Marital rape, polygamy, and prostitution: tradibg sex equality for agency and choice?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author considers three cases in which criminal laws apply to gendered harms: sexual assault, polygamy and prostitution. The first of these, the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v. JA was framed as being about the legal recognition of advance consent to sexual activity while unconscious. While the Court reached a positive result for women in rejecting this doctrine, it did so in a way that obscured the realities for women of domestic violence and sexual assault in spousal relationships. Instead the case was framed by both sides in the language of choice, agency and autonomy. The author argues that similar tensions are present in the Charter challenges to the criminal laws on polygamy and prostitution. In the Polygamy Reference, the BC Supreme Court was unconvinced by evidence of individual choice, instead focusing on the gendered harms of polygamy as practiced. In Bedford, the Ontario Court of Appeal treated prostitution as a question of women’s individual choice, leading to a focus on the locations in which women choose to prostitute rather than choice of men to buy sex or the inequalities that drive women into prostitution. The author argues that all of these practices should be understood as causing gendered harms that can justify legal intervention to address them.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".