Holly Johnson and Elizabeth Sheehy, National Post | December 31, 2014 11:52 AM ET
The University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia
Barbara Kay’s column on December 22, “More rape statistics by the biased for the biased,” tells Canadians we should be looking for “bruises or blood or broken bones” on the bodies of women and girls before we name it rape or sexual assault.
Kay’s understanding of “real rape” would return Canadian women to the 19th century, when women and girls needed to show “great resistance” to prove that they were taken “by force” even when attacked while sleeping or overpowered by the size, strength, authority or the sheer number of men who attacked them.
She cites a Forum Research telephone survey of 1,658 women and men in Toronto that found that one in five women has been raped or sexually assaulted, and calls the survey as well as its critics “biased.”
The survey is flawed, but not in the direction Kay suggests. The question used, “Have you ever been sexually assaulted or raped?,” is indeed inadequate because it produces unreliable results. Most Canadians do not understand the legal definition of sexual assault, which does not require proof of “great resistance.” In Canada, we have a law of “affirmative consent” and a responsibility to ensure “voluntary agreement.” Many women know they will not be believed or that they can be blamed for making themselves vulnerable in some way.
Forty years of social science research shows that multiple, behaviour-specific questions are needed to measure sexual assault and rape reliably. Reliability is based on consistency, meaning that all respondents understand the questions in the same way and are clear about which behaviours are to be included and which are not. The simple question posed by Forum Research assumes that all respondents will not only interpret “sexual assault” and “rape” in the same way, but also in the way the survey designers intended.
This is unlikely to be the case. Despite a modern sexual assault law that criminalizes marital rape and rids us of the pernicious notion that consent can be “implied” by a woman’s manner of dress, “real rape” scenarios of brutal attacks by strangers continue to dominate public understanding. In a culture committed to minimizing and normalizing sexual violence against women, a single question is sure to undercount.
Kay makes the incredible claim that girls under 16 and women over 30 are “in statistical terms at zero risk of rape.” She also misleads readers when she claims that the methodology of surveys about rape do not meet the standards of social science research, an easy assertion knowing most readers will not have the training to question it.
Would Kay claim that men, like women, cannot be trusted to report honestly to carefully tested survey questions?
The 1978 San Francisco survey mocked by Kay was a leader in the field, incorporating random sampling (which Kay agrees is the gold standard), behaviour-specific questions, and specially trained interviewers. These innovations were adapted by Statistics Canada (the source of the statistic cited by Professor Sheehy that one in two Canadian women experiences male violence in her adult lifetime), and by numerous other governments. They are now standard practice at the United Nations, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When this method is applied to interviews with men in several countries, they disclose similarly high rates of perpetrating sexual violence. Would Kay claim that men, like women, cannot be trusted to report honestly to carefully tested survey questions?
In the past few months, women of all ages and all walks of life have come forward to disclose experiences of sexual violence and why they didn’t report. The problem is not that women or social science research exaggerate the problem of sexual violence. The problem is that commentators like Kay attempt to drown out this important conversation by reasserting outdated and inaccurate stereotypes. She may belong to another century, but Canadians are not going back.
National Post
Holly Johnson is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Elizabeth Sheehy is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa.
Commentary by the Ottawa Mens Centre
One only needs to take a look at the names of the authors of this article to
know that its more feminist propaganda that fails to deal with the problem of
fabricated statistics of domestic violence by those with a vested, Billions of
dollars vested interest in promoting the myth that men are violent and women are
victims.
Elizabeth Sheehy advocates that women can Murder their husbands as long as they
claim, to be victims of abuse.
It's that kind of sick mentality that has enabled the coming to power of a
Fas.cist Ontario Government that operates a Gender Superiority program that
actively promotes domestic violence towards fathers.
Take Detective Peter Van Der Zander, a drop out recently promoted to $120,000
plus a year from his work for Fabricating Evidence to NOT charge one of Ottawa's
most violent females who attempted to murder her husband.
You see, the attending officers found the father with bruised, and bleeding from
around the neck with scratch marks consistent with an
attempt to strangle the father which the father told police occurred by her
pulling
his head down by the hair to a couch where she placed her hands in a strangle
hold around his neck blocking off his airway.
Det. Peter Van Der Zander wrote a written report to Fabricate Evidence. He
claimed she "denied pulling his hair or attempting to choke him. The Ottawa
Police then obstructed justice by failing to provide the Video disclosure of
that interview which obtained in another court in another matter showed that Det.
Peter Van Der Zander never asked her those questions. He suggested that
she might kill him with knife, sent her home in a victim services car, and
told her to be the first to call police next time.
The Ottawa Police are a Criminal Organization that operate a Fascist Program
that promotes domestic violence towards fathers for the purpose of "Gender
Cleansing" to remove children from full time fathers and place them with the
most violent women who are encouraged to be violent by the Ottawa Police, the
CAS and worst of all, the Judiciary of Ottawa who are selected by Ontario's
Fascist Government for their willingness to promote the Ontario Government's
Fascist Ideas of Gender Superiority.
Ottawa is a playground for Criminals, who have total immunity from criminal and
or civil liability. The worst of the worst are the Evidence Fabricating Rotten
Cops like
Detective Peter Van Der Zander and his superiors who turn a deliberate blind eye
or who also fabricate evidence or commit further criminal
offences toprotect one of Ottawa's most notorious Criminals. Detective Peter Van
Der Zander.
An update to this Story.
Two days after the mother later obtained an Anger Management Certificate
from Ottawa's notorious Feminist Institution, Jewish Family Services, she
assaulted her new male partner by placing a similar Strangle Hold around his
neck
with her thumbs intertwined around his windpipe she coldly told him, "My father
was
KGB, I know what I am doing".
When that male reported that assault to the Ottawa Police they did
NOTHING.
When she learned of his report, she threatened him with false allegations
to the CAS to have his children removed. When he reported that intimidation to
the Ottawa Police they did NOTHING.
Ottawa Mens Centre
---
It was in Ottawa that a woman stabbed her sleeping husband in the chest with
a butchers knife and claimed to be a victim of abuse.
It was in Ottawa that the Supreme Court of Canada gave its blessing to the
hiring of a hitman to murder a father simply because the SCC decided that the
RCMP got it all wrong and failed to consider her claims of being a victim of
abuse, when there was no evidence to support that conclusion.
And so it goes on with a radical feminist promoter of murder by women against
men, providing an illegal justification of being a victim of abuse, as active
encouragement for women to murder their husbands.
Ottawa Mens Centre