Rethinking the Criminalization of Sexual Violence: The Limits of the Criminal Justice Paradigm

The domination of the criminal justice paradigm suggests that criminalization is the best paradigm to address violence and to provide public safety. Despite decades of criminal justice reforms, the stable rates of sexual crimes call for a discourse analysis on societal understanding of justice. This thesis is an analysis of the efficiency of the criminal justice paradigm’s operationalization to address sexual violence in the Canadian context. The analysis conducted centered on the four sentencing principles of the criminal justice paradigm: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation and demonstrated the inability of the Canadian criminal justice system to convict individuals who commit sexual harm. Furthermore, the power of the criminal justice system to institutionalize the social categorization of individuals within a binary, as victims and as offenders, further entrenches cycles of harm. The victim/offender binary erases the complexities and nuances of sexual harm limiting healing and transformation for both individuals involved in the harmful interaction. Thus, it is argued that the criminal justice system has failed to prevent and address sexual violence and to create more harm by creating disposable identities in with the victim/offender binary. A shift in justice paradigm towards transformative justice and carceral abolition is proposed here as a hopeful avenue to better address sexual violence in Canadian society. Abolition praxis encourages the experimenting of community-based transformative justice practices to both prevent and address sexual violence without the intervention of police and prisons