Attitudes may be beyond repair
Remarkably, for all the trees felled this week in the castigation of Federal Court of Canada Judge robin Camp, the breadth of his misapprehension, both of the law and the cultural norms in Canada, and of his wide-ranging condescension toward those who used to appear before him in Alberta provincial court, may yet be underestimated.
Camp, as the world now knows, is the fellow who actually asked a young woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted in a bathroom, “Why not — why didn’t you just sink your bottom down into the basin so he couldn’t penetrate you?” and, “And when your ankles were held together by your jeans, your skinny jeans, why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?”
He was elevated to the Federal Court last June, by the Conservative government, about four months before his acquittal in the case involving the girl was roundly overturned at the Alberta Court of Appeal, and a new trial ordered.
On monday, the same day four prominent law professors launched a formal complaint, the Canadian Judicial Council announced it is reviewing Camp’s comments in the September 2014 decision.
The judge issued an apology Tuesday for “things I said and attitudes I displayed during the trial of this matter,” and offered to undergo gender-sensitivity training on his own dime and time.
but a read of the materials in the case suggests that he might have to attend such training for the rest of his days, so retrograde and weird are his views, and so pervasive.
Off the top, like the four professors (Alice Woolley and Jennifer Koshan from the university of Calgary, elaine Craig and Jocelyn downie at dalhousie) write in their complaint, I should say I take no position about whether Camp should have acquitted Alexander Scott Wagar of sexual assault.
Such cases, being intimate crimes that often occur behind closed doors, are invariably among the trickiest that judges hear.
The decision — the result — is hardly the issue here.
The first hint of trouble comes in practically the first words Camp spoke in his reasons. He addressed Wagar directly, telling him he was acquitting him before offering him some manly words of wisdom.
“… I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m saying right at the beginning,” the judge said.
“The law and the way that people approach sexual activity has changed in the last 30 years. I want you to tell your friends, your male friends, that they have to be far more gentle with women. They have to be far more patient. And they have to be very careful. To protect themselves, they have to be very careful.
“The law in Canada today is that you have to be very sure before you engage in any form of sexual activity with a woman. Not just sex, not just oral sex, not even just touching a personal part of a girl’s body, but touching it at all. you’ve got to be very sure that the girl wants you to do it.
“Please tell your friends that so that they don’t upset women and so that they don’t get into trouble.
“We’re far more protective of women — young women and older women — than we used to be and that’s the way it should be.”
but it’s not about being “gentle” or “protective” of girls and women, surely, or about not upsetting them or staying out of trouble yourself, and it’s not about wistful longing for the law of the olden days: It’s about consent. It always has been.
It’s about having sex only with someone who wants to have sex with you, as much as you want to have sex with her, at that moment. you want a young man to give his friends a message, that’s the message to urge upon him — don’t force yourself upon a woman, not once, not ever, not even if you’re drunk and so is she.
everyone in this case (alleged victim, perpetrator, and witnesses) was, as it happens, drunk when the alleged assault occurred. They were also young (the alleged victim was 19) and ridiculously vulnerable, the girl in particular, as she was physically tiny, broke and homeless at the time.
yet Camp was dismissive of all that; he was also dismissive of the state of the law, but more grating to me is how he treated the participants in his court.
Several times he called them “unsavoury,” citing their previous records, use of drugs and alcohol and homelessness as evidence, and even questioned their morality. “Certainly the complainant and the accused’s morality, their sense of values, leaves a lot to be desired,” he said once, and another time pronounced unequivocally, “The complainant and the accused are amoral people.”
There was also a strange, disturbing and almost prurient quality about the decision.
A judge can surely find that an alleged assault in a bathroom — wherein a small female is placed on a sink by a huge man — was, in fact, consensual sex, but saying of it, “indeed it was even tender sex” is odd. Similarly, saying, as he did when the prosecutor protested that the girl was in pain, “No, this pain, you know, but that sex and pain sometimes go together, that — that’s not necessarily a bad thing …”
I appreciate that Camp, who spent decades as a lawyer in South Africa and botswana before immigrating to Canada, has apologized and claims to want to fix himself. I’m just not sure it can be done.
A read of the materials in the case suggests that he might have to attend such training for the rest of his days, so retrograde and weird are his views, and so pervasive. — columnist Christie Blatchford on Judge Robin camp’s offer to take gender-sensitivity training