Judicial bias in sexual assault cases is generally associated with the conduct of sitting judges who engage in victim blaming and reserve the full protection of the law to ideal victims. However, this paper seeks to examine the role of the Canadian Judicial Council (CJC) in perpetuating sexist stereotypes in the legal realm. It does so by juxtaposing the CJC’s handling of two judicial misconduct complaints, one in which a male judge exhibited bias against women while adjudicating a sexual assault (...) trial and a second in which graphic, sexual pictures of a female judge were posted on the internet without her knowledge or consent. The proposition offered is that the CJC’s gendered record in disposing of the two judicial misconduct cases was similarly informed by the notional ideal victim, further perpetuating sexism both in Canadian courtrooms and among the judiciary. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study addresses the need for more research on news media representations of sexual assault within Critical Discourse Analysis. It focuses on the discursive links between victim-blaming in mainstream news coverage, on the one hand, and a neoliberal ideology that backgrounds structural issues while implicitly emphasizing an ethic of ‘personal responsibility’ for risk-management, on the other. The existing research in feminist media studies points to the way that media misrepresent gendered crime by individualizing cases and focusing on victim behaviour rather (...) than connecting sexual assault to systemic social issues based on power imbalance. Using coverage of the highly publicized 2013 Steubenville, Ohio rape as a case study, this article builds on existing research by performing a systematized, grammar-based analysis of transitivity and agency in news reports and demonstrating their often subtle connection with neoliberal notions of victimization and risk that align with the interests of perpetrators, especially when they are privileged social actors while placing the onus on victims, whose agency is used to imply blame. (shrink)