“For me, at first, I didn’t know how any of it worked,” says Tess Posine, a Carleton University student who was raped last February. “I don’t have any friends that ever reported it or ever did anything about it.”
Posine, who was raped by a stranger during a night out with friends this past year, did everything by the book.
She performed the rape evidence kit at the Ottawa Hospital less than 72 hours after the incident, filed a report at the Ottawa Police, and gave over every article of evidence, including phone records, clothing and repeated DNA samples.
She was assigned a detective from the Ottawa police sexual assault and child abuse unit who, according to Posine, seemed really reassuring they would arrest her alleged assailant.
But months later, Posine has only heard back once from the detective.
“She was like, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and then I heard nothing,” says Posine. “She took weeks and weeks to answer my email.”
Experts, survivors and feminists agree: claimants of sexual violence and assault are becoming victims of a system that traumatizes and misunderstands them.
What remains less clear is why these issues still persist.
Experts point to part of the problem starting back in 2006; the beginning of the global feminist movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp.
“Neither of those initiatives are making a difference,” says Wendy Murphy, a professor of sexual violence law at New England Law. “In fact, it is likely causing harm because they’re not using their platforms to shine a light on what we all know are the systemic problems that produce and contribute to high rates of violence against women.”
Instead, the focus has been on ensuring women as a whole believe their allegations will be taken seriously when in reality this movement has not translated into a material change in the system, said Stephen Tasson, a law professor at Carleton University.
“There’s a bigger disconnect between expectations and outcomes,” says Tasson.
Posine said the absence of information could be because the unit is dealing with an number of cases.
“It’s kind of like a hospital emergency room,” explains Const. Daniel Gervais from the unit.
“You can have somebody come in with whatever injury, and then you may have someone who comes in with a heart attack or chest pains, and that person is bumped up in the triage management,” says Gervais. “It’s very much the same thing with our investigations.”
In Posine’s case, when her detective finally got in touch again, she was unable to tell her much of anything about her case.
“At that point, she said, ‘I know who it is, we know what’s going to go down, I can’t tell you anything because it is going to ruin the investigation,’” says Posine with a sigh.
“It’s very frustrating because it’s my investigation, it’s my story.”
No sense of control for victims
Feelings of frustration are common in rape proceedings since the justice system does not give most people a sense of control, explains Tasson.
“When victims opt not to go to the justice system, we can’t blame them. All the evidence points to the fact that they aren’t going to get the resolutions that they want,” he adds.
In truth, sexual assault victims have a 50/50 chance of getting a compassionate response from the Ottawa Police in a way they feel believed and supported, according to a 2015 research study led by Holly Johnson, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa.
This finding is highly problematic, according to Johnson, since it has the potential to affect the already all-time low sexual assault reporting rate of five per cent.
“Women are really reluctant to go to the police largely because they are worried about not being believed, not only by the police but by others around them,” says Johnson.
As reluctant as victims are to go to the authorities, Canadians, and especially Canadian women, have a high confidence rate in the justice system and courts according to results released in 2015 from the Statistics Canada social survey on public confidence in Canadian institutions.
Seventy-nine per cent of Canadian women reported having a great deal or some confidence in the police, compared to 73 per cent of men. Additionally, 57 per cent of Canadians reported having a great deal or some confidence in the justice system and courts.
These statistics, which are perhaps encouraging for authorities, hide the reality of victims’ experiences which largely remain arbitrary, due to the lack of standardization, said Tasson.
Johnson, in her 2015 study, collaborated with Ottawa’s then police chief, Charles Bordeleau, to identify issues relating to the inconsistency in handling sexual assault claimants.
“From my study, I found a lot of women just expected better treatment and they were floored when their cases were dropped or they were treated badly by the police. We do think things have changed, we do expect this is going to be treated with respect and professionalism and it’s shocking when it’s not.” – Holly Johnson, criminology professor at U ottawa
“We have to be careful not to say that all police provide a shoddy response,” adds Johnson. “But many do, and enough to deter women from reporting.”
Rape myths
Johnson points specifically to the ways in which the police have perpetuated false assumptions about who gets raped, how they get raped, and created conceptions of an “ideal victim.”
“She looks like somebody who has been physically assaulted, she’s hysterical, she comes immediately to the police, she has been raped by a stranger, and there’s a witness,” says Johnson. “And that’s not typical.”
