Underdog by Sue-Ann Levy Read Free Book Online Page A

chief Julian Fantino to ease reporting of such assaults and to ensure police investigators conducted regular and timely follow-up with victims. Mr. Griffiths would prove an invaluable friendand a sounding board, regularly reminding me of what the police were obligated to do. He was the kind of auditor general who was dogged about keeping up the pressure on those bureaucrats he audited. Five and ten years after his initial 1999 review, Mr. Griffiths did in-depth follow-ups to see how far the police had gone to implement his recommendations. His ground-breaking report has been reviewed and used by police forces across North America.
    But it was not just the support from unexpected places that helped my healing. What kept me from succumbing to my crippling depression was a determination to get my day in court – the kind of closure I was denied twenty-six years before with my first assault. I soon realized that getting justice would prove to be as much of an uphill battle as facing my demons with Dr. Abrams. Like so many other victims of assault, sexual and otherwise, my ordeal had merely begun with the assault itself. Over the next nine months, I would feel repeatedly betrayed by a system that is supposed to help victims – by jaded cops untrained in sexual assault cases, by a women’s support network that appeared to pick and choose who it helped, and by an overstretched legal system that tried to strong-arm victims into dropping their cases. I was careful throughout never to talk about my first assault, except to Dr. Abrams and a very few close friends as a way of explaining why I’d fallen so completely apart. Despite my profile as a journalist, I was forever afraid that if the cops or court officials found out what had happened to me twenty-six years earlier in Ottawa, they would take me even less seriously than they did at the time. (I quickly discovered why more than 80 per cent of Canadian women whosuffer a sexual assault do not report it. Put simply, they are afraid of being victimized all over again by the police and the court system.)
    Mine was a textbook case of incompetence and apathy by all parties involved. In the seventy-two hours following my assault, I found myself repeating my story eight times to the first responders and then to the investigating police officers located in the division representing my Toronto neighbourhood – as if I was being tested to see if my story would stand up under repeated scrutiny. In the first week after the assault, I came into the police station and recorded my statement, only to be told the camera hadn’t worked, forcing me to repeat it a second time.
    Although my assailant was arrested the day after the assault, right in the store employing him—Structube – his manager denied all culpability, claiming the incident had taken place outside the store and after working hours. She even refused to do the bare minimum and apologize for what had happened. To further rub my nose in it, my assailant retained his employment, and at that location instead of being transferred to another store or put on leave until the court case was settled.
    The real culprit was the police. Given the circumstances – the store was right down the street from my condo – they could have made it a condition of my assailant’s bail that he was not allowed within a safe distance of my residence. Instead, and without my knowledge until it was too late, he was merely ordered not to come within one hundred metres of my home, which is nothing – forcing me for the next nine months to live in fear that I’d run into him. And I did, three times.
    When I told the investigating officer that it was difficult to walk by the store, he chided me, saying that if it were him and it bothered him as much as it bothered me, he would walk out of his way, even if it meant adding thirty extra minutes to his route to work, to avoid such an encounter. Disgusted with his lack of empathy, his victim-shaming and poor