Law Commons^™

The "Statutory Rape" Myth: A Case Law Study Of Sexual Assaults Against Adolescent Girls, Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

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This article examines three years of Canadian case law involving sexual offences against adolescent girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen inclusive, with a view to identifying the types of cases that are making it to court, whether these cases are resulting in convictions, and what are the types of sentences being imposed on individuals convicted of these offences. A significant majority of cases under review involved men considerably older than the complainant. The average age difference between the accused and the complainant was nineteen years and, where family members were excluded, 15.6 years. The small number of cases …

Confronting The Sexual Assault Of Teenage Girls: The Mistake Of Age Defence In Canadian Sexual Assault Law, Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

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Teenage girls experience high rates of sexual assault. The Criminal Code permits the Crown to substitute proof of young age for proof of non-consent for sexual assault and related offences applicable to young complainants. This paper focuses on the defence of mistaken belief in age. It provides a defence where the accused honestly believed that the complainant was at or above the age of consent and where the accused took all reasonable steps to ascertain her age. A review of the cases considering the defence indicates that it is often applied incorrectly, where the accused does not have any belief …

Social Media Crime In Canada: Annotated Criminal Code, R.S.C., 1985, C. C-46, 2nd Ed., Benjamin Perrin

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Over 80% of Canadians use the Internet and approximately 20 million Canadians are active on social media networks. It is not surprising that criminal activity is taking place in these global digital communities and this is raising challenges for criminal law and the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court of Canada recently recognized in R. v. K.R.J. that “[t]he rate of technological change over the past decade has fundamentally altered the social context” in which certain crimes are occurring and social media networks have given “unprecedented access to potential victims and avenues” for offending.

This annotated Criminal Code aims to …

Unreasonable Steps: Trying To Make Sense Of R. V. Morrison, Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

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Children and youth routinely have easy, unsupervised access to the internet through smartphones and tablets. This connectivity increases the danger that adults will sexually exploit them. Adult chat rooms, which may require nothing more than a child checking a box indicating that they are over the age of 18, are a common site for such exploitation. In most cases, this behaviour only comes to light when either a parent becomes aware of the activity, or when an in-person sexual offence against a child is detected and the online communications are discovered in the course of the investigation.