The Shackled Sexual Assault Victim: Trauma, Resistance, and Criminal Justice Violations of an Indigenous Woman

Abstract

This article provides a critical exposition of the harrowing experience of an Indigenous woman who was the complainant in a sexual assault case. Angela Cardinal was shackled and incarcerated during the preliminary inquiry into the matter of R v Blanchard, 2016 ABQB 706. The story of what this woman endured is among the most appalling examples of gendered, colonial and racialized brutality the Canadian criminal justice system has imposed on a sexual assault complainant and is a devastating indictment of this system. However, as well as a story of violation it is simultaneously a story which is most usefully understood through the lens of this woman’s strategy of dignified resistance in the face of the egregious institutional revictimization of her. I organize the analysis of what happened to Angela Cardinal around themes, described as intersecting and compounding layers of violation. The themes, or layers of violation, revolve around the violation of Angela Cardinal’s most fundamental rights and liberties, her retraumatization at the hands of the criminal justice system, and the failure to hold any of those responsible for this to account. I also examine the story, and its many dimensions, through three lenses. First, the story of the shackling of Angela Cardinal at the preliminary inquiry and her subsequent incarceration has to be situated in its wider context. It is only in the larger social, political, and economic contexts of both pervasive gender inequality and colonial forms of inequality shaping the lives of Indigenous women that the significance of the story of Angela Cardinal’s abuse at the hands of the Canadian legal system can be fully grasped. Second, I elucidate the narrative in terms of what it tells us about how the criminal justice system’s response to sexual assault victims––and in particular to women not seen as “ideal victims”—can go very badly wrong; the themes are expressed here in the worst possible way. The epidemic levels of sexual violence marking the lives of Indigenous women in Canada have been well documented, as have the state failures in delivering equal protection or benefit of the law. The third lens through which I explore this story is through that of Angela Cardinal’s amazing resistance in the face of the degrading and dehumanizing treatment to which she was subjected by the Canadian criminal justice system. This theme of women’s resistance to sexual violence is an important corrective to dominant and totalizing narratives of victimization which obliterate their agency––an agency which often survives even in the face of the most extreme forms of violence and abuse. Indigenous women, often individually and as a collectivity (diverse as this collectivity is), have displayed fierce agency and resistance in response to the historical harms and contemporary wrongs they have endured and continue to endure.