Speaking into a Void: Parliamentary Action Ignored in Sexual Violence Sentencing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian sentencing jurisprudence is heavily reflective of the Alberta Court of Appeal’s determination of a three-year starting point for major sexual assaults in R v Sandercock, even in those jurisdictions that did not adopt it. This decision, issued in 1985, reflects attitudes and beliefs about sexual assault that are outdated and rely on improper myths and stereotypes. The Court also relied on sentencing guidance from England that was revisited in that country the very next year and has been revised numerous times since. Additionally, Parliament has made significant changes to the Criminal Code in the sentencing realm since. Despite these factors and the significantly greater understanding of the harm caused by sexual violence since 1985, courts continue to impose sentences that reflect the Sandercock starting point. Often, courts go below it, failing to account for the significant impacts of sexual violence on offenders. It is time to revisit sentencing guidance in this area. In this article, we look to comparable legal systems, and demonstrate that while other countries have adjusted their sentencing guidance to reflect the greater understanding that society now has of the harms caused by sexual violence, Canada has not. Instead, judges have talked tough, but failed to follow through. We provide numerous principled reasons that appellate courts across the country need to provide updated sentencing guidance and argue that sentences in this area must increase to properly account for appropriate sentencing principles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: yes | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: yes | Other design | low |
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 | 0.011 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".