28. A Feminist Remedy for Sexual Assault: A Quest for Answers

In this final chapter, Constance Backhouse returns us full circle to the very questions posed by Jane Doe’s activism and the Garneau Sisters who followed her: what is a feminist response to sexual assault? As a historian, Constance looks back at harsh sentencing laws for convicted rapists, revealing how embedded they were and remain in racial fear of and hatred directed at Africans and African-Canadians. Looking forward, she argues that feminists should not support prisons and should continue to explore restorative justice options, advocating more, not less, delegation of self-governance to offenders, in contrast, perhaps, to the directions identified by Gillian Balfour and Janice Du Mont. Constance points to a 1974 Ontario decision that awarded compensation to the complainant as a criminal remedy as an example of how to ensure restitution for women. She urges us to divest from criminal law responses and instead invest in the creative possibilities for recognizing and reimagining the harm of rape that feminist artists and authors can offe