The Impact of the Charter on the Law of Sexual Assault: Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The law of sexual assault has undergone enormous change in the 30 years since the Charter came into effect. In this paper, I examine the extent to which the Charter is responsible for this dramatic transformation. I argue that the Charter has been instrumental in modernizing the law of sexual assault, in part through legal challenges brought by men accused of sexual offences and in part through its use by equality-seeking groups as a tool in law reform efforts that took place during the 1990s. These two mechanisms have brought about changes to the Criminal Code provisions dealing with sexual assault which have created a framework for prosecuting sexual offences that has the potential to vindicate women’s rights to sexual autonomy, dignity, equality and privacy. I also argue, however, that the potential of this Charter-influenced sexual assault legislation is not being realized. My argument is that the promise of the law is being thwarted through the operation of deeply engrained assumptions and belief structures about women and about sexual assault. These belief structures inform the application of the sexual assault provisions the mselves, but they also inform evidentiary rulings that are made even before the court gets to the application of the sexual assault provisions. These evidentiary rulings have a profound impact on the success of sexual assault prosecutions, since they control the material the trier of fact is entitled to consider in determining whether a sexual assault occurred. Using examples of evidentiary rulings made in two Supreme Court of Canada sexual assault cases, I attempt to show how these deeply embedded assumptions erode the promise of the Charter-influenced law reforms by injecting problematic views into the reasoning process.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".