‘This is why people don’t go to police’
Ottawa teen says she was raped, but is told her claim ‘unfounded’
In the early morning hours of May 21, a 19-year-old Ottawa woman agreed to meet a man she had contacted on the dating app Tinder in an apartment downtown.
“What’re you looking for here?” the woman, who we will call “K”, asked the man. He called himself “Brian” and described himself as 27, athletic and over six feet tall.
“Meet new people in a new city lol, make friends, have some fun and maybe see where it leads,” he responded, adding later, “Maybe we can start by making friends with each other lol.”
K understood that agreeing to meet Brian would likely lead to sex. “I’m not dumb. I know what it means,” she says.
What K didn’t expect was that Brian would become very rough with her, slapping her buttocks, grabbing her breasts and forcing his penis down her throat. Nor did she expect that his friend “Andrew,” who was also in the apartment, would walk into the bedroom and also force himself on her.
K says she struggled and tried to press her legs together, but could not escape. The two men left the room. When Brian returned, K says she gathered her clothes and fled to the nearest bus stop.
Hours later, after speaking to a friend, she decided to report the incident to a constable at the Elgin Street police station.
“The first thing he said was, ‘Are you sure you didn’t want it?’ I was sobbing. He said, ‘We have people come in here and they don’t always tell the truth,’ ” recalls K.
By June 13, an Ottawa police detective concluded that K’s case was “unfounded” because she didn’t tell the men explicitly to stop.
“There is no criminal component to this file. The victim did not relay, in any way, that she did not want to have sex,” the detective wrote in a curt concluding report.
K says she was raped by both men, and the treatment she has received from police has shaken her faith, especially after the detective told her she had to “take accountability” for agreeing to meet Brian.
“It’s hard to say ‘no’ when there’s a d--k down your throat,” she says.
“You are told your whole life to trust these people (police). And you go in and tell them something that’s terrifying. And to be told ‘take accountability.’ It’s a bit of a slap in the face.”
Earlier this year, a 20-month Globe and Mail investigation found that about one in five sexual assault allegations in Canada is dismissed as “unfounded.” In Ottawa, the rate was 28 per cent. That figure is from 2012, says Ottawa police Insp. Jamie Dunlop.
The number of unfounded cases has since dropped to eight per cent.
In April, Statistics Canada, which stopped reporting unfounded statistics in 2003, said it was working with police forces so they are prepared to report unfounded sexual assault statistics, which will be reported in 2018.
A conclusion of “unfounded” is one of the ways police can clear a report, says Staff Sgt. Alison Cookson. It could be used, for example, if the address given by the complainant doesn’t exist, or if some other detail is not verifiable.
“It shouldn’t be used very often,” says Cookson, who can’t discuss individual cases. “It doesn’t mean we don’t believe them. We have to look at the evidence. And we have to look at the Crown’s standards. There has to be a prospect of conviction.”
As for consent, Cookson says police have moved beyond “no means no” and acknowledge that a complainant can consent to some sexual acts, but not all acts, and that there are other ways to indicate a lack of consent. “You don’t have to say the words,” she says.
It also doesn’t matter how the complainant met the alleged attacker, Cookson says.
“To us, it doesn’t matter that you met through a dating app. The whole idea of how they met doesn’t play a key role. It’s how it happens. We don’t judge anyone because they met through Tinder.”
When K showed up at the police station on the morning of May 21, she was “visibly shaken and crying off and on,” noted the constable who took her report. He handed her a napkin for the tears that were “streaming from the corners of her eyes” and asked her to take a deep breath and continue when she was ready, according to his report. K was speaking in a low voice — she had told a friend who accompanied her to the station that the assault happened when she was walking in a park.
K says when she got to Brian’s highrise apartment building, she was surprised that he appeared older than on his Tinder profile, balding and going grey. Brian’s friend, Andrew, was also in the apartment and called Brian by another name, Brett. Both men said they had recently moved to Ottawa from Montreal. They appeared intoxicated and continued to drink beer, says K. The kitchen with littered with alcohol containers. K doesn’t drink and wasn’t impaired.
The men pressed K to play a sexual version of truth or dare. K says she insisted that she wasn’t interested in a threesome. She went into the bedroom with Brian. He became very rough. “I tried to close my legs and push him off, but he wouldn’t stop,” K told police.
Andrew entered the room, took off his pants and penetrated her. She struggled against both of them, she says. “I just laid there and kept trying to move away but they pulled me closer and kept going.”
After taking her report, the constable asked her to sign a medical release form, scanned it into her file and gave K a copy to take to the hospital for a sexual assault kit. K says she was treated sensitively by staff at the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital.
K subsequently became anxious and depressed and was considered a suicide risk. “Some days I can’t get out of bed. When it’s bad, it’s bad. When it’s good, it’s still bad.”
About 10 days after filing her initial police report, she was interviewed by a female detective. The interview lasted about an hour. K says the detective told her charges could only be laid if she had explicitly denied consent.
“I needed to explicitly say ‘No,’ ” says K. “She said, ‘There’s nothing we can do with your case. The guy was intoxicated, you went there. You need to take accountability for your actions.’ She just dismissed it,” says K. “This is why people don’t go to the police.”
K says she did everything a victim is supposed to do. She reported the incident as soon as possible. She gave police all the information she had, including Brian’s cellphone number, screen shots of their conversations, descriptions of both men, and an Uber receipt indicating the address of the apartment building. She recalled the floor number of the apartment building, but not the apartment number.
K also told police that the men said they had tried to “get it on” with another woman earlier that day, but she panicked and fled. Police said this was “hearsay,” K says, but she believes it is an indication that what happened to her was not an isolated incident. “Maybe it was something that they planned.”
Staff at the hospital were sympathetic and considerate, says K. She was told that she qualifies for counselling and was given an application to apply to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, the Ontario agency that assesses financial compensation for victims of violent crimes.
“The fact that a nurse can say, ‘This is not your fault. This should not have happened to you.’ And then to go to someone you should trust and have them tell you, ‘There’s nothing we can do for you … ,’ ” she says.
Sunny Marriner, executive director of the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre, says many people who contact the centre question the police handling of their complaints, and many report that the police don’t believe they’re credible.
“But there is also the issue of correct interpretation of the law. It has been established by the Supreme Court that we have a ‘yes means yes’ standard. There are many ways of resisting.”
Dunlop says K can file a complaint or ask a staff sergeant for a review. The next step is to lay a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director.
K would be interested in a review, but didn’t even know it was an option.
“At the same time I feel it is almost useless seeing how a) they closed the case as quickly as they could and b) I wouldn’t want to end up with someone as awful as the person I had. If they said the same things to me again I don’t think I could take it. It would be like adding more insult to injury.”