Tag Archives: Ontario

You Go Young Woman!

Posted on by elizabeth
2

I hadn’t heard of this show but I’m glad I’ve now heard of Karrin Huynh.  I’m off to join this group on Facebook.

As though the hair extensions, fake eyelashes and skimpy bikinis weren’t enough, hip-grinding dance moves were the final straw for 17-year-old Karrin Huynh. But she wasn’t the one being asked to preen, dance and smile for the cameras: It was a four-year-old girl on the cable television show Toddlers and Tiaras.

Ms. Huynh, a Grade 12 student at Governor Simcoe Secondary School in St. Catharines, was so disgusted by the show that she started a Facebook group to get the show off the air. Barely a month later, the group has more than 600 members in Canada and the United States.

“It’s The Learning Channel, and it’s a family channel, so you have little kids watching this show and seeing these living dolls being paraded on stage,” she said. “And society wonders why girls have low self-esteem and low self-confidence when they’re sitting at home wondering, ‘Is this what I’m supposed to look like? Is this what I’m supposed to be?’ “

After seeing commercials for the show’s premiere, and then watching episodes posted on YouTube, Ms. Huynh started a petition to have the show removed.

A classmate, Lesley Cornelius, helped start the Facebook group, and hundreds of people became members.

One member e-mailed Discovery Communications, the media company that owns TLC, and received a thank you for the remarks, but the company didn’t address any of the group’s concerns.

“Maintaining the integrity of all of our networks is our primary goal,” reads the e-mail, from viewer relations. “It is these types of comments that contribute to creating change and improving our programming.”

Ms. Huynh said that though some feel the show is only examining, rather than glorifying, children’s beauty pageants, their minds are changed when they check out the Toddlers and Tiaras website.

There, in a feature called “Rate the beauty queens,” visitors can score photographs of pageant contestants on a scale of 1 to 10. Many have an average score of below 4.

From Kate Hammer at The Globe & Mail

Ugggghhhhhh!

The person who uploaded the videos to YouTube is from JonBenét-Ramsey.com – not affiliated with the Ramsey family and more than a little creepy.

I can’t find the Toddlers and Tiaras website referred to in the article though.  If you find it, please drop a link in comments.  Seems to me these little ones are at least doubly exploited – first by their parents and then by TLC.

‘Parental Alienation’, Father’s Rights, Women’s Inequality

Posted on by elizabeth
8

Last week, many Canadian newspapers reported on an Ontario child custody case decided in mid-January wherein a judge of the Ontario Superior Court decided that a mother had alienated her children from their father over a period of fourteen years and granted custody of the children to their father.  Here’s a report at The Star.

I’ve seen a lot of conversations going on in response to this decision and they follow the usual pattern – many men, some of them Men’s Rights and Father’s Rights advocates – but by no means all – see this case as an example of the terrible abuse that some men suffer at the hands of vindictive women.  These men engage in a fight with women who have often been abused by husbands or partners or had difficulties with children.  Everyone has an anecdote that’s supposed to be determinative.  Shit gets flung.  The conversation accomplishes little but for providing people with an opportunity to vent.  Often the men and women involved in the conversation are people who have been badly hurt in their interactions with family law, I don’t dispute that and, also, I’ve been there.

It would be good, though, if these conversations could be based on knowledge rather than opinion.  Besides having a personal experience with family law in Ontario, I’ve also practiced family law and done academic research and teaching in family law.  So, I’m going to offer a few thoughts on this case and the issues involved in hopes that it might inspire some readers to dig a little deeper before offering their expertise – a bit of snark – sorry!

One of the problems with the PAS (“parental alienation syndrome”) deal, even if it really is a syndrome (and there’s more evidence that it isn’t than that it is)  is that it makes it almost impossibly difficult  for women who experience emotional, physical, sexual and economic abuse in a marriage or with a partner who is the father or in loco parentis to a child or children to have her allegations believed.  It’s already notoriously difficult to prove these allegations and it’s aways been common that abuse is disregarded or put down to women/mothers being vindictive.  Now, of course, it’s not impossibe that some women have used such allegations in a purely manipulative way.  Similarly, women who have been victims of rape often have their cases “unfounded” by police and possibly there have been women who have concocted allegations for one reason or another.  The problem is that the very possibility of that happening often, much too often, leads to law enforcement personnel “unfounding” rape charges because they’ve fallen into rape myth traps.

