24. Limits of a Criminal Justice Response: Trends in Police and Court Processing of Sexual Assault

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 effect of the criminal justice process, with the end result that only .3 percent of perpetrators are convicted whereas fully 99.7 percent are never held accountable for their crimes. Holly reviews current trends in the legal 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 conditional 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 crim