Bio:
Jennifer Koshan is a professor the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary. Before joining the Faculty, Professor Koshan practiced law for several years in the Northwest Territories as a Crown prosecutor, and she worked as the Legal Director of the British Columbia branch of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of constitutional law, equality and human rights law, violence against women, and public interest advocacy. In 2004 Professor Koshan was awarded The University of Calgary Faculty Association's Community Service Award for her contributions to the equality-seeking community. Her recent research has included a study of the judicial treatment of marital rape in Canada since 1983 for the Equality Effect (http://theequalityeffect.org/pdfs/maritalrapecanadexperience.pdf), and as a Global Research Fellow at NYU School of Law in fall 2011, a comparison of specialized domestic violence courts in Alberta and New York. Professor Koshan is also a founding member of the Women’s Court of Canada (http://womenscourt.ca/), a group of academics, activists, and litigators who are rewriting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms equality jurisprudence.
Title of paper:
‘Spousal Sexual Assault in Canada and Ghana: An Equality Analysis of Crimnal Law Reforms’ [with Elizabeth Archampong and Melanie Randall]
Abstract:
This paper presents work carried out with the equality effect (http://theequalityeffect.org/), an NGO comprised of lawyers, academics and activists in Canada, Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, on a project exploring the legal treatment of marital rape in these four countries. Canada is sometimes seen as a model for the reform of the law on marital rape, as the 1983 removal of spousal immunity for sexual assault made it one of the first countries globally to criminalize this particular form of gender based violence. Canada has implemented several other positive legislative changes in the area of sexual violence against women as well, many of those reforms a result of feminist organizing. However, the judicial treatment of marital rape in Canada continues to raise questions about the extent to which women sexually assaulted in spousal relationships receive the equal benefit of the law. In Ghana, reforms to the law of sexual assault in 2007 make it possible for men to be prosecuted for marital rape, but these changes have not fully eliminated discrimination against Ghanaian married women because there is still no direct prohibition of marital rape. The presenters will explore the equality of women in the context of marital rape in each jurisdiction, focusing on issues of consent and the myths and stereotypes underlying marital rape and its legal treatment.