One of the problems I see, in both cases, is how easily the dominant “meme” or rhetoric or discourse or conversation , the one which characterizes the woman as lying, manipulative bitch, is accepted as the most likely truth of the situation.  We fall into this pattern so easily –  so much of the culture reinforces and reproduces the dominant memes, that it makes these ways of stereotyping women very easy and dangerous – the meme becomes one more tool in the toolbox for men and their lawyers.  If it’s so easy to believe that a mother could be a lying manipulative bitch, why is it not similarly believable that a man might lie and deny abuse and use his power, his money and the patriarchal power vested in the “justice system” to get what he wants?  IMHO, that’s actually the most likely result, given women’s inequality.  NOT saying this is the fault of every individual man – it’s systemic and sometimes, men are the victims of it as well.  The feminist points don’t go away just because patriarchy sometimes victimizes men.
 
Mediation and “collaborative justice” are also problemmatic for women.  In fact, I did my Master’s Degree thesis on the use of mediation in the context of family law.  I looked at the entire Canadian history of child custody decision making, attempting to document the specific, concrete ways in which dominant ways of thinking about marriage and mothers and children and fathers shifted over time, always put women at a disadvantage, even when granting women custody – and how those shifts still work to women’s disadvantage.  There’s really good scholarship out there that demonstrates how even the ideas of gender neutrality introduced into Canadian family law in the ’80s works to obscure the unfairness of many decisions [for instance, google Susan B. Boyd].  What we’re looking for is a pattern.  Everyone has an anecdote that falls outside the pattern.  We tend to pay much more attention to the heartrending anecdotes than we do to the pattern.  One anecdote from a man or his mother tends to trump several thousand of them from women.  My colleagues and I have been talking lately about how much more attention the tropes about “women” and “mothers”  get – those lying, manipulative, hysterical, spurned women – and how incredibly easily they are accepted as “truth”.  Especially as compared to the stories of men which “we” (including the lawmakers and law enforcers) seem to find so much moe credible, most of the time. 

As for the “new” process of “collaborative justice” now so popular in family law, there’s lots of critical work on that too.  It seems to work for some people, but imagine how it can be used against a woman who is in a relatively powerless position considering how prone “we” are to setting women’s views of reality aside.  Some truly terrible things result.  Formal legal processes are often critisized, especially in the context of family law – another thing I looked at in my thesis.  Thing is, formal legal processes have at their heart, supposedly, the protection of the rights of the parties.  Sometimes, we get rights “right” and actually protect relatively powerless people.  But “rights” aren’t first and foremost with mediation and collaborative law – an agreement, sometimes any agreement, is understood to be “in the best interests” of children.  Sounds good?  Sounds “right”?  That too depends on point of view.  Where agreements reinforce the relative powerlessness of mothers and formalize abuse, as they often do, the harm to the mother becomes harm to the children as well – though there still seem to be few people who “get” that.   There is still a view that a man can be almost as abusive as they come to his wife; as long as he hasn’t directly abused his children in a way that can be proved, he is almost always deemed to be a fit father, at the very least for the purposes of access to children which almost always necessitates an ongoing relationship with their mother.  The emotional damage experienced by children whose mother’s are abused is ignored, though it seems just intuitively true to me.  It’s not that I want to pay attention to mothers at the expense of children; I just have a broader concept of what’s good for children.  Or at least children who have mothers as primary caregivers.
 
