'But if you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?' toward a course-of-conduct offence centring partner sexual coercion in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the removal of the marital exemption to rape 40 years ago in Canada, the law still fails to treat partner sexual assault on par with other sexual assaults. Starting from the norm of stranger rape, it struggles to make sense of partner sexual violence in a culture that normalizes sexually coercive behaviours. Because partner sexual violence presents a serious empirical, social, and legal problem, it deserves to receive primary consideration and should not be treated by legal scholars as a mere exception to the stranger rape model. This process of ‘centring’ partner sexual violence enables me to identify a gap in the law and propose new avenues to address chronic and non-physically forced sexual violence. Noting that the stranger rape model presupposes a unique interaction between victim and offender, I work by analogy with coercive control to criticize the ‘incident model’ of sexual assault. I work ‘bottom-up’ from the empirical reality of partner sexual violence to propose creating course-of-conduct provisions criminalizing repeatedly engaging in pre-defined acts of sexual coercion. Developing criminal provisions that are behaviourally specific and that do not require proving non-consent (among other features) produces a strategy that could pre-empt the implementation problems that plague the legal response to partner sexual violence. Beyond its exploration of concrete legal reform possibilities, my work contributes to the sexual violence field by focusing on the context of intimate relationships, which is often neglected by legal scholarship. My research confronts the injustices still faced by victims of partner sexual violence and opens up new ways of thinking about legal responses to sexual violations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".