The Canadian Supreme Court ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” and implied that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”
The top court judge Justice Sheilah Martin in a decision wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.” However, she does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing.
The next passage of her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.”
The case that came to the Canadian apex court was that of Charles Kruk, who was allegedly involved in a 2017 charge of sexual assault against 34-year-old Maple Ridge. “Mr. Kruk found the complainant intoxicated, lost, and distressed one night in downtown Vancouver,” reads the background to the case. “He decided to take her to his house, and connected with the complainant’s parents by phone.”