Hmmm.  As always, I get back to how complicated it is, how much work it takes to understand it and how unlikely it is that most people can or will take the time or trouble to figure it out.  Everyone seems to think they’re an expert in family law, certainly everyone who’s been through the system and lots of other people as well.  Most people also think that when they read a case, or about it, everything they read “true” or the judge wouldn’t say it.  This despite the fact that judge-made law is known to be as gender biased as any other form of law.  I’m being honest when I say, in family law, as with so many other things, it’s one step forward and two steps back for women.
 
One last note:  it’s often said that “joint custody” works best for children and so it’s an inviolable “good thing”.  As usual, for every study that says it’s best, there are a few more that show the flaws in those studies and more studies that show less glowing results.  Again, the big concern is that joint custody regimes so easily reinforce the previous status quo in the relationship where the mother does all the work and the father has all the control.  That’s what joint custody often means.  Stats Can has some numbers that show that in by far and away the greater number of Canadian cases, joint custody means the mother has de facto custody and the father can intervene with regard to major (or minor) decision making.  Those are situations in which the parties have come to an agreement.  And clearly, it’s not custody or even shared time that many fathers want.  It’s ongoing control. 

I’m not saying all fathers, so don’t bug me!  I’m sure there are plenty of engaged and involved and loving fathers and I wish them no harm.  But an engaged and involved and loving father respects the mother of his children.

I’ve not included many links here because I just needed to get this off my chest.  If anyone wants sources, ask me in comments and I’ll try to provide them.

And by the way, the three children in the case reported at The Star lived with their mother and her family for fourteen years, with almost no contact with their father.  Even if that lack of contact was no fault of his and even if it was entirely the fault of their mother, I wonder how we can possibly say that it’s in the best interests of these children to be sent from the home of their mother to a courhouse to be handed over to the patriarch without the mother’s presence and to be entirely cut off from contact with her for the foreseeable future.  Maybe this is justice for this father.  It’s neither justice for the children nor good for them.  If the situation was reversed, if the father had abused these children in this way, I can tell you almost for sure, they wouldn’t be handed over to their mother with no access for Dad.  It doesn’t happen.

UPDATE:  I’ve bounced the uglier comments.  And I forgot one trope about women, specifically feminists:  we’re all aching to “claim our victimhood”.  No matter how uppity we get.

Toronto Without Power

Posted on by elizabeth
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Intersection of Dufferin and St. Clair in Toronto at 10 p.m. Thursday night –

after a flood blew out the Dufferin St. tranformer station –

leaving 100,00 people without power –

in bitterly cold temperatures

Power has been returned to about three-quarters of those customers – leaving lots of people shivering tonight if they haven’t found alternate accomodations.  I hope everybody’s ok.

Power outages in the winter bring back one of my favourite childhood memories.  I lived in a small community on Scarborough Bluffs.  Winter storms often left us cut off from the rest of the world because cars couldn’t get up the hill on the road that offered the only access and egress.  When the power went out too, my parents would light up the fire in the living room fireplace and we lived in front of it for the duration.

Evenings were like camping out at home and indoors.  They would heat water over the fire to make hot chocolate, tell stories and then zip my younger brother and me into one sleeping bag.  We slept warm and toasty in front of the fire, listening to my parents chat away until they fell asleep on the floor beside us.  I was always disappointed when the power went back on.

We were safe, of course, so that made it easier to enjoy the winter black-outs.  Still, I think it reminded us of what we had lost by way of intimacy with the introduction of “power”.

Seriously Sid?

Posted on by elizabeth
Reply

From Josh Wingrove at the Globe & Mail:

A proposed resolution by a major Ontario union to ban Israeli academics at the province’s universities has sparked a bitter debate between leaders on both sides over an Israeli attack on a Gaza university.

The Ontario arm of the Canadian Union of Public Employees announced yesterday it would propose, in a meeting next month, “a ban on Israeli academics doing speaking, teaching or research work at Ontario universities,” if they do not explicitly condemn Israeli action in Gaza.

The proposal comes specifically after a Dec. 29 attack on an Islamic university in Gaza, which Israel claimed was affiliated with Hamas.

