Not at all ‘impossible’
Justice minister’s comments about sexual assault victims raises a big red flag
When is an apology enough and when is it window dressing masking a more serious problem?
Earlier in April, Newfoundland and Labrador Justice Minister John Hogan apologized for saying in the House of Assembly on March 6 that it is “impossible” for courtroom lawyers to retraumatize sexual assault victims.
His remark was in response to a petition tabled by the provincial NDP justice critic about lawyers using aggressive questioning tactics with sexual assault victims in court.
Once his observation sparked outrage from Status of Women councils in the province, Hogan walked his words back.
He told the CBC they came “during a heated moment in the legislature” and that he had since “spoken with lawyers and advocates about why his remarks were hurtful and incorrect.”
“The statement was wrong,” he now says.
TROUBLING APOLOGY
I’d venture Hogan is sorry he uttered the words because he got called out on them.
But his apology is, in itself, troubling.
Did he, the person responsible for justice in the province, actually have to consult with lawyers and advocates to figure out where he went wrong?
You only need to be a consumer of daily news to see how sexual assault victims are regularly retraumatized in courtrooms across this country.
And not just by lawyers, but by judges, too.
In 2019, Huffpost reported on at least 10 Canadian sexual assault cases working their way through court that “demonstrate how some judges continue to rely on stereotypes and rape myths when informing their decisions or make significant mistakes on issues of consent.”
Complainants in rape cases are regularly questioned (and judged) relentlessly on their choice of clothes, their alcohol consumption, their responses to violence, their decision to walk alone after dark, their strength of character — as if those things have anything to do with the perpetrator’s decision to commit sexual violence.
Victims are all too often blamed — explicitly and implicitly — for something that has been done to them.
THE IMPACT
Why do you think so many sexual assaults are never reported? Who wants to be brutally violated and then emotionally retraumatized in front of a packed courtroom?
We’ve all read court stories where sexual assault victims are ruthlessly questioned about their own behaviours and motives in an attempt to deflect blame from the accused.
In 2016, when serial rapist Sofyan Boalag — later declared a dangerous offender — was tried in St. John’s, a woman who was 15 when she was sexually assaulted but 20 when she testified, said she had to fight to be allowed to give her testimony from behind a screen.
She said the way victims are treated in court dissuades other survivors from coming forward.
In a 2016 interview with Newfoundland newspaper The Overcast, retired Superior Court judge Marie Corbett commented on how Boalag’s victims were aggressively cross-examined, saying: “I think it perfectly typifies rape culture that women are attacked for their behaviour and for drinking. It’s as if because you drink or you like to party or you dress in a socalled ‘tarty fashion’ that your behaviour is an invitation to be assaulted and it simply isn’t. But that mentality seeps into the courtroom.”
'I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE'
When Boalag tried to have his dangerous offender designation overturned in 2020, victims said they were horrified and hurt to hear his lawyer describe his crimes as while horrific, “fairly minor on the scale of dangerous offender predicate offences.”
“I thought I was going to die. It wasn’t minor. It was a sexual assault with a weapon,” one victim told Saltwire.
In a commentary for Saltwire Network in 2021, another woman Boalag raped wrote, “During his trial, when he got sentenced, it was a victory, yes, but I never heard his voice or heard him defend himself. In fact, it was the opposite — I had to defend myself against his lawyer. At the end of the trial, I felt like crap — guilty and weak, even if the right verdict was made, because the questioning itself was traumatizing.”
Boalag is just one high-profile local case where the issue of retraumatizing victims was front and centre.
If the person responsible for justice in a province is not aware that lawyers and judges still are regularly retraumatizing sexual assault victims in courtrooms, perhaps he should not be in charge of that portfolio. Period.