Rape Culture in the Yukon?

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Dec 20

RE: Rape Culture is thriving in Yukon report says.  by The Canadian Press.  Published in the Spectator today on page A8.

You know they’re lying; it’s a question of how.  Even the editors distrusted the story; that’s why they buried it on page A8.  The story is of an alleged “rape culture” which is said to explain the prevalence of rape in the Yukon.

Except, it really isn’t “rape,” it’s assault, which can mean an unwanted kiss or a punch in the head.

A survey claimed that 61 percent of Yukon’s residents, both men and women, reported a “physical or sexual assault” at least once in their lives after the age of 15, a punch to the head being counted together with an unwanted kiss.  In Nunavut, 52 percent of women and 55 percent of men reported being the victims of assault.  The numbers were not broken down into physical and sexual, and whether the assaults were heterosexual or homosexual.

Somehow, women were supposedly three times more likely to be victims of assault as men, though that disparity was not borne out in the figures quoted in the story.

Nevertheless, the Yukon Status of Women Council claimed these figures established the existence of a rape culture, with Indigenous women being the worst affected by it.  That the Yukon is “relatively recently colonized” is a contributing factor to the existence of this rape culture.  This ‘recent colonization,’ in turn, creates a distrust between Indigenous women and the RCMP, and the women having experienced “massive systemic racism.”

Clearly, the facts don’t support the theory.  The Yukon was settled as a result of the 1898 Klondike gold rush, and the NWMP under the famous Sam Steele were among the first on the scene.  So, the recently colonized business doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.  The fact that the majority of both men and women claimed to be victims casts doubt on the thesis of a rape culture, unless the minority who are the victimizers are indiscriminate as to their tastes in victims.  The large proportion of Indigenous in the Yukon population casts doubt upon the prevalence of “massive systemic racism.”

The additional problem is who are the carriers of this culture?  If Indigenous women are the primary victims, then it must be Indigenous men who are the primary culprits, but that would be un-P.C. to admit, so the rape culture needs to be diffused and generalized into a stain on the colonizers, which, let it be said, are white.

It may well be that the Yukon is a more violent place than downtown Toronto, but the story of the prevalence of a rape culture in the Yukon is a fiction at worst, and intellectually dishonest at best.

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