“IF MY WIFE HAD BEEN HOME THIS WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED”: INCEST IN SASKATCHEWAN, 1901 TO 1931
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1918 Regina District Court Judge James Hannon presided over a case the Leader-Post described as “one of the most heinous offences under the criminal code” – a father was charged with incest against his 16-year-old daughter. During the trial, the victim revealed her father started sexually abusing her at the age of 12, and she became pregnant twice as a result. Throughout both pregnancies her father made attempts to induce miscarriages, which scarred the victim. Despite this physical evidence and corroborative witness testimony, Judge Hannon found the father not guilty. This disturbing incident is one of 166 incest cases that were processed through the Saskatchewan criminal courts between 1901 and 1931. This dissertation is the first to examine these cases in detail, showing how the prosecution of incest reflets the larger attitudes of Saskatchewan’s white Anglo Protestant society. These trials reveal more than the history of filial sexual violence – they also expose how migration patterns, anxieties about federal and provincial nation-building, classism, racism, and patriarchal power intersected with one another through the prosecution of sex crimes. Judges’ perceptions of the morality of victims influenced their sentencing, not merely the evidence presented in the court of law. Victims, as in other histories of sex crimes, were put on trial with conviction rates and sentences varying widely. Race, class, and gender biases shaped these legal processes, along with how well integrated (or not) these perpetrators were in the community. Ultimately, Anglo Protestant incest victims had a higher chance of having their claims recognized and their perpetrators convicted compared to ethnic, racialized, and/or Indigenous women. Using a legal and social history analysis, this research offers original insights into the history of Saskatchewan’s settlement era through to 1931. Building on foundational scholarship on the history of rape and sex crimes in Canada, I used legal records, court proceedings, newspaper reports, and census data to show that incest was not an extraordinary or rare crime. Rather, incest was an extension of domestic violence committed by “ordinary” people. This analysis contributes to historical explorations of colonization and gendered violence in Prairie, legal, and gender histories.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".