This article explores the relationship between workers in transition houses (the Canadian term for shelters for abused women), clergy, and church women. It identifies themes of cooperation between churches and transition houses, including women helping women and shared understandings of wife abuse, as well as challenges to cooperation, such as different ideologies and poor communication.Evangelical (conservative Christian) women are both victims of abuse and providers of services to friends, relatives, and others who have suffered abuse at the hands of men (Beaman-Hall, 1995;Nason-Clark, 1995).
Beginning with the idea of law as discourse, this essay examines the ways in which legal method is gendered. Texts, such as affidavits and court forms, and local "mundane' practices are part of the production and affwmation of the law as a producer of truth. A possible methodology for exploring legal method, "legal ethnography,' is introduced as a means by which we might explicate how legal method works to support and reify legal discourse, in the process silencing the voices of women. The essay also explores how legal method comes to be accepted as a "tool of the trade" by lawyers, who then use it to translate the primary narrative of the client into a cause of action that is comprehensible to lawyers, judges, and other actors in the legal system. Finally, the limitations of the proposed methodology are considered.
A couple of years ago I taught a criminology course in which students chose topics for class presentations. One team selected the issue of sexual assault, and did a fine presentation with the exception of a rather glaring omission of the 1992 amendments (which were at that point two years old) to the legislationessentially a response to the Seaboyer/Gayme decisions. The team of students was made up of some of the best students in the class, and I thought about how they had missed what I considered to be an essential element of any discussion on sexual assault. On reflection, I concluded that there had been, outside of law texts, little systematic consideration of the rather confusing development of sexual assault law in Canada. It was for this reason that I was anxious to review this book, with the hope that it might, at the very least, be a resource to which I could direct my students. For the most part, I was not disappointed. The book is an edited collection which includes 13 chapters and 2 appendices, one of which is the text of Bill C-49. Chapters include data-based discussions like that by Rita Gunn and Rick Linden on the processing of child sexual abuse cases, and the chapter by Scott Clark and Dorothy Hepworth in which they consider the effects of reform legislation on the processing of sexual assault cases. The book also contains analytical chapters from a critical perspective, such as that by Diana Majury on the Seaboyer and Gayme cases, and the discussion by Elizabeth Sheehy of the issues surrounding compensation for women who have been raped. Historical description and insight are offered in Adelyn Bowland's chapter on the "battle" between the courts and parliament, Maria Los's discussion of the struggle to redefine rape in the early 1980s, and Sheila Mclntyre's description of women's activism in the law reform process. Although almost all of the chapters are well written and raise important issues, in the interests of space I will discuss only a few chapters which I found to be especially intriguing. In her chapter, "Sexual Assault of Inuit Females: A Comment on 'Cultural Bias'," Teressa Nahanee discusses the willingness of judges to impose lenient sentences and to consider "cultural" defences for Inuit
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