“Attacking an institution of learning is just beyond the pale,” CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan said last night. “They deliberately targeted an institution of learning. That’s what the Nazis did.”   [more]

I stand strongly against Israel’s attack on Gaza, both because I believe it is immoral and illegal, but also because I don’t think it can achieve any reasonable, practical goals.

However.  Sid? 

Now, some people have been troubled that there seems to have been little concern voiced by academics about the bombing of a Gaza university by Israel.  It makes little sense to me that we ought to specifically protest every Gazan institution that comes under attack, since it appears that all Gazan institutions are under attack, and have been for longer than many people seem willing to admit.  After all, if you have no electricity, food or water it’s very hard to run anything.

And when innocent civilians and children are being killed in their homes and in the streets, why on earth would a university be exempt?  As long as the Israelis prevent journalists from reporting in Gaza, we will hear the excuse that anything that gets bombed contains members of Hamas using civilians as shields. And by the way, Gazans are making pretty fragile shields these days – Israel doesn’t seem at all inclined to be bothered by their presence where the bombs fall, as we heard today when a UN school was bombed, killing many innocents.  It will be a long while, if ever, before we know the truth.  As long as that’s the case, I say it’s all illegitimate and I protest all of it.

Beyond that, academic freedom doesn’t seem to be of any particular value to Ryan, but there are those who think that it’s an  important way to protect freedom of expression within the academy.  Within reasonable limits, so I.  Freedom of expression in the universities has been seriously eroded by corporatism.  Go after that one Sid – in the long run, it’s much more serious, insidious and important.  If Israeli academics express opinions that people find illegitimate, they’re free to say so.  Period.  I guess Ryan missed the irony of speaking out for the “sacredness” of institutions of higher learning by attacking one of their highest values.  Just what are they worth anyway?

And hell, why pick on academics?  Why not just refuse entry to Canada to any person who agrees with the Israeli aggression?  Ya see Sid? 

But the capper just has to be accusing Israel of behaving like the Nazis.  If Ryan had a legitimate bone to pick, he sure blew himself right out of the water there.  While I decry, quite absolutely, the actions of Israel in blockading Gaza and then attacking it, there just is no analogy to the systematic programme to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe undertaken by the Nazis.  Ryan’s comment smacks of anti-Semitism,  as well as being simply inaccurate.  The casual way that this kind of accusation is made continually blows my mind.  Ryan isn’t  helping the Palestinian cause with this dumbassery.

Shut up Sid!

Jane Doe & Thousands of Women

Posted on by elizabeth
Reply

In May, I responded to the disbanding of the community and women based Toronto Police Services Board Steering Committee on Sexual Assault that was formed as a result of Jane Doe’s successful suit against the Metropolitan Toronto Police.  In that case, it was found that the Toronto Police had been negligent in their handling of her rape, and had also breached her Charter right to equality before the law.

Last week at The Star, Michele Henry insulted both Doe and women’s communities who have struggled and worked against the odds for decades to challenge, assist and support the police to make or begin to make the systemic changes necessary to ensure that rape and sexual assault cases are properly pursued in an article purporting to assess the “gains” made in the ten years since the case was decided and since the re-structuring of a new “Advisory Committee” that excludes community members. 

The article isolated Doe, called her “bitter”, left out the work of individual women and women’s community groups in her struggle and bought into the official police view that “everything has changed and things are all better now”.  [You can read the article here].  Doe mobilized women to write to The Star and set them straight.  This week, The Star has some of their letters:

The woman known as Jane Doe has lectured at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law every year since the early ’90s. Her thoughtful, insightful analyses of the policing of sexual assault and the role of the law, health care, the media and other of our institutions in perpetuating sexual assault mythology has informed generations of our students. The hall is always packed. Just last week it was standing room only during her presentation. Her research, her book and of course her case are part of the curriculum in universities across the country.
It is difficult to reconcile her hopeful energy and dedication to teaching the next generation with the Star‘s categorization of her as “bitter” or “dogged” and its failure to represent her as a woman who has worked in collaboration with others in Toronto and across the province to effect change in police investigation of sexual assault.

