Published In
Canadian Women Studies
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2000
Subjects
systemic inequality; substantive laws; procedural laws; evidentiary laws; sexual offences; actual violence against women; threatened violence against women; equality-resistant legal doctrine; feminist reforms; sexual assault law
Abstract
The authors document feminist efforts to expose, challenge, and eliminate direct, indirect, and systemic inequality in the substantive, evidentiary, and procedural laws proscribing sexual offences and in the enforcement and application of those laws have not only been consistently resisted by police, lawyers, judges, and juries, but have also consistently generated backlash against those responsible for and/or supportive of such egalitarian change. Actual and imagined social, economic, political and legal equality gains by women as a class-however unevenly distributed- have triggered a variety of types of backlash, including an escalation in actual or threatened violence against women accompanied by new equality-resistant strains of legal doctrine that effectively offset or bypass earlier reforms. The authors illustrate these forms of backlash by examining three decades of feminist reforms to sexual assault laws.
Citation Details
Sheila McIntyre, Christine Boyle, Lee F Lakeman & Elizabeth A Sheehy, “Tracking and Resisting Backlash Against Equality Gains in Sexual Offence Law” (2000) 20:3 Can Woman Stud 72-83.
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons