- Where's the justice?
She paid her debt to society, but redemption eludes woman who
challenged status quo on violence
MICHELE LANDSBERG, The Toronto
Star, Sep. 13, 2003
The story of Anne Marie Aikins,
which began with a brutal rape, is almost mythic in its startling
achievements, reversals, glories and depths.
A pioneer in the rape crisis
movement in Ontario, she is quietly emerging from an 11-year
shadow of legal travail.
Charged with misuse of public
funds, she went through six years of trial delays, appeals and
setbacks, was convicted, and then was hit with further charges
that that have only now been dropped, after five more torturous
years. Aikins' case is a chilling example of what can happen
to someone who challenges the status quo, particularly in small-town
Ontario.
In 1981, at age 25, Aikins
(then known by her married name of Wicksted) was a dark-haired
young beauty from a doctor's respectable family in Barrie.
"I went to strict Catholic
schools and wanted to be a doctor, but somehow ended up doing
a nursing program and working with the developmentally challenged
in an institution," Aikins told me.
She and her husband, with two
infant sons, did shifts: He worked daytimes; she worked evenings.
Leaving work one August evening and sliding into her car, she
suddenly felt a hand grip her throat and a gun press against
her head.
Aikins' greatest weaknesses
are her naïveté, her deference to convention and
her bred-in-the-bone tendency to guilt and self-blame. Her greatest
strengths, all of them painfully earned, are her shrewd insight,
gutsy defiance of authority and convention, and a steadfast clarity
about crimes against women.
"I still have trouble
with my compliance..." she says, her voice trailing off
as she recalls driving just where her assailant told her to.
"He beat me nearly unconscious
and raped me over and over. We were three or four hours in that
field. When I woke up, he was gone." Her voice, usually
warm and flirting with laughter, goes absolutely flat when she
talks about the rape. No wonder that, later, she became a respected
expert on the way rape trauma affects women and how they appear
to be "not upset."
Aikins was in hospital for
a week, concussed, scraped, bruised and torn. The police investigated
it as a case of simple assault and, says Aikin, were so ham-fisted
and accusatory ("Was it your boyfriend?") that she
refused to even tell them about the rape. They knew about it
from the medical evidence, however. And, in keeping with Barrie
police practices in rape cases at that time, they subjected Aikins
to a humiliating lie detector test. (One question: "Do you
often fantasize about being raped?") Even her husband, she
says, felt that "since nothing bad happens in Barrie, it
must somehow have been my fault."
Barrie Detective Sergeant Norm
Meech of the sexual assault squad agrees that "police officers
back then didn't have special training and there was a lack of
knowledge about sensitivity issues. They would have been just
the regular crime unit that dealt with robbery and so on."
The rape was the worst thing
that had happened to Aikins in her sheltered, middle-class existence,
and it was also the beginning of a completely new life. Her marriage
fraying under the pressure of the trauma, Aikins turned to feminist
books to understand what she was suffering. "I had never
even heard the word `feminism,'" she recalls with a wry
laugh. "It was like a new language and yet so familiar,
and it explained everything."
One year later, she had opened
a rape crisis line in her basement and began to find other women
like herself in the community. She had 50 phone calls that first
year.
"The work separated me
from my husband and family, and my feminist principles and identity
separated me from my church," she recalls.
The response in the desperately
under-served Barrie area was overwhelming. Aikins was a star:
a quick learner, empathetic and a natural performer in local
media. By the mid-'80s, the Barrie Rape Crisis Line was fielding
nearly 500 calls a year.
Aikins was fearless in challenging
the local police and their conservative attitude toward rape
victims. In fact, local media delighted in posing her and the
police chief as antagonists in debates about sexual violence.
She soon became an expert witness on rape trauma, testifying
in 116 trials (115 defendants were found guilty). She spoke widely,
won awards and recognition, became president of the Ontario Coalition
of Rape Crisis Centres, taught courses at the Ontario Police
College, published well-argued newspaper pieces and made training
videos for police.
Five years after Aikins was
assaulted, the man who had raped her was convicted as a dangerous
offender as the result of another rape case.
The twist in this story is
almost Shakespearean. At the height of her achievement, Aikins'
centre won the jackpot that would lead to its downfall. In 1991,
the recently elected New Democratic Party government boosted
the centre's funding from $80,000 a year to nearly $400,000.
In exchange, the centre was
expected to create five satellite offices to cover all of Simcoe
County, with long-term counselling and court support services
in French and English. Eleven new staff were hastily hired.
Aikins and her colleagues were
ill-prepared for the leap to the big time. For years, she and
her volunteer board of directors had a trusting, informal arrangement.
