(Un)reasonable Doubt? the Invocation of Children's Consent in Sexual Abuse Trial Judgments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The techniques of discursive psychology were used to analyze the discourse of offence descriptions in criminal trial judgments in recent cases of child sexual abuse in Canada. In certain cases, descriptions of the complaints provided resources that judges mobilized as a warrant for doubt by contrasting children's negative reception of sexual abuse with the innocuous or positive character of subsequent social contact with offenders. This argument emphasizes the agency of children in consenting to affiliate with offenders, presuming that authentic victims can and would avoid further involvement. Although a child's consent to sexual contact is no longer a possible defence under Canadian law, these findings show how the notion of consent can enter current trial decisions. Recommendations suggest ways of incorporating alternative conceptions of abuse in which repeated contact with offenders is viewed as consonant with children's dependent relationships with familiar (and often familial) abusers.
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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 | 0.035 | 0.099 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".