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Gender, Race & the Social Casualties of Information Policy

Marsha Hanen, President of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, introduced and moderated the panel on Gender, Race & the Social Casualties of Information Policy.

Jane Doe, Teacher, Lecturer and Arts & Culture Worker in Toronto presented a paper, entitled "Anonymity, Women and Sexual Assault." Doe's presentation reflected a number of her personal experiences and the results of her interviews with women who had been sexually assaulted. She observed that woman who file sexual assault charges are themselves criminalized and that the criminal justice system poses a threat to them. Women are shamed, not believed, subjected to medical exams, humiliated, lied-to and insulted by court officials, shunned by friends and family and community and forbidden to speak about their experiences. She gave a moving account of how women's bodies function as crime sites and how women must remove themselves from their own bodies in this process. Why would any woman report a sexual assault and subject herself to all this abuse, especially when the conviction rate in Ontario is under 5%? For many of the women Doe interviewed, the notion of privacy through a publication ban is exactly that - a notion. It only prevents certain kinds of publication and effectively removes a great degree of control from the woman herself. Women in small communities, for example, found that the entire community had full knowledge of their identity because it could not be concealed in the courtroom.

Oscar Gandy, Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, presented a paper, entitled "Racial Profiling: They say it's against the law." He reported on his continuing project reviewing policy formation in the area of racial profiling and described past research into how racial profiling was framed in major newspapers. That research found that most articles concluded that racial profiling was wrong, particularly articles in newspapers based in areas with large black populations. He pointed out that since 9/11, racial profiling has come to the fore again. In his latest research, he used Lexis/Nexis to look at 1999-2004 legislative developments at the state level. He found 24 laws that were a response to racial profiling. He also found considerable variation between laws, particularly in the way that racial profiling was defined.