Colonial Constructs and Legally Sanctioned Sexually Violent Consequences in R v. Edmondson
Document Type
Article
Abstract
What kind of a system or process would portray a twelve-year-old girl from the Yellow Quill First Nation as a sexual threat to three twenty-something white men, who promising her a ride home, picked her up and got her drunk? The answer: The Canadian legal system. In R v Edmondson a twelve-year old Aboriginal girl, who was sexually assaulted by Dean Edmondson, Jeffrey Brown, and Jeffrey Kindrat from Tisdale Saskatchewan, was portrayed by the judge as a "sexual aggressor". This paper focuses on the trial of Dean Edmondson in which, according to Judge Kovatch, the girls "sexual aggression" led to an "unusual and tragic" circumstance where three men violated a "child's sense of trust" (Law Society of Saskatchewan). In this paper, I draw on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Doreen Massey, Elizabeth Furniss, Radhika Mohanram and Sherene Razack to theorize the ensemble of colonial relations and constructs that allowed Saskatchewan's legal system to reduce a twelve-year old Indigenous girl to "bare life", life that is solely biological as opposed to human, through her association to the "camp", a space where the state of exception becomes the state of rule.
Repository Citation
Bonokoski, Nicholas. "Colonial Constructs and Legally Sanctioned Sexually Violent Consequences in R v. Edmondson." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–20. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss1/56