Columnists
Witnesses and victims
Victims, in the real world, are not innocent. They are as flawed as any other person. They are just as likely to do things they’re ashamed of. Make mistakes. Lie. They are just as prone to humiliation and shame. It makes it easy to fall into the trap of victim-blaming. I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of that.
Anyone can become a victim. All it takes is to have a crime committed against you. And for that, no victim should be blamed.
And yet.
When a wellknown Canadian personality was acquitted last week of five charges including sexual assault and overcoming resistance by choking, the judge, along with some experts in criminal law, when analyzing the case, blamed the witnesses. Not victims. Witnesses. As if hiding behind that word makes victim-blaming acceptable.
The fact is a witness is just a person. Usually not a person who is at all versed in legal procedures. And if a victim comes forward with an allegation, especially sexual assault, there is bound to be humiliation. There is bound to be personal reservation. Of course there will be details that the victim is ashamed to reveal. Details that might not seem as significant as describing what the perpetrator did to them.
The problem with that is, if a person feels ashamed of some detail, that shame just makes them human. If they don’t reveal those details, that, too, makes them human.
To say that the police and the Crown were not to blame—and I did hear that today—that the witnesses were to blame, is to say that we should expect a person coming forward with an allegation of sexual assault to already be versed in our legal system. That’s not fair.
That’s stacking the odds against laypersons who bravely come forward and allow themselves to be dissected by a system they don’t understand.
That’s like blaming a five-year-old for failing a calculus exam because he or she didn’t study.
The law is complicated enough that lawyers and judges needs years of training to become proficient at their jobs. We value them immensely in our society because they have a special expertise. Why would we expect laypersons, thrust unwillingly into the system, to be at that level?
The justice system worked the way it should—as it is currently set up. The onus is on the Crown to prove an accused person guilty. Anyone accused of a crime is presumed innocent until our prosecutors can prove otherwise. That is a good thing.
But this is only a celebrity example of a standard case in which the Crown’s onus puts unfair pressure on victims who are imperfect people and imperfect witnesses.
This should be a signal to Canadians that we have to change things, to make that system more accessible, so that victims are given the tools they need right from the start to be good witnesses.
But you know? If you blame the witnesses, and the witnesses are the victims, you’re blaming the victims. There’s no getting around that.
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