ALISON BLACKDUCK
Nunatsiaq News
IQALUIT — More than a decade ago, Elisapee, who was then 14 years old, was sexually assaulted in a small Baffin community.
Since then, Elisapee, now 31, has worked hard to overcome the trauma and put the past behind her for her sake and for the sake of her two daughters, aged five and seven.
But Elisapee learned recently that she’s been violated all over again.
This time the assailant isn’t the "family friend" who, in 1984, tied Elisapee’s hands behind her back with a ghetto-blaster cord so Elisapee couldn’t fight him off while he forced her to have intercourse with him.
This time Elisapee feels that the assailant is a group of people who should have had her best interests at heart — members of the territorial justice system and academics who have dedicated most of their careers to studying social justice and criminology.
Since 1985, details about the sexual assault committed against Elisapee, and her assailant’s subsequent sentencing hearing, have been repeated innumerable times in an educational video whose copyright holders, according to the video’s credits, are: Simon Fraser University, the NWT territorial court, Curt Taylor Griffiths and Margit Nance. (Nance is also the video’s producer, director and narrator.)
The detailed information in the video is so telling that some of Elisapee’s friends and relatives – who viewed the video at various training courses over the years — identified Elisapee as the victim immediately.
No informed consent
But none of Elisapee’s friends told Elisapee about the video because they assumed she knew about it.
They assumed that the producer obtained Elisapee’s prior informed consent — or at least that of her parents, since Elisapee was a minor at the time — before videotaping the sentencing hearing.
But Elisapee says her parents weren’t even told that a video about the crime she endured was being produced.
Nance, the producer, said presiding Judge Michel Bourassa vetted the video’s content. She said she feels no responsibility for what happened with the video afterwards.
Elisapee’s friends also assumed that Bourassa told everybody at the sentencing hearing that people were videotaping the proceedings to produce an educational documentary.
That part is true, according to Nance and her colleague Griffiths.
In a voicemail that Griffiths left at Nunatsiaq News three weeks ago, he said Bourassa gave the producer permission to videotape during the sentencing hearing.
(However, according to a copy of Bourassa’s oral sentencing transcript, there’s no reference to the documentary crew nor any indication that Bourassa informed the court that the hearing was being videotaped. Nunatsiaq News also tried to obtain other relevant court documents from Bruce McKay, the NWT’s director of court services, but they haven’t yet arrived in Iqaluit. Telephone calls to Bourassa’s office in Yellowknife were redirected to the NWT court registry.)
It wasn’t until Elisapee, now living in Ottawa, and a few of her friends gathered at Elisapee’s home last March to reminisce and laugh about their years in Baffin over a casual meal of country food that she learned the truth.
"After I finished crying, I came out of the washroom, and I asked, ‘There really is a videotape?’"
– Elisapee, sexually assaulted at the age of 14
Shocking discovery
That night, Elisapee learned that the most horrific experience of her life is used regularily by professors and instructors throughout Canada for educational purposes.
"Some of my friends from different communities up north were visiting me — some of them were in Ottawa for a conference, some of them live down here — that’s how I found out about the video," Elisapee explained in a telephone interview two weeks ago.
"One friend who used to live in Igloolik told me that she saw the video a couple of years ago when she was a student at Nunavut Savuniksavut," Elisapee said. "Another friend told me that she saw the video when she was training as an RCMP officer in Nanisivik many years ago." Elisapee claims her cousin worked for the territorial department of justice when she saw the video as part of a job-related training course.
The former NS student — who later became a close friend of Elisapee’s – didn’t know Elisapee well when she saw the video, and she definitely didn’t know that Elisapee was a sexual assault victim.
However, that night, Elisapee’s friend put two-and-two together and said, "Oh, you’re Elisapee, the one who’s in the videotape.
"That’s when I realized, ‘Oh my God, it’s out there,’" Elisapee said.
"I went to the washroom and I cried."
Michael, a friend Elisapee turned to for support and guidance a few weeks after that night, said Elisapee told him she was so devastated by the news that night, that she stuffed a towel in her mouth because she didn’t want her friends to hear her sobbing in the washroom.
"After I finished crying," she continued, "I came out of the washroom, and I asked, ‘There really is a videotape?’"
Next week Elisapee tells how the sexual assault changed her life.
Editor’s note: "Elisapee" is a pseudonym created to conceal the identity of the victim.
Privacy rights in Canada
In 1985, an amendment was made to the Criminal Code of Canada that made it illegal to publish or broadcast any information about a sexual assault trial that identifies the victim either directly or indirectly, but that amendment didn’t come into effect until after the date of the sentencing hearing.
However, RCMP trainer Bill Chisholm of Nunavut’s V Division headquarters said that prior to 1985, most professionals working in the justice system took protecting a victim’s identity, especially that of a minor, as a "given" that should be upheld out of common decency, unless the judge issued a publication ban.
In the event of a publication ban, Chisholm explained, any identifying information in a media product for public use would be in violation of the law.
At press time, Nunatsiaq News still hadn’t been told by anybody working at the NWT court registry if the courts imposed such a publication ban on information about the 1984 assault.
In 1996, Nance produced the made-for-television movie Trial at Fortitude Bay, which is based primarily on the events of 1984 and 1985.
Nance is now the director of the TING Forum on Public Policy in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Griffiths currently works as a criminology professor at SFU.
As for which individual or institution has copyright to the video, Griffiths said that would be the NWT territorial court. But Internet searches, and even the information held by the National Library in Ottawa, identify SFU as the copyright holder.
Griffiths is known by many Nunavummiut as the director of a multi-year study of crime and justice which led to the publication of a major research paper in 1995 titled "Crime, Law, and Justice Among Inuit in the Baffin Region, N.W.T., Canada."