This is the problem in Canada!

“Rules are like women, made to be violated.” (Judge Denys Dionne, Quebec Court, 1989,

These are the comments made by a Canadian Judge while presiding over a court case of sexual assault against a woman by her ex-husband.  After being ridiculed  by the judge on a number of occasions, the victim withdrew her charges.  To which the judge told her, if she ever try to accuse another man of rape, she will not be believed, or else supported by the Canadian legal system, because of her actions of withdrawal.  He wondered for record if she would continue a pattern of accustations and withdrawals against other men.

His comments in court were later found to be sexist, in bad taste and unnacceptable for a judge.  He was suspended for four months by a Quebec disciplinary commitee.

Other examples of judicial secondary sexual victimization of rape victims from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.fact.on.ca/newpaper/gm99031d.htm

Judge Monique Dubreuil angered the Haitian community in Montreal in 1998 when she sentenced two men, whom she said were “immature” and not a threat to society, to an 18-month suspended sentence for sexual assault. She explained her leniency by saying that the victim was not a juvenile and that the men, who were of Haitian origin, came from a culture where rape is accepted. “The absence of regret of the two accused seems to be related more to the cultural context, particularly with regard to relations with women than a veritable problem of a sexual nature,” she said in her ruling.

Mr. Justice Kerr Twaddle of the Manitoba Court of Appeal lessened the sentence of a man convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old girl from nine months in prison to a curfew and community service on these grounds: “She was apparently more sophisticated than many her age and was performing many household tasks, including babysitting the accused’s children.” Judge Twaddle described the relationship with the accused as “entirely inappropriate and criminal,” but he argued that the victim was not coerced. “The girl, of course, could not consent in the legal sense, but nonetheless was a willing participant,” he concluded.

In 1996, Mr. Justice Allyre Sirois of the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench observed during a bail hearing for a man who beat his former girlfriend unconscious after she asked him to turn down the television set that “it takes two to tango.” In 1993, at a dangerous-offender hearing, Judge Sirois referred to a prostitute who had been assaulted at knifepoint as belonging to “a different caste”; the year before, he told a woman who had been assaulted at the age of 12 that she had to accept some responsibility for the event.

Quebec Judge Raymonde Verreault cited “extenuating circumstances” when she handed down a 23-month sentence in 1994 to a man who had repeatedly sodomized his stepdaughter from the time she was 9 until 11. The victim did not have any “permanent scars” from the sexual assaults, according to Judge Verreault, because the attacker had respected the values of her Muslim faith and had “spared her virginity” by not engaging in vaginal intercourse. Besides, the girl may have encouraged the accused because she “harboured hatred” against her mother.

Quebec Judge René Crochetière ruled in 1993 that there was not enough evidence to bring a man to trial for threatening to kill his live-in lover. On leaving the crowded courtroom, the alleged victim said to the judge: “If I get killed, it will be your fault.” To which he replied: “I would like to tell everyone here that, if ever this man kills this woman, it won’t stop me from sleeping and I won’t die — don’t worry, I won’t get depressed, either. It isn’t my responsibility.”

Manitoba Judge Frank Allen offered the following advice in 1989 to a 19-year-old man accused of beating a female acquaintance: “There isn’t any woman worth the trouble you got yourself into.” In a 1984 sexual-assault trial, the same judge observed: “You would have to be living in a vacuum, totally without wordly experience at all, not to know in many cases women are first to resist and later give in to persuasion and sometimes their own instinct.”