An Examination of How the Canadian Military's Legal System Responds to Sexual Assault
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the Canadian military has been conducting sexual assault trials for over twenty years, there has been no academic study of them and no external review of them. This review of the military’s sexual assault cases (the first of its kind) yields several important findings. First, the conviction rate for the offence of sexual assault by courts martial is dramatically lower than the rate in Canada’s civilian criminal courts. The difference between acquittal rates in sexual assault cases in these two systems appears to be even larger. Since Operation Honour was launched in 2015 only one soldier has been convicted of sexually assaulting a female member of the Canadian Armed Forces by Canada’s military legal system. (One other conviction was overturned on appeal and is pending before the Supreme Court of Canada.)In addition, plea bargains in which accused individuals can avoid Criminal Code convictions by pleading guilty to military specific discipline offences like drunkenness,conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline, and disgraceful conduct have been used in some cases involving aggressive sexual attacks. Sanctions for even these serious sexual attacks involved fines and reprimands. Last, the decisions of military judges in some cases suggest a critical failure to recognize the Canadian military’s culture of hostility to women documented in the Deschamps Report. Together these findings raise the following question: regardless of the outcome of the current constitutional challenge to courts martial proceedings in Canada (in R v Beaudry), should the military’s legal system continue to maintain jurisdiction over sexual assault cases?\nBien que les militaires canadiens mènent des procès pour agression sexuelle depuis plus de vingt ans, ils n’ont fait l’objet d’aucune étude théorique et d’aucun examen externe. Le présent examen des cas d’agression sexuelle par des militaires (le premier du genre) permet de tirer plusieurs conclusions importantes. Premièrement, letaux de condamnation pour l’infraction d’agression sexuelle par une cour martiale est nettement inférieur à celui des cours criminelles civiles du Canada. La différence entre les taux d’acquittement dans les affaires d’agression sexuelle dans ces deux systèmes semble être encore plus grande. Depuis le lancement de l’Opération Honneur en 2015, un seul soldat a été reconnu coupable d’agression sexuelle contre une femme membre des Forces armées canadiennes par le système judiciaire militaire canadien. (Une autre condamnation a été annulée en appel et est en instance devant la Cour suprême du Canada.) De plus, des négociations de plaidoyer permettant aux accusés d’éviter des condamnations en vertu du Code criminel en plaidant coupable à des infractions relatives à des mesures disciplinaires militaires précises comme l’ivresse, la conduite préjudiciable au bon ordre et à la discipline et la conduite honteuse ontété utilisées dans certains cas d’agressions sexuelles. Les sanctions, même pour ces graves agressions sexuelles, comprenaient des amendes et des réprimandes. Enfin, les décisions des juges militaires dans certains cas suggèrent un manque critique dere connaissance de la culture d’hostilité des militaires canadiens envers les femmes documentées dans le rapport Deschamps. Ensemble, ces conclusions soulèvent la question suivante: quelle que soit l’issue de la contestation constitutionnelle en cours devant les cours martiales au Canada (dans R. c. Beaudry), le système juridique militaire devrait-il continuer d’exercer sa compétence dans les affaires d’agression sexuelle ?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".