Her reporting helped upend the Rob Ford mayoralty in
Robyn Doolittle of the Globe and Mail will be sharing her ideas as part of the Illuminating Conversation series this Monday in
Doolittle tells BarrieToday, “When news broke that the Barrie Examiner and Orillia Packet and Times were shuttering their doors, I think the entire media community felt broken. The loss of local news is the greatest threat to democracy, at least in this humble reporter's opinion, and I am so looking forward to digging into all of these issues on Monday's panel. What happened? How did we get here? What now?"
Doolittle, on her way to pick up her National Newspaper Award for her series on how police handle sexual assault, said the idea first dawned during the Jian Ghomeshi case in 2015, months after the Bill Cosby case first gathered steam, when it seemed society couldn’t get through a week without hearing how the justice system was failing sex assault victims.
“I wanted to know: is there something here I could tackle from an investigative standpoint. Is there something specific, one piece of the puzzle, that I could explore?’
Eventually, Robyn came upon a statistic called the “unfounded rate”.
“When police conclude a criminal investigation, they give it a code to signify the outcome. One of those codes means the detective does not believe a crime occurred… the case is no longer considered a valid complaint and it is not reported to Statistics Canada.”
After months of digging, hearing from more than 800 police jurisdictions, she determined that one in five sexual assault complaints was thrown out and that police were mishandling cases.
“As a result of the series,” she says, “more than 30,000 cases are being audited, thousands are being recoded, more than 400 investigations have been reopened, and half of the country is now being policed by an agency launching new specialized sexual assault training for officers.”
Doolittle goes onto say data suggests thousands of legitimate complaints were deemed “unfounded”, therefore, invalid.
“This is not the same thing as police not having enough evidence to lay a charge or (not being able to) find an accused. This is someone going to police and saying, ‘I was raped,’ and the detective concludes ‘no you weren't.’ In response to the Globe's reporting - these cases were never reported in annual crime data. What we have since determined is that about 30 per cent of unfounded cases were being incorrectly dismissed as baseless.”
Doolittle asserts that the “Me-Too” movement involves women and saying “enough” to sexual assault – but goes beyond that to address gender discrimination in general.
“It's about saying: at what point am I allowed to walk down the street without some jerk telling me to smile? When will women be able to go to work and not have to figure out a way to reject their bosses' sexual advances without jeopardizing their career? Or have a man take credit for their ideas? This moment has been a long time coming”.
As for the Fords, of course, they are back in the public eye; Rob’s younger brother Doug is running to be
“I purposely wrote half of the book (Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story) about Doug because it was so obvious that his political ambitions extended beyond City Hall. I think the advantage he has - beyond the populist movement that's spreading… and his name recognition - is that he and his family have been under so much scrutiny for years.
“And whether people care or not is perhaps directly proportional to how much they dislike the Liberals and Kathleen Wynne.”
Doolittle will join other panelists, including social activist Gerald Caplan, at the Five Points Theatre,
