There is no benefit to someone to lie about being sexually assaulted. These are women who have just as much, if not more, on the line as the men that they are accusing. This is not an attention seeking campaign.
sexual assualt
Whether it’s classifying revenge porn as sexual assault, or initiating an overhaul in how our police services deal with sexual cybercrimes, it’s clear that something has to change.
A former Gee-Gees volunteer equipment manager is facing charges of sexual assault and further charges of human trafficking, according to the Ottawa Police Service.
In case you haven’t heard the news, most cases of campus sexual harassment are committed by university professors. At least, this is the allegation levelled by Angelina Chapin in her Ottawa Citizen op-ed titled “Universities need to focus on harassment, not just on sex assault.”
Shannon Fournier, the organizer of Rise Up and a former criminology student at the U of O, explained that through her own experiences, and during her time at the university, she learned about the holes that exist in the criminal justice system for victims of sexual assault when reporting crimes.
Is it OK to withhold information under oath because you’re embarrassed? No, but is it ok to overlook the fact these women chose solely to withhold information that doesn’t fit the ‘socially valid’ abuse victim profile? Certainly not.
It is unreasonable to expect every moment of a traumatic event to be remembered in perfect detail, because that simply isn’t how the mind works. Especially if you consider that these assaults allegedly occurred up to 12 years ago, and these women probably tried their best to forget them at that time.
If survivors are already having trouble coming forward in sexual assault cases, as less than one per cent of these offences get reported to the police, money acts as another barrier to justice. This is why sexual assault survivors should have access to free or discounted lawyers for civil suits.
