Mentions of complainant sexual arousal in Canadian criminal sexual assault cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Involuntary sexual arousal can be experienced by victims during sexual assault. The misconception that sexual arousal equates to a victim’s consent is a “rape myth,” sometimes used to deny the occurrence of an assault, including in criminal trials. The goals of this scoping review were threefold: (a) to assess if complainant sexual arousal was discussed in Canadian criminal sexual assault cases, and if so, what signs of sexual arousal; (b) how sexual arousal was interpreted by legal actors, and (c) whether this contributed to case outcomes. Canadian legal databases CanLII, LexisNexis, and Westlaw were used to extract and screen 4,301 legal materials from Canadian sexual assault trials. Mentions of complainant sexual arousal, including moaning, hip movement, genital warmth, vaginal lubrication, and penile erection, were found in 13 cases, 12 of which involved female complainants and one case involving a male complainant. Content analysis of these cases revealed that signs of complainant sexual arousal were considered relevant evidence to ground the accused’s defences of “mistaken belief in consent” in all cases. The findings of this review emphasize the need to distinguish between sexual arousal and sexual consent and the risks associated with their confusion in legal contexts. Results support the promotion of standardized sexual education, including comprehensive information about consent. Additionally, they highlight the need for legal protections against the misuse of evidence related to complainant arousal to ensure criminal legal processes function with truth, fairness, and justice for all.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| 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".