An anti-Rape Culture in Canada?

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Jan 2019

In her Hamilton Spectator column of Saturday, January 19, 2019, Lathan Hunter, Ph.D., declared in the second paragraph that there were 436,000 rapes per year in Canada, with only 3 percent convicted, or 12,780.  On that basis of these numbers, Hunter proceeds to make recommendations to teach boys not to rape girls.  This is the “anti-rape” culture of which she writes.

Hunter’s numbers are nowhere near correct.  Although rape is a kind of sexual assault, not all sexual assaults are rape.  Statistics Canada does report that, for example, there were 646,000 self-reported cases of sexual assault in Canada in 2014.  But of these, more than half (567 per 1,000) were not charged; one fifth (221 per 1,000) were charged but didn’t go to court; a tenth (95 per 1,000) went to court but were not convicted; and a twentieth (52 per 1,000) were convicted, not sentenced to custody, and a final twentieth (65 per 1,000) were convicted, sent to custody.  That last figure would would amount to 4,200, not 12,700; and a conviction rate of 0.66 percent, not 3 percent.

Allowing that same rapes may go unreported and for a perpetrator not to be caught or identified, really only those sent to custody could objectively considered “rape”.  Most sexual assaults seem to be matters of opinion.   It is not the case that men are getting away with rape most of the time in the Canadian justice system, as Hunter seems to indicate.

Repeal of laws against homosexual sodomy  turned on the argument that while homosexuality may not be normal, it is commonplace enough not to be considered heinous.  Hunter faces a similar dilemma:  If rape were as common as Hunter alleged, she would be faced with the problem of explaining why such commonplace behavior should be considered so heinous.  Rather, the argument is that because rape is so heinous that explains why it is not commonplace.

I don't know how Hunter escapes the dilemma she fell into, arguing that all men are potential rapists, rape is commonplace, and that men needed to be trained from boyhood not to rape.  Yet how can something so commonplace not be thought of as natural rather than heinous?  The trap is escapable but it requires something more sophisticated than the rigid, categorical thinking that Hunter usually exhibits.
-30-