Rape laws and rape processing: the contradictory nature of corroboration

• Published in: Canadian woman studies 1999-03, Vol.19 (1-2), p.74
• Main Authors: Parnis, Deborah, Du Mont, Janice
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Emotions; Face (Body); Laws, regulations and rules; Legal status laws etc; Police; Procedure (Law); Rape; Sexual assault; Women
• ISSN: 0713-3235

Several changes were made to the Criminal Code of Canada in 1983 with respect to rape.(f.1) These substantive and procedural reforms were intended to eliminate biases that worked against women who had been sexually assaulted, impeding their ability to attain justice. Although an improvement on existing statutes, several scholars have documented how this reform legislation has not achieved the goal of equitable outcomes (Clark and Hepworth; Hinch), nor the elimination of a woman's "re-victimization" in the legal processing of rape, an issue recently highlighted by the Jane Doe v. Toronto (Metropolitan) Commissioners of Police (1998) court case. This evokes the question of why, despite some positive gains, have things not fundamentally changed in the post assault institutional response to women who have been raped? Why are women continuing to have such difficulty attaining both justice and just treatment? In this review, we will examine the rape laws before and after the 1983 reforms and look at the ways in which the current standardized practices of medicolegal evidence collection may continue to perpetuate the biases associated with corroboration. A fundamental contradiction exists between the current sexual assault legislation and the process of evidence collection from the body of the woman who has been assaulted. This contradiction may ultimately serve to undermine the objectives of the 1983 reforms. In the face of amendments which formally removed the corroboration requirements, medical evidence "provide(s) a way of reimposing the expectations of 'corroboration'" ([Feldberg] 107). An examination of the standardized procedures for collecting medicolegal evidence reflects how these institutionalized practices may perpetuate the old rules of corroboration. While the stated purpose of the SAEK is to gather evidence or the proof of assailant identity, of the use of force, and to establish when the assault occurred (Tucker, Ledray, and Werner), a critical review of its role within post-assault processing reveals the ways in which it functions to provide evidence that not only corroborates a woman's story, but in doing so, reestablishes the centrality of recent complaint, sexual reputation. Beyond the collection of specimens, the woman who has been assaulted is asked if she left marks on the assailant from biting, scratching, kicking, etc. This can be construed as corroborative evidence for although the question is intended to provide investigators with infor