substantive equality in sexual assault law. I argue that substantive equality has had a significant effect on both substance and procedure. Part III examines the impact of these reforms by considering the extent to which substantive equality has infused judicial reasoning and fact determination in contested sexual assault cases. Specifically, I focus on the factual reasoning in the three sexual assault cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2011 (R. v. A. (J.A.); R. v. A. (J.); R. v. H. (J.M.)). My analysis shows that substantive equality reasoning has not yet infused judicial approaches to fact determination in sexual assault cases, and that individual complainants are not yet fully protected against the operation of myths and stereotypes when consent or credibility is at stake. I suggest in conclusion that the Court has a leading role to play in moving judicial reasoning towards a more egalitarian approach to fact determination.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".