Disorder in the court: The approach to sex addiction in Canadian legal proceedings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hypersexual Disorder, often termed colloquially as sex addiction, does not appear as a diagnosis in the most recent edition of the DSM, as there was insufficient empirical support for the putative cluster of symptoms involving preoccupation with sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Despite the lack of scientific evidence for a sex addiction diagnosis, the popular media continue to discuss sex addiction, and individuals continue to present clinically seeking assistance with their out-of-control sexual behaviours. Importantly, “sex addiction” is being led as a defence in criminal and civil matters in several jurisdictions. Building on a recent American case law review, the current research systematically sampled Canadian court, tribunal, and arbitral case law to query how these venues are addressing the concept of sex addiction. Case law was identified using the comprehensive Canadian legal database, Quicklaw, using an exhaustive list of key terms. Of the 111 cases identified and screened, 63 were excluded, and 48 were included in the review. Results indicate sex addiction is being used most commonly in criminal law and family law matters but is also used at arbitral and professional disciplinary hearings, as well as in administrative proceedings (including employment, human rights and immigration hearings). The current article presents examples of how sex addiction is being used in these venues and offers commentary on the ways in which legal and scientific epistemologies differ.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.029 | 0.031 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".