How our language regarding sexual assault reinforces rape culture and perpetuates the battery of victims.
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More Canadians per capita tuned in to watch the Super Bowl than Americans this year. According to CTV’s ratings, 18.2 million viewers, or 52% per cent of the population, tuned in on February 7. Those who stayed tuned after the event were offered a recap of the week’s biggest news stories, one of which was the ongoing Jian Ghomeshi trial. The voiceover caught those roughly 18 million Canadians up to speed on the case. It mentioned that last week, the Ghomeshi defense team “dropped another bomb” on one of the witnesses during cross-examination in the form of email records revealing a more externally warm correspondence between the two than had previously been assumed.
“Dropped a bomb.” 18.2 million viewers, 52% of the Canadian population, many of whom may not have been following the case in detail at that point, were watching. When forced to pare the story down to its essential details, CTV chose to direct explosively violent terminology towards the witnesses testifying in a case of sexual violence.
CTV was not alone in using violent language to report on the trial proceedings. Christie Blatchford, writing for the National Post, described the third witness’s cross-examination by saying, “She might as well have been wearing a suicide vest, so thoroughly did she blow up.” The online version of Blatchford’s column is prefaced with a content warning for sexual language, but this sugarcoats the flippant and harmful associations she makes between sexual assault survivors, suicide, and the continued battery that comes from testimony.
Violent terminology was not only present in media coverage of Ghomeshi’s trial, but also in the legal tactics that were used throughout. Ghomeshi’s lawyer, Marie Henein, was accused of ‘whacking’ the witnesses during cross-examination—a legal slang term specific to sexual assault cases, where lawyers use aggressive questioning techniques to discredit witnesses. Speaking with CBC Radio’s The Current, Anne Kingston—who was covering the trial for Maclean’s—explains that ‘whacking’ uses “very personal questions that should have been outlawed by rape shield provisions that have come into the Criminal Code over the last generation.”
A term that calls to mind Mafia-style assassinations being regularly applied to questioning techniques used against sexual assault survivors in the Ontario court system. That technique arguably should have been outlawed to align with the updated Criminal Code, so why hasn’t it happened yet? It’s likely for the same reason that the fourth witness’s name was tweeted out by courtroom reporters despite there being a publication ban on her name. Why didn’t they look up whether or not there was a publication ban in place? Because nobody really cares about the treatment of sexual assault victims in the courtroom, or the treatment of victims anywhere.
These past two weeks have seen much discussion of how a trial like this one, involving a national celebrity, inevitably becomes a spectacle given the nature of a transparent justice system. This is the ‘price of living in a democracy,’ folks. The only thing the transparency of the justice system has shown us over the course of this trial is that something needs to change, not only in our justice system but also in our professional and personal lives, in how we handle and talk about sexual assault.
In a Toronto Star piece titled “No right to a discriminatory defense,” Joanna Birenbaum, Pamela Cross, and Amanda Dale dissect the way sexual assault cases are handled in the Canadian court system. They point out that “in no other category of trial are discriminatory assumptions about how a witness ought to have behaved trotted out as regularly…inconsistencies on peripheral or extraneous matters routinely result in acquittals.” In a chilling condemnation of our court system, they write, “Fewer than 10 per cent of sexual assault victims will report to authorities. Even fewer go to trial. Fewer still are convicted. This too makes sex assault unlike any other crime. We are dangerously close to creating the conditions for impunity.”
The use of the term “impunity” directly calls to mind another piece written in December 2014 for The Guardian by former Q producer Kathryn Borel. The piece details her experience reporting Ghomeshi’s harassment to her superiors and the CBC’s lack of responsive action. Borel writes of her experience, “I was essentially forced to either leave the show or allow my boss to lay his hands on my body at his pleasure. But since then, no manager or executive who was complicit in creating or maintaining a workplace in which Ghomeshi was allowed to operate with impunity has lost his job, let alone apologized.”
Everyone wants to operate in a social contract based on trust. But that trust is violated on all levels when women are abused in their personal relationships with men, in their workplaces, and in the courtrooms, and there is never a solution. Boys will be boys, this is just the way things are, this is a side effect of a transparent judicial system.
A Vice article discussing the Ghomeshi trial was published last week with the headline “Canadians are watching this sexual assault trial like it’s a real life episode of <i>Law & Order</i>.” Sensational? Yes, but there’s a lesson to be learned from that kind of commentary on the way we’ve been reacting to the trial. The piece took a comment from Thom Fitzgerald, friend of witness Lucy DeCoutere, who said he sometimes “tunes out the news because it’s upsetting to hear. The trial isn’t entertainment to friends and families of the witnesses or of the defendant…The nightly news doesn’t have time to build a three-dimensional character of each witness.” True, but it does have time to summarize the two-week long character assassination of the witnesses by saying that the defense “dropped a bomb” on said witness’s credibility in front of an audience of 19 million. Ghomeshi’s trial concluded without him even opening his mouth, and the women testifying against him were subject to a thorough ‘whacking’ on the stand, to a degree that should be illegal under the Criminal Code. Records of their words in the form of emails, letters, and texts were used as a weapon against them. Ghomeshi was allowed to remain silent.
Ghomeshi is entitled to a fair trial and defense, but he is the one on trial, not the witnesses testifying against him. Fitzgerald is right: this trial is not entertainment. It’s personal to the many victims of Ghomeshi and their loved ones, and it’s personal to the multiple survivors of sexual abuse, harassment, and assault who are watching. The battery of women on a personal, professional, and judiciary level should not be entertainment for a nation, and if we learn anything from the Ghomeshi trial, it’s that our entire attitude and language regarding sexual assault needs a makeover.
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