In March 2009 our faculty will host an international conference to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Jane Doe decision and to reflect on the current response to sexual assault. Many of the 60-plus proposals we have received share her position that little has changed in the policing of that crime.

In fact, a 2007 Department of Justice study demonstrates the persistence of a shockingly high rate of unfounding for sexual assault by police. And Toronto’s own Auditor General in 2004 documented ongoing failure by police to follow their own protocols regarding sexual assault investigation.

Rather than isolating Jane and her work, it is in the interest of your readers that you represent the systemic nature of the crime of sexual assault and the many other scholars, front line and community workers who work with Jane Doe or support her.

Elizabeth Sheehy, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

You need only read the report of the Auditor General of Toronto, the judge’s decision in Jane Doe’s case, or the brilliant book that Jane wrote to understand the real story of Jane Doe.

 If you had taken the time to actually engage with Jane Doe’s story and the significant social analysis embedded in what she is doing, perhaps then you would not have run such a simplistic report. It is clear that you chose instead to support the posturing of a police force that was found guilty of negligence and discrimination in their investigation of sexual assault.

If we must decide, as the article suggests, “Who is right – the police or Jane Doe?” I’m with Jane, as are many people who have woken up from a false sense of security and who don’t trust a police force that deliberately squashes the possibility for real change.

Institutional affiliation as a quality of the new advisory committee is not community driven and has often been proven to augment divisions between what actually happens to women and the institutions that they must adhere to. Democracy, we must remember, depends on the courage and challenges of citizen-subjects (not institutions). I think you have forgotten this.

Maria Belen Ordonez, Department of Social Anthropology, York University

One need only look at statistics to understand that the rate of sexual assault continues to rise and women continue to not report, citing fear of the police investigation as the main reason. An article about the work of the Steering Committee would have been much more useful than a police promo piece.

 Anna Bourque, Toronto

Your article is framed by the question “Who is right – the police or Jane Doe?” Given this simplistic approach, I’m not at all surprised the article failed to deal with what the Jane Doe case represents: the political struggle of many diverse women against systemic violence. The Star audience deserves a story that represents the perspectives of these women and their work to address how interlocking systemic violences such as racism and sexism and classism are reproduced by the state.

 Let’s have a little political analysis when dealing with issues of political violence.

Jamie Magnusson, Associate Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Thousands of cheers to Jane Doe, Elizabeth Sheehy, Marie Belen Ordonez, Anna Bourque and Jamie Magnusson and all other women who wrote letters that didn’t get published.  To all the women participating in the international conference at Ottawa U. in March, 2009 to celebrate the Ten Year Anniversary of the decision in Jane Doe’s case.  To community and women’s advocacy groups such as the Toronto YWCA, METRAC, Parkdale Community Legal Aid Services Programme who worked so hard on the Steering Committee.  To Beverly Bains, who helped to design the Committee.  And to women everywhere, who struggle with such persistence and courage  and beauty to make the world a better place for women – and men.  I am so proud of you – of us.

“Justice” in Canada Night

Posted on by elizabeth
2

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been as upset as I am tonight about the case of David Frost.  I find it difficult to get myself together enough to write about it, but I’m going to try.

In a post on Tuesday, I commented on this story at The Star, reporting on the trial of Frost, who is charged with four counts of sexual exploitation with respect to two young men who were on a Quebec hockey team he coached.  Let’s do just a little background on David Frost.

In 2004, NHL hockey player Mike Danton was arrested by FBI agents in the US on charges of conspiring to have Frost killed.  Danton pled guilty to the charges.  The reasons behind Danton’s attempt to have his former hockey coach killed were never revealed.

The CBC’s Fifth Estate later obtained tapes of conversations [listen to the tapes or read transcripts here]between Mike Danton, serving a jail sentence, and David Frost which indicated the control that Frost continued to have over the hockey player.  A Fifth Estate documentary told the tale of their relationship, beginning when Danton was ten-years old and  playing hockey in Brampton, Ontario:

It was there that Frost first began to exert his control over the young hockey player; control that continued throughout Mike’s hockey career, from the minor leagues in Toronto, through teams in the Ontario Hockey League and eventually to the National Hockey League. Frost’s influence was continual and unrelenting.  

