The Story of Jane Doe: A Book About Rape

The Background On an August night in 1986, Jane Doe became the fifth reported woman raped by a sexual serial predator dubbed the Balcony Rapist. The rapist stalked single women who lived alone in second- and third-floor apartments in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood. He scaled the outside walls of high-rises located within a six-block radius and entered the apartments through locked balcony doors. Despite the fact that the police had full knowledge of his modus operandi, they made a conscious decision not to issue a warning about the rapist to women in the neighbourhood. Their rationale was that women, hearing the news, would become hysterical, and the rapist would flee the area. Informed of their decision a few days after her rape, the woman who became known as Jane Doe quickly realized that she, in particular, and women, generally, were being used by the police as bait to catch the rapist. The woman who became Jane Doe was actively involved in the then thriving women's movement. She worked for a high-profile film festival and was experienced in public relations and marketing. She took it upon herself to organize a series of press conferences, postered her neighbourhood with warnings and delivered a deputation to the Police Services Board, demanding that the police be accountable. The rapist was captured as a result of a tip received after Jane and other women distributed two thousand posters including one to the home of the man who raped her alerting the community to the danger women faced. During the criminal prosecution that followed, Jane Doe became the first raped woman in Ontario to secure her own legal representation. This strategy allowed her to sit inside the courtroom while the hearings involving her rapist proceeded, instead of out in the hall where victim-witnesses were usually cloistered from the ongoing testimony. As a result she heard details of the police investigation that were normally withheld from women in her position. When the rapist was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison, the comfort Jane experienced was cold. A shocking degree of police negligence and manipulation had been revealed during the hearings, and Jane realized that the same type of crime that had been committed against her could easily take place again. By 1986 a number of external elements colluded to provide a small window of redress for women who experienced crimes of violence. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a new constitutional document with a section designed to prevent gender discrimination. The women's movement had established awareness of sexual assault as a prevalent social crime, as opposed to an ugly fact of life. Since criminal law did not serve raped women, the women's movement looked to civil prosecutions as an alternative. Jane Doe became a test case, the right woman in the wrong place at the right time. Political, educated, presentable and a risk-taker, she was in her early thirties and there was no doubt as to her "good girl" status. In 1987 Jane Doe sued the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force for negligence and Charter violation in the investigation of her rape. The rest became legal history. Of course history is a long time in the making. Over the next eleven years, Jane engaged a legal system and its players as no other woman in her position had previously done. Unwilling to play the traditional victim role, she battled with a series of her own lawyers to ensure that she, the person most involved, directed her case. In 1991 the Ontario Supreme Court ruled that Jane Doe had a cause of action and that she could proceed to trial. Until that ruling, it had not been possible to hold police officers responsible in a court of law for their actions in the investigation of a crime. Jane plowed on. She developed strategies, secured witnesses and challenged her lawyers to pusDoe, Jane is the author of 'The Story of Jane Doe: A Book About Rape' with ISBN 9780679312758 and ISBN 0679312757.