Playing the Blame Game: Indigenous Status and Culpability in Ambiguous Sexual Assaults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the current social and political climate of emphasis on sexual violence awareness, as well as attempts to rectify past injustices that were committed in the ‘name of race’, so to speak, the current study was designed to assess bias within these two relevant areas. Studies concerning racial biases that may be more relevant to Canadian jurors (such as those involving Indigenous persons) are relatively lacking. While there is much statistical and anecdotal evidence to suggest that Indigenous persons are treated differently in the criminal justice system (i.e., prison over-representation, sentencing disparity), there is little evidence specifically focused on biases that may affect jurors in Canadian courtrooms. As a result, the present study was designed to examine whether race and age factors influence decisions concerning criminal culpability. This study was conducted on a University population and consisted of 711 participants. Participants read a transcript of a sexual assault court case that has been adapted from Canadian court records that is an ambiguous case (i.e., unclear whether victim or perpetrator is responsible). Our manipulated variables involve differing descriptions of the complainant (both age and race variations) and defendant (race variations), such that we can examine how these “extralegal” factors may introduce bias in whose testimony is given more weight or deemed more believable. Preliminary analysis shows significant differences in believably, consent, and punishments lengths for false reporting between Caucasian and Indigenous victims. These findings support the idea that racial biases may be relevant to Canadian juries. Faculty Mentor: Kristine Peace Department: Psychology (Honours)
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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 | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".