In the fifth estate documentary “Frost Bite”, Bob McKeown delves deeper into the jailhouse conversations between Mike Danton and David Frost. The program reveals new details of the intricate and troubling relationship between the St. Louis Blues player and his agent, especially the importance of Danton’s sex life as a possible influence in the murder plot.

Since Danton’s incarceration, Frost has been his media representative and his chief defender – he controls access to Danton, who has had no contact with his family for years. 

In 2006, Frost was arrested by the Ontario Provincial Police on twelve charges of sexual exploitation involving four boys and three girls.  The charges with respect to the girls were eventually dropped because s. 153(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada allows for such charges only when the person charged is in a position of trust with respect to the victims – that is, a teacher, coach etc.  The young women were sixteen at the time of the behaviour in question and thus were able to consent to sexual contact.  They were girlfriends of several of the young men, hockey players on Frost’s team, and had been involved in “threesomes” with their boyfriends and Frost.  Charges were also dropped with respect to two of the boys.

That left four charges pending with respect to two young men.  First problem.  It seems absurd on the face of it to acknowledge the possibility of exploitation between the coach and his players and not between the coach and these young women.  But that’s what the Code says.  The law needs to be changed to take account of situations like this, where an adult uses his power and authority, even “second-hand”, to obtain access to young women for the purposes of sexual exploitation.  That was the subject of my post, as far as it went, on Tuesday.

For the last several days, two young women have testified as witnesses in the case.  On Monday, “Kristy” testified that she had been involved in “three-way” sex with her boyfriend and Frost when she was sixteen.  On Tuesday, the second woman, “Jennifer”, testified:

The woman, now 28, speaking today at Frost’s ongoing trial for sexual exploitation, said that Frost had a threesome with her and her teenage hockey player boyfriend while Frost was coaching the Quinte Hawks in Deseronto in 1996.

[…]

The woman told court the three-way sexual encounters involving her boyfriend and Frost happened many times.

During the woman’s emotional testimony, she said she and her boyfriend often fought because she didn’t want to have sex with Frost anymore.

She testified that even years later, when her boyfriend was playing hockey in the U.S., Frost would be there when she visited and told them he didn’t want them to have sex if he wasn’t involved.

Here’s where it all gets even more lovely.  There is a publication ban in place with respect to the young men involved both because of the nature of the charges and because they were minors at the time of the alleged offenses.  The Crown applied for a ban with respect to the young woman, but The Globe and Mail argued that the ban ought not to apply to the young women because they are not “victims”.  Subsequently, the judge decided not to grant the ban where they are concerned.

The Globe in its wisdom has decided not to print the last names of these women.  Not so with other media.  Thank you Globe and Mail.  Freedom of the press is safe because of you, even if these young women are not.  What’s more important anyway?  [oh I’m so mad I can only snark]

I’m sorry to say, this story goes on.  And on.  And only gets worse.

Frost’s lawyer is Marie Heinen.  Frost is creepy, pervy slimy and it’s always great for a guy like him to have a woman lawyer.  How does she sleep?  I’ll never understand.  It’s the position of the defense that none of this “three-way sex party” stuff ever happened.  With anyone.  At all.  So of course, the cross examination involves the proposition that these young women have fabricated the whole thing.  That, in itself, is not unusual.  To agree that it happened at all is to admit guilt to the offense, by definition.  The question is, or was, how does it make sense to argue this if you have two young men, the complainants” in the case, saying that it did and their position is corroborated by two female witnesses?

And the worm turns.  Today, the two ostensible male victims, former Ontario Junior hockey players, came to court and said none of it ever happened, the charges are ridiculous and the coach did nothing wrong at all, ever, never mind committing these criminal offenses.

