Challenging Notions: Critical Victimology in Canada [2 ed.] 9781551305660

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Box 2.4: Slain Teens Don’t Sound “Ordinary” April 7th front page headline, “Teen slaying victims just ordinary kids this is both atrocious and inaccurate. How can two 15-year-olds who don’t go to school, don’t appear to live with responsible adults and are out after 1 a.m. in potentially dangerous areas be described as “ordinary kids? “ Such a tragedy isn’t ameliorated by your trying to whitewash the circumstances. Even today to think that ordinary 15-year-olds live at home, go to school and are expected to be in by a reasonable time, though no doubt rebelling against their stuffy parents. These young lives seem to have been a wasteland already, their prospects for a worthwhile life of love and family and personal achievement exceedingly dim. It’s not easy to be parents of teenagers at any time – in fact, it’s hard and exhausting work – but someone has to be accountable for them. And no, it’s not society. Society didn’t bring these children into the world Source: Letters to the Editor, Toronto Star, April 11, 1998, E8.

Chapter 2

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Why were they out so late? Were they behaving as “normal” girls of their age should? Did they engage in activities or associate with the kind of people they should have known might be dangerous? Perhaps more importantly, however, is whether we would be asking these questions if the victims were young males. Are any of these issues relevant to acknowledging the tragic loss of two young lives? Not surprisingly, then, we are still faced with the fact that sexual assaults in Canada have the highest rates of non-reporting of all victimizations (Perrault and Brennan, 2010). In the 2009 General Social Survey, 69 percent of all victimizations were not reported to the police. Sixty-five percent of non-sexual assaults were not reported, but a staggering 88 percent of sexual assaults were not reported to the police. Regrettably, the inadequacies of the criminal justice response t-o victims of sexual assault have not improved as much as would be hoped. An audit of the response by the Toronto Police Service to sexual assaults after the decision in the Jane Doe case suggests that some improvements were made (in, for example, expanding the mandate of the Sexual Assault Squad from responding only to “serious” sexual assaults to responding to –assaults). However, some problems persisted years later, such obsequious resources devoted to the unit, outdated training material ---- in following established procedures and protocols. (---- CITATION) MEN AND VICTIMIZATION Throughout this discussion, we have the **the critical contributions of *** scholarship and activism to the most significant social reforms in responding to victimization. However, the emphasis on woman’s victimization reflects the political and social agenda to challenge the structural inequality experienced by woman in various social sphere. In replacing the overwhelming emphasis on men in criminology, there has not, to date, been as much critical scholarship on male victimization. “The first point to be made is that there have been relatively few studies of male victims of crime” ) Newburn and Stanko, 1994, p.159). Victimhood cannot be thoroughly explored without it. For example, while the sexual assault provisions in Canada are now genderneutral, there are few data on the nature and extent of sexual assault among men (Goodey, 1997; Newburn and Stanko, 1994; Stermac et al., 1996; Washington, 1999). As Goodey (1997) states, “[o]ne can readily understand the research focus on woman in light of their heightened and pervasive experience of victimization and fear. However, to ignore the male experience is to deny the insight into male

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Vulnerability and, correspondingly, excludes an innovative appraisal of men as ‘aggressors’” (p.414). For example, woman are inundated with warnings about protecting their personal safety in a variety of ways (not walking home alone after dark, checking the backseat of their car before getting in, taking self-defense courses). The imaginary of the “good victim” is presumptively female. Equally importantly, however, we expect men to be immune to victimization as it is culturally constructed as a form of vulnerability that is generally excluded from traditional notions of masculinity. “[W]omen are risk-prone. Men are risk-free” (Walklate, 2007, p. 52), despite the consistent finding that levels of reported violent victimization among men and woman are fairly similar (Vaillancourt, 2010). While women are girls are constructed to be perpetually at risk of most types of physical victimization, we are unable to accommodate similar notions of victimhood for men. “What is never questioned in the literature on crime, vitimization, and fear of crime is masculinity” (Stanko and Hobdell, 1993, p. 413). There are important empirical findings that highlight the complexity of masculinity, femininity, and victimization. For example, as will outlined in greater detail in Chapter 4, men do, in fact, experience high degrees of victimization, which in some contexts, exceeds that of women (Gannon, 2005;Vaillancourt, 2010; also see Walklate, 2001). While woman are more likely to be sexually assaulted , men are at greater risk on non-sexual assault of a more serious (i.e violent or injurious) nature. Men are more likely than woman to be victims of an assault involving a weapon, assault by a stranger in a public place, and to be victims of homicide (Vaillancourt, 2010). Woman express more fear than do men in a variety of situations: when relying on public transit alone at night (58 percent versus 29 percent); when home alone at night (27 percent versus 12 percent); and walking alone after dark (16 percent versus 6 percent)(Gannon, 2005). As Stanko rightly points out, “[t]ry as they might, woman are unable to predict when a threatening or intimidating form of male behaviour will escalated to violence. As a result, woman are continually on guard to the possibility of men’s violence” (Stanko, 1985, p.1) At the same time, however, there is the “untested assumption” (Stanko, 1994, p.160) that men are unwilling to discuss their own feelings of insecurity, vulnurability, or fear, which accounts, to some extent, for the lack of empirical research on this topic. Nevertheless, Goodey (1997) found that 11-year-old boys not only expressed fear “when outside in public places” (p. 407), but expressed more fear than did girls at this age. The main source of their fear: older boys. While reporting rates by male victims of sexual violence is low (Gannon,