The Story of Jane Doe
By Jane Doe
Random House, 2003
$39.95 hardcover

It ie the Jane Doe story as one woman's courage and incredible tenacity throughout the two trials and 12-year court battle that resulted from her rape. But The Story of Jane Doe: A Book About Rape is much more than her story alone. Her success is a testimony to the strength of not only her commitment to social justice, but of the latent potential of the feminist movement as well.

The influence of the Jane Doe criminal and civil cases has been profoundly social, seeking to affect change at the institutional level as well as justice for all rape victims. It is this social contribution, however, that has been most often ignored. This book, written by Jane Doe herself, is an attempt to rectify such oversight. It also provides a venue for Doe to give her story the meaning she intended, after years of police, crown and defense attorney, and media distortion. In the process, Doe provides us with a powerful educational tool about rape and the institutional procedures that ostensibly deal with both the punishment of rapists and the protection of victims.

Rape and the Justice System

Jane Doe was raped by the “balcony rapist” in Toronto in the summer of 1986. Afterwards, in the absence of any police communication with the community, she helped to form Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) and postered warnings around the area. Within 24 hours the rapist was arrested, after his parole officer read the poster and tipped police. WAVAW then worked to change police protocol in order to improve not only police rape sensitivity and awareness, but to empower women who are repeatedly victimized during the investigative process. Doe's own account of being interviewed repeatedly during the police investigation - each interview becoming “increasingly aggressive and offensive as I continued to attempt to make them accountable” - is a chilling indictment of such investigative procedures.

WAVAW's continued pressure on the police, though most often met with intransigence, was successful in establishing a sexual assault squad, the first of its kind in Canada. The creation of this squad “caused the force to finally remove the crime of rape from the jurisdiction of untrained officers who usually investigated robbery and homicide….” Sadly, Chief Julian Fantino disbanded the squad in 2002, in one of those historic grand steps backwards, amalgamating it with the vice and morality squad and neutralizing the emphasis on rape.

The criminal trial of the balcony rapist exposed police insensitivity to the nature of rape, to victims themselves (including most famously, the use of women as bait to lure the rapist) and extreme investigative incompetence. In response to what she felt were police practices that continued to endanger women, Doe launched a civil action against the force for negligent and sexist discrimination, in violation of the Charter. Ten years later, after humiliating, infuriating and misogynist treatment at the hands of our so-called justice system, she won her case. The court found that her constitutional rights had been violated and that police had acted in a negligent manner motivated by discrimination.

The police issued her a public apology, and paid her compensation. Although Doe acknowledges that “civil law had come through for me,” she has no illusions about the social impact of her victory. It was, she says, “a single court victory. A drop in the bucket.” Missing was any teeth in the ruling that imposed change. An audit ordered by City Council was “the closest we came to change.” The audit made 75 recommendations and revealed that the squad investigated only four percent of all reported rapes. However, the police were left to themselves to reform their practices and neither women who have actually experienced violence nor women's rights advocates have any input.

Jane Doe intends the book to be an educational tool - revolutionary even - placing rape and its consequences in the discourses of every household. She exposes the reader to the internal workings of an archaic, alienating and adversarial court system we rarely see. Her disempowering experience helps to explain why, although one in four Canadian women experience sexual assault in their lives (three-quarters of them at the hands of a man they know), 90 percent choose not to report it. The maintenance of her anonymity was the only protection she received. Her anonymity had one other benefit: a broader public identification with the events of the trial, and hence a public consciousness-raising of the systemic nature of rape.

Fighting the Rape Myths

The Story of Jane Doe deconstructs the popular mythology of rape, as purported by police, media, and courts. A denial of rape, she argues, has become our collective modus operandi. Our institutions continue to act on the assumption that rape is not a gender-based crime through the use, for example, of gender-neutral terms and ongoing arguments that women rape too. Yes they do, counters Doe, but rarely. Men report about three percent of all adult sexual assaults, but 99 percent of these are perpetrated by other men. By contrast, one woman in Canada is raped by a man approximately every 17 minutes. To argue that women are also rapists obfuscates overwhelming evidence that they are victims of a crime of tremendous magnitude. Nevertheless, our state systems continue to treat rape as the action of a few bad apples. Her very insistence on the word “rape” helps to counter the invisibility of the crime and the gendered nature of violence against women, highlighting both the specificity of male violence and its pervasiveness.

Doe successfully deconstructs the notion that the police officer - the good male - is the protector of women and the avenger of the rapist - the bad male. Several examples in the book underscore the willingness of police to act illegally to punish those they see to be at fault, whether perpetrator or victim, and to do so with a brutality that itself often constitutes assault. She deconstructs legal definitions of statutory rape, which are based on the assumption that rape can be non-violent or harmless. She tackles the view that women can consent to rape, that if a woman doesn't struggle no rape occurred, and that women tend to make false allegations. She describes the use of alienating and intrusive medical procedures to confirm rape. And lastly, she details the consequences of the striking down of the eight-year old rape shield law that had barred cross-examination of women's sexual histories in rape trials. All of this brilliantly illuminates the inability of the police, court, and state to understand the crime.

While Jane Doe elucidates the discrimination inherent in rape mythology, she is somewhat less successful in providing an analysis of why rape is so pervasive. She is absolutely correct in the analysis she does provide: rape is an enactment of male social power. Rape is a tool of sexism, and as such it “works,” meaning, it keeps women down - economically, socially, legally. Racism informs and strengthens rape. These are all importance insights. But her attempts to connect rape to a broader social and economic system of capital accumulation are non-existent, and as such her insights lose potency.

For example, while noting that men benefit from sexism, including freedom from the unpaid work of mothering, she does not link this systemic brutality to the ongoing extraction of women's unpaid reproductive labour. Nor does she acknowledge that this labour benefits not only men specifically, but also capitalist relations of production generally, dependent as it is on vulnerable labour pools. These benefits are an important part of the systemic and institutional support for rape. We are therefore left with a one-sided explanation of rape as patriarchal power, with no framework linking the interconnectedness of our social oppressions, and their mutual reinforcement. Hence the revolutionary potential for the text is diluted.

Honouring Feminism's Achievements

Doe reminds us that her story is not hers alone. Two chapters discuss feminism - not an academic rendition of its history, but a personal accounting that honours its collective achievements. She states: “I understand feminism to be a social justice movement that has served more people, effected more progressive change in its first and second waves, than any other documented social movement before or since”. In an era of backlash, she makes no apologies for a readership that may cringe at the label “feminist,” but with sensitivity and wit, helps to expose inconsistencies in anti-feminist rhetoric.