Now I have to pause to, literally, weep.  Here we have two young women literally hung out to dry, their reputations smashed, all in the cause of seeing David Frost put to rights by the court for what he did to these two young men and the alleged victims wouldn’t even say he did anything wrong.  Not only that, they took some nasty, macho, misgynist swipes at their former girlfriends while they were doing it.

The testimony from the two young men yesterday was alternately galling and heartless.
For instance, the first to take the witness box seriously described his forays into two-on-one sex as “like a bonding thing, with friends and teammates.” He appeared oblivious to the fact that in the stereotypical male fantasy, threesomes traditionally involve not two men and a woman, but two women and a man.
He later attended a Canadian university on a hockey scholarship and said that after leaving the junior game, he had had threesomes and foursomes. “I had up to five and six guys with one woman,” he said quietly.

The second young man was asked by Mr. Tse if he had not once upon a time, as the judge has heard, pronounced his girl Jennifer as gorgeous. “I wouldn’t say that,” the young man replied coolly. “I was 16. It worked.”

“What worked?” Mr. Tse asked.

“She worked,” the young man smirked. “Ever heard the expression ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’?” He said she was pointed out to him as a likely sexual plaything by a player who “had been with her” previously.   [here]

 

 

 

Given that one player disputed an incident that several other people witnessed and that resulted in assault charges against Mr. Frost, to which he pled guilty, the credibility of these players is, uh, questionable to say the least:

Arguably, the most revealing moment may have come when Mr. Tse was questioning the second player about an incident in which Mr. Frost physically assaulted one of his teammates, this in a game before an arena full of fans. No fewer than four other witnesses, including other former players and the team’s former trainer, have testified they saw the assault, and Mr. Frost in fact later pleaded guilty to it.

But this player said he never saw such a thing, and furiously told Mr. Tse [the Crown], “I also recall our whole team rallying around that and marching into the police station in Deseronto … everyone rallied around and not one player saw that assault. And no one spoke about it, if they did.” [here]

In the article I’ve been quoting here, Christie Blatchford points out the harm done to the young women who were witnesses in this case and to the game of hockey in Canada:

In the process, they inflicted incalculable damage to the national game – painting it at the junior and college levels as an amoral sexual playground – and casually, in one instance rather cheerfully, tried to obliterate the reputations of their former girlfriends.

Apart from the obvious, wtf is wrong here?  I am left wondering why the Crown proceeded with this case.  There are no complainants.  These young men refused to meet with the Crown before coming to court, they refused to come to court until Frost’s lawyer had ensured that their identity would be protected by a publication ban and they testified for the defense.  It’s not as if the Crown wasn’t aware of those facts.

If this was a case where the alleged victims were young women, this case would have gone absolutely nowhere.  There’s been a lot of pressure on the O.P.P. and the Attorney General’s Office to do something about Frost for four years, since Mike Danton’s arrest.  After all, he appeared to be endangering the morals of our stalwart heroes, our young male warriors, our hockey players for gawd sakes – human beings who are inestimably more valuable than any young woman could ever be.  The Crown Attorney’s Office wanted Frost and they wanted him badly enough to attempt to get a conviction in a case where there just wasn’t ever much hope.  Perhaps they were willing to risk it simply to prove to the people of Ontario that they tried, or perhaps they knew it would be clear enough to observers just what’s going on here that the success of the case didn’t/doesn’t really matter.

But look who paid.  There’s not a Crown Attorney in this godforsaken country that wouldn’t know what was going to happen to these young women.  It’s difficult enough to protect female complainants in cases such as these, never mind witnesses.  Jennifer and Kristy never had a prayer.  As for the publication ban, that one was a toss-up, but it certainly couldn’t or ought not to have been promised to them.  And I hope to gawd it wasn’t.

