Reforming rape laws

Almost all legislative evaluations and impact analyses in the area of rape reform have involved the U.S. This article examines the effects of rape reform legislation introduced in Canada in 1983. In that year the offenses of rape and indecent assault were replaced with three new offenses of sexual assault. As in other jurisdictions in the U.S., the Canadian reforms were designed to achieve several aims. These included increasing the number of victims reporting to the police, reducing the proportion of reports classified by the police as unfounded, and increasing the number of cases in which a charge is laid. This article presents a time-series analysis of reports of crimes of sexual aggression over a 10-year period around passage of the reform legislation. The results indicate that there was a significant increase in the number of reports of these crimes concurrent with the passage of the legislation. Moreover, the increase in sexual assault reports exceeds by a significant margin the increase in reports made of other personal injury offenses (e.g., assault). However, the legislation has had no discernible effect upon the immediate criminal justice response to reports of sexual aggression: Neither the percentage of reports classified as founded, nor the percentage of reported incidents resulting in the laying of a charge has changed.The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the comments made upon an earlier draft of this article by Ed Renner, the editor of the journal, and an anonymous reviewer. This research was supported by the Department of Justice Canada; the authors thank the Department for permission to publish these data. Finally we would like to thank the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics for providing the data.