If This Isn't Sexual Assault, What Is?

It was curious to see Toronto Star reporter Rosie DiManno arguing in a column yesterday that the sexual assault case involving former Saskatchewan Roughriders general manager Eric Tillman was "patronizing to women." Tillman, who resigned his position last week, received an absolute discharge last week - escaping even the stigma of a criminal record in the process - after admitting he was guilty of fondling a 16-year babysitter.

DiManno reports the agreed statement of facts in the case as follows: Tillman, apparently made woozy by medication, sidled up behind the young woman, grabbed her by the hips and pulled her back end up against his front end. Dimanno then, despite admitting she couldn't quite buy Tillman's claim that he didn't remember these events, nevertheless dismisses the encounter as a trivial lapse in judgement that couldn't possibly have been damaging to the victim.

I share her skepticism about Tillman's memory loss - and about the notion that sleeping pills and pain relievers combine to create a Viagra-like arousal response - but the rest of her argument doesn't hold water. DiManno laments that a justice system based on zero-tolerance when it comes to sex offences condescends to women by placing even sufferers of relatively mild offences into aggrieved victim status. "Where's the sex or the assault in the sexual assault charge to which Eric Tillman pleaded guilty," DiManno wonders. Later, she suggests that calling Tillman's offence sexual assault diminishes the trauma felt by victims of more severe crimes such as rape.

DiManno might have a point that the law should do a better job of distiniguishing between different grades of sexual assault. She might even be right that victims of "minor" sex offences are often not be as traumatized as some believe - although I'll leave that one to the psychiatric experts.

But if she can't see that Tillman's actions were clearly of a sexual nature and could very reasonably have been upsetting to a young woman who, it bears repeating, was working for him at the time, I'm not sure what definition of sexual assault she would accept short of the stereotypical "rapist jumping out of the bushes" scenario.

Tillman's actions constituted a crime and his clean-slate escape from the legal system is a farce. DiManno, always eager to uphold her tough-as-nails image, may believe that prosecuting offences like Tillman's is patronizing to women, but columns like hers do a far greater disservice.

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The Pro Rogue

It's a new year and here's the first of what should be 71 posts in 2010, according to the statistical average of the first two years. Anyone care to play the over-under?

Anyone care at all?

This last query isn't really a dig at myself or the blog. It's more of an open question in the wake of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's successful move last week to prorogue Parliament for the second straight year. Late in 2008, Harper sent Canadians to their political dictionaries to look up "prorogue" after he created a furor by trying to cut off public funding for political parties. The request, granted by Governor-General Michaelle Jean, bought the Conservatives enough time to avoid a non-confidence vote that could have thrown them out of power.

Harper clearly prizes effectiveness over originality when it comes to political strategy. No wonder, then, that he went back to the prorogue well when the heat got turned up about the Canadian military and the possibility that they'd handed over prisoners in Afghanistan to local authorities with a thing for torture. Opposition leaders demanded answers and Parliament as a whole agreed that the Prime Minister needed to supply them. So Harper did the logical thing - he put Parliament to sleep until early March.

An article in today's Vancouver Sun enumerates some of the advantages and disadvantages of this move by the Conservatives. Author Barbara Yaffe points out that, by the time Parliament sits again, Conservatives will have had the chance to look all official and important at Olympic photo-ops and will also be able to set the agenda with the Throne Speech. She also speculates that the Conservatives are betting Canadians will be more engrossed with the fate of the Canadian Olympic hockey team than Afghan detainees over the next couple of months.

She could be right. Andrew Coyne at Maclean's certainly seems to think so. Coyne suspects Harper will absorb less political punishment from this latest prorogation because Canadians will be more desensitized to it and distracted from it. Jaffe cites a poll showing that 43% of Canadians oppose this prorogation, but Coyne believes we're just not likely to notice the death of our democracy if the murder is carried out by numerous paper cuts.

I'm inclined to agree with Coyne. Harper's willingness to render Parliament irrelevant by ignoring and then silencing it - twice - suggests he's perfectly capable of this kind of slow democra-cide. If citizens don't show resistance, we'll be accomplices. And it's going to take more than a Facebook group.