I can’t help but feel that I know what they’re feeling.  I can’t help but feel revulsion for the puling, cowardly ex-boyfriends, princes of our national game.  And tonight, I can’t help but feel hatred toward that game and the machismo saturated system it has engendered.  It has to be said that the underlying motive for these young men’s lie is not just misogyny, but also homophobia.  The alleged threesomes, after all, involved two men and one woman.  In the past, there has been speculation at a level much greater than a whisper that David Frost and Mike Danton were lovers.  And that, as Christie Blatchford notes, is speculation that the macho boys will never admit:

… any young male in hockey who was sexually taken advantage of by, or involved with, another male would be too ashamed and alarmed at the prospect of the dread spectre of gayness that he would deny it with his dying breath.  [here]

This is wrong at so many levels that I just can’t leave it alone.  I’m not sure what can be done, but I’m going to mobilize my little feminist army to find out.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  In the meantime, if any of you have ideas, please let me know in comments or by e-mail.  You’ll find my address on the “About” page of this blog.

Sleep the sleep of righteous warriors.

David Frost

UPDATE:  Great article on this case by Laura Robinson on Saturday in the Winnipeg Free Press.  Robinson, a former member of Canada’s national cycling team, wrote Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Game in 1998.

If there was a huge hue and cry from men on this issue, from hockey fans, from hockey DADS, from male players, something might happen that would change the face of the sport and make it into something I can respect.  Hockey was a central part of my childhood, even though they wouldn’t let me play – my sisters would both have made GREAT hockey players.  I did idolize – and idealize – those guys.  I can tell you lots of good stories about them and what they do off the ice.  But I’m angry with the sport, with many of those who run it and coach in it, and with players like those described in this story, who are adults now – 28 or 29 years old – and who don’t have the courage to stand up for women.  And ultimately, for themselves.

Write letters to the Winnipeg Free Press and to Laura Robinson.  I’m going to gather some other addresses were you can direct your letters.

UPDATE:  Christie Blatchford on the acquittal (surprise!) of David Frost – note that some commenters blame the judge for the acquittal.  You can’t find someone guilty if the complainants won’t testify for the Crown!

When Is Sex “Consensual”?

Posted on by elizabeth
1

How fucked up is this:

The notorious ex-hockey coach and player agent David Frost is pleading not guilty and in the end, Judge Geoffrey Griffin of the Ontario Court of Justice may decide that, if Mr. Frost did anything, it wasn’t criminal.

But the testimony of a young woman here yesterday indelibly marked Mr. Frost at the least as a perverse creep who, she said, had sex with his players’ girlfriends, directed them down to the last sordid detail in threesomes and arguably was as interested in seeing his players naked as he was the girls.

The woman, now 28, was testifying about the time she was 16, the new junior hockey team had come to her eastern Ontario town and was the biggest thing in it, and how she went from a being a virgin one month to having sex with her boyfriend and his then-29-year-old coach the next.

Now 41, Mr. Frost is charged with four counts of sexual exploitation involving two of his former charges when he coached the now defunct Quinte Hawks in nearby Deseronto, Ont.

The allegations are rooted in the fact that as the coach, he was in a position of trust or authority over vulnerable then-teenagers. Comparable charges relating to the girls, including the woman who testified yesterday, were withdrawn because Mr. Frost wasn’t similarly a figure of authority to them.

The case is further complicated by the fact that the two players, who can’t be identified because of a mandatory publication ban, are not being called by prosecutors and apparently deny anything happened, and because the then-girls who allegedly participated admit, as did yesterday’s witness, that the sex was consensual.

Read the whole article at The Star

Where there is coercion used with respect to young women, I can’t think how we can call it “consensual sex”.  The Court, by the way, did not and would not issue a publication ban with respect to the names of the young women involved.  The Globe and Mail argued against the ban and then decided to publish only this young woman’s first name.  Just as long as we’re clear who’s in charge, right?  Asses.

There’s a problem with the law here:

Someone under the age of 18 cannot legally consent to have sex with a person in a position of authority such as a teacher, health care provider, coach, lawyer or family member

Surely it’s clear that if David Frost can be charged with having exploited the young men who he was coaching, surely the same goes for the young women he involved in the exploitation.  The law needs to be clarified.