In truth, Johnson says women are often assaulted in private by people they trust, and alcohol may be involved. These factors make it harder for women, especially in the era of heavy victim scrutiny, to realize they were violated at all.
“Rape myths are so insidious that most of us carry them around and we are not even aware of them,” says Johnson.
When women come forward with alternative experiences, not only do some people assume they are lying, says Johnson, but they also create narratives to explain why women find themselves in particular situations.
This approach, according to Johnson, is extremely problematic since it assumes women to be at fault.
“The assumptions are there that because she was drunk, or because she was dancing with him, or because she took a ride home with him, then she consented,” says Johnson.
Johnson adds police forces, especially in the past, have responded to these findings with denial.
In addition, the police often blame women’s negative experiences on ‘one bad apple.’ Blaming one detective or officer who did not respond properly, and who will be given sensitivity training as a result.
However, Johnson argues this does not solve the problem.
“It’s a systemic problem,” says Johnson. “And the more we deny that there’s racism and there’s sexism institutionalized within institutions, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
Making changes
Since the 2015 study, the Ottawa Police have initiated major changes to guarantee compassion from officials, investigators and patrol officers towards victims and claimants, according to Gervais.
To move forward, they have introduced a sexual assault response officer course, sex assault reviews by community partnerships, anonymous, third-party and online reporting, and a support dog program inside of the past five years.
However, the biggest aspect the Ottawa Police has focused on, according to Gervais, has been properly understanding trauma-based interviews.
“It’s a lot of training and updating on the trauma of these incidents and then how that translates into interviews and behaviour of people,” says Gervais.
Johnson explains research has shown trauma to affect a victim’s ability to come forward at the first instance or to tell a consistent story.
It is through misunderstanding these effects of trauma that authorities retraumatize the victim. Retraumatization relates to the legal concept of double-victimization or revictimization; how a victim is not only traumatized because of their assault, but also traumatized by their experience in the justice system.
“It’s just a complete sense of loss of control within the system,” says Tasson.
Tassons added this concept is particularly present in the courts, since lawyers assigned to criminal sexual assault cases are not necessarily experts, and consequently, do not understand a victim’s experience.
As a result, victims suffer from inappropriate badgering and victimization from the defence counsel, who may reveal irrelevant and sensitive information about a victim’s sexual history in an effort to defend the alleged assailant, said Murphy.
“That does not happen to robbery victims, larceny victims, eyewitnesses to bank robberies,” says Murphy.
“Only when a woman reports a sexual assault or some kind of interpersonal violence is she subjected to this grotesque process that does not affect other types of crime victims; where she is forced to answer questions about her sex life, her medical history, whether she has ever used drugs, whether she had mental health care, all of these things are irrelevant.”
Deeper societal issues
These kinds of questions force women to choose between privacy and prosecution, says Murphy. Having to make that choice makes women feel ultimately betrayed by those who they thought were there to protect them.
“The betrayal that victims feel from the system itself, from the people that they grew up believing were responsible for stopping violence and providing justice, to have those people then become the source of harm, the fact that it is a betrayal, is what causes even more suffering than the rape itself,” says Murphy.
This lingering sense that no one cares about what happened to you is what makes it harder for victims to move on from their experiences, added Murphy.
“If she’s left out of the process, she never hears back from the police, she doesn’t know why her case was dropped,” says Johnson. “Then she justifiably feels very unsupported, and it just compounds the trauma of the case.”
The key to preventing negative experiences, says Johnson, is by placing importance on achieving procedural justice; the feeling of being supported and respected by authorities whether or not it leads to a conviction.
“From the inside, you can see that everybody here is well and truly dedicated to doing what they do,” says Gervais. “They endeavor to try to make sure that it’s done as best as it possibly can be, I think that’s something that’s sometimes missed and it’s understandable at times why.”
While this approach would guarantee women feel empowered while navigating the police and justice system, Murphy says the historic subjugation of women is the root issue, which continuously affects how they are perceived and treated in the modern-day.
“The problems are massive and they’re deep, and they’re societal and they permeate the criminal justice system,” says Johnson. “It’s not yesterday’s problem, it’s today’s problem, it continues.”
Featured image by Rachel Watts.
