Lawwe gaPrcar 24. Limits of a Criminal Justice （Lawwe gaPrcar 24。）.pdfVIP

Holly Johnson 24. Limits of a Criminal Justice Response: Trends in Police and Court Processing of Sexual Assault Holly Johnson In this final section of Part II, Holly Johnson’s paper puts in perspective the criminal law response to sexual assault. She examines the filtering ef- fect of the criminal justice process, with the end result that only .3 per - cent of perpetrators are convicted whereas fully 99.7 percent are never held accountable for their crimes. Holly reviews current trends in the le- gal processing of sexual assault, revisiting the issue of the police response to sexual assault reports explored in Part I and raising questions about a seeming downturn in women’s reporting rates — possibly in response to the continuing barriers erected by police and defence counsel. In light of the overwhelming trend by police to charge sexual assault at the lowest level of seriousness, the declining rate of conviction, and the use of condi- tional sentences (house arrest) for sex offenders, her chapter forces us to ask what possible role the criminal law can play when it condemns only a tiny fraction of this pervasive crime. Sexual assault is the most gendered of crimes. Only 3 percent of those charged by police with sexual assault offences in Canada in 2007 were women, yet 86 percent of those victimized were women and girls.1 It is no coincidence that the most gendered crime is also the most under- reported. According to Statistics Canada’s crime victimization survey, which interviews women anonymously, an estimated 460,000 Canadi- an women were victims of sexual assault in 2004 and just 8 percent re- ported the crime to the police.2 1 Data for this article were retrieved from Statistics Canada’s Uniform Crime Report- ing Survey (UCR), which incorporates data provided by all police departments across the country on an annual basis since 1962. Aggregate trends on sexual assault are availab