Content area
Full text
Abstract
Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the early years of the next deca de, feminists provided compelling evidence that under the existing rape laws a woman's sexuali ty was treated as "property" belonging to a man. They emphasized that rape was an aggressive i nvasion of a person's physical integrity and in 1983 rape was redefined in the Criminal Code as a form of assault. The use of physical assault as a metaphor had the effect of shifting t he emphasis of the essence of sexual aggression away from a woman's sexuality as property to the co ercive nature of the act. A decade later, the evidence suggests this was an ill - conceived c hange. Redefining rape as a sexual assault, and measuring the severity of the crime by the level o f physical violence, has established the legal and social expectations that the woman must be injured to be a "legitimate" victim. This paper advances the proposition that treating a woma n's sexuality as property, as did the old rape law, was correct, and that a more appropriate meta phor is robbery. The metaphor of robbery treats a woman's sexuality as property, but achieves ref orm by shifting ownership from the domain of a male to the woman herself. Robbery implies the u se or threat of force, but, unlike assault, does not require harm to the victim as evidence o f the robbery. The theoretical proposition that conceptualizing the essence of sexual aggression as "assault" has failed and that "robbery" may be more appropriate was evaluated by examined ever y case of sexual assault (n = 50), physical assault (n = 158) and robbery (n = 82) that ap peared before the Halifax Law Courts between 1983 and 1988. This legal profile of sexual assa ult was compared to the alternative profile created by examining every case (n = 593) of sexual assault reported to the local sexual assault service during the same time period.
Resume
De la fin des annees 1970 jusqu'au debut de la decennie suivante, les feministes ont fourni des elements de preuve demontrant de facon convaincante que la sexualite des femmes etait traitee comme la propriete des hommes aux termes des dispositio ns legislatives existantes...