YELLOWKNIFE RCMP ARRESTED RAPE VICTIM ‘FOR HER SAFETY’
Criminalizing poverty and addiction only serves to re-victimize these women
It was just after 9:30 p.m. on May 29, 2017 when Christopher Wood stepped out into the alley behind the Capitol Theatre in downtown Yellowknife. It wasn’t yet dark. Sunset on that northern summer night was still more than an hour away.
But when Wood, the cinema’s manager, opened the rear door of his theatre, he got a shock. In the doorway alcove, he saw a man lying on top of a woman. Her pants and underwear had been partially pulled off.
The woman, Wood later testified, “appeared to be not quite aware of what was going on.”
“Are you being raped?” he called out.
Her answer, Wood later told the court, was a timid yes.
He called police on his cellphone — then used his phone’s camera to take a photograph of the victim and her assailant.
The Yellowknife RCMP arrived just six minutes later.
And arrested the victim. For being drunk in a public place.
Yes. You read that correctly.
Police didn’t take then early unconscious woman to hospital. They didn’t ask emergency room doctors to conduct an internal examination or collect a semen sample. Instead, they took her to the police cells and locked her up.
Wade Kapakatoak, then 24, was arrested later, two blocks away.
Outraged? You should be. It’s outrageous.
Here’s how Judge Garth Malakoe of the Northwest Territories territorial court put it on Aug. 9.
“I am unable to imagine circumstances which would justify this type of treatment of a victim of sexual assault,” the judge wrote when delivering his guilty verdict against Kapakatoak this month.
“It appears the victim was not treated with the dignity and compassion that she or any victim of a sexual assault deserves. I am reluctant to say more because this is not the forum for the examination of this issue and ... the police have not been given an opportunity to respond. Still, on the face of it, the treatment by the police of the victim was egregious.”
The officer involved testified that he’d arrested the woman “for her safety.”
Because sure. Let’s arrest women who’ve been sexually assaulted. To keep them “safe.”
But this isn’t just about the way one woman was treated.
The RCMP put the administration of justice at risk. With no rape kit, there was no physical evidence of the alleged rape. As for the victim?
She disappeared. As the judge noted, that might be because of the way police treated her. But when the trial started, 13 months later, the Crown and the RCMP were unable to find her. The court heard the woman had left Yellowknife and moved to Edmonton.
No one here was able to find her either. (She can’t be named because of a statutory publication ban on identifying sexual assault victims.)
That meant she didn’t testify — and Kapakatoak’s lawyer had no opportunity to cross-examine her.
If it hadn’t been for the security cameras outside the movie theatre which captured the lengthy sexual assault, including the woman’s repeated struggle to push her assailant away, and her eventual lapse into apparently intoxicated, limp unconsciousness, there’d likely have been no conviction at all.
The RCMP in Yellowknife have little comment. The detachment said in an email statement that it has requested a copy of the trial transcript and will review the case. But police wouldn’t say whether the officer who arrested the victim is under investigation or has been assigned to other duties. Police spokeswoman Marie York-Condon will only say they’ll review the training they provide to officers dealing with sexual assault victims.
It would be simple enough to ask whether these officers are bullies who treated the victim like a criminal because she was drunk and homeless. (It’s not clear from the judgment whether she is Indigenous.)
But it’s also possible the officer really did think he was doing her a favour, because that’s exactly how he’d been trained and conditioned to think.
This whole story is all too reminiscent of the Lance Blanchard case, where the court jailed the homeless Indigenous victim of a vicious sexual assault in order to “protect” her and to secure her testimony in a preliminary hearing.
I’m sure it seems convenient to lock up homeless sexual assault victims for their own good. But it’s insanely counterproductive if we want women to come forward to report assaults. Criminalizing poverty? Criminalizing addictions? It just victimizes these women all over again.
Meantime, somewhere in Edmonton, Wade Kapakatoak’s victim perhaps knows her attacker has been convicted — thanks largely to a dispassionate security camera, the silent witness, the unblinking eye that saw her and her pain, and didn’t look away.
I’m sure it seems convenient to lock up homeless sexual assault victims for their own good. But it’s insanely counterproductive if we want women to come forward to report assaults.