Because she was now a single mother who had taken a cut in pay
to $16,000 a year to work as the centre's executive director,
she didn't qualify for a personal credit card. Members of the
board say - and would later testify in court - that they encouraged
her to use the centre's credit card for expenses and, occasionally,
for personal shopping, to be repaid in cash. but no mention of
this arrangement was recorded in the minutes.
Aikins admits she paid "little
attention" to receipts and accounts.
In early '92, some of the new
staff, who later testified to feeling "excluded" by
the original group, joined with a dismissed employee to accuse
Aikins of misusing the centre's funds. The solicitor-general's
office swooped down to do an audit, but the police interrupted
the audit by seizing the books. Aikins was charged with one count
of fraud over $1,000.
The crown alleged she did not
repay crisis line money she used for personal expenses and did
not remit to the crisis line fees from outside sources that she
earned as its director.
But the board declared its
complete confidence in her and she continued as executive director.
From start to finish, Aikins says she was innocent.
Local papers reported that
calls of support flooded in to the crisis line after charges
were laid. One client told the Barrie Examiner she thought it
was a "crying shame, those who want to discredit all the
wonderful things the staff and volunteers have been doing for
years for us victims of rape and incest." A special report
in the Examiner concluded: "Wicksted has helped more than
2,000 rape victims....Her colleagues have nothing but praise
for her."
Amazingly, in the very teeth
of her personal difficulties, she dared to defy the court's demand
that she hand over her notes from a rape victim's counselling
session.
That was in 1993, when the
so-called "rape shield" law had been struck down, and
accused rapists were able to demand, get and paw through every
scrap of a victim's personal papers, including diaries, medical
records, letters and notes from post-rape therapy sessions. It
was a scandalous breach of crime victims' privacy rights. And
it was Aikins and a Barrie Rape Crisis Line colleague who became
the first counsellors in Canada to refuse to hand over private
records. When the Ontario Court agreed with Aikins, her beleaguered
centre and rape crisis workers everywhere rejoiced. (The Supreme
Court reversed that decision two years later.)
Aikins' case at last came to
trial in March of '94, when she was 37. Long-since divorced,
she had found a new love and was pregnant. She sold her house
and cashed in her RRSPs to hire a lawyer.
The trial was something of
a circus. The crown had to take the stand himself to contradict
one of his witnesses - investigating Constable Mark Irwin - about
the disposition of some missing evidence. The judge found Irwin
"unworthy of belief" when he claimed to have lost,
then found, then not found, notes from 10 to 12 hours of interviews
with the prosecution's chief witness.
Quiet repayment is usually
enough to settle a case like this. Instead, Aikins saw all she'd
worked for destroyed
Irwin, the judge said,
had misled the court. And so much evidence was never disclosed
that the judge ordered a stay of proceeding, ruling that Aikins'
Charter rights had been breached.
The crown appealed. The Ontario
Court of Appeal ruled that the trial judge should have opted
for an adjournment. Aikins appealed to the Supreme Court, which
agreed that her Charter rights had been violated, but ruled that
she still must stand trial.
In 1998, when Aikins faced
the court again, she opted for a jury. The charge was fraud over
$1,000, but how much over became a matter of much dispute. In
the end, only $2,800 of receipts were unaccounted for - money
Aikins swore she had repaid, but repaid again in the panicky
run-up to the trial.
Judge Peter Howden, in his
charge to the jury, all but dismissed the evidence of the witnesses
against Aikins and was eloquent in his praise of her integrity.
Was it likely, he asked the jury, that Aikins would openly misallocate
funds and "simply hand those records every month to a rigid
employee who was not her friend? Or is it more consistent with
your life experience that someone who has devoted years to building
this organization continued to concentrate on its service development
and simply ignored administrative details...since she was acting
with the board's approval and was repaying the organization anyway?"
Quiet repayment is usually
enough to settle a case like this. Remember, when Queen's Park
politicians and their staff were caught charging the public for
their liquor and sumptuous dinners, they were able to make restitution.
But sometimes it seems that puffed-up guys get cream puff punishments,
while severe consequences are reserved for ordinary people. When
the jury found Aikins guilty, there was an audible gasp of surprise
in the courtroom. She thinks now that it was her act of repaying
the $2,800 that convicted her in the jury's eyes.
The crown at the time, Frank
Giordano, recalls that "her cause and her successes were
never diminished in the case, but people must be held accountable
for criminal acts."
The judge sentenced her to
six months' community service (i.e., working at her own job)
with a 6 p.m. curfew.
Aikins didn't have the money
or energy to pursue an appeal. To spare the crisis line further
duress, she packed her bags and planned to move to Toronto the
moment her sentence was over.
But the roof fell in once more.
Just as the six months ended, the Barrie police charged Aikins
and six members of the board with criminal breach of trust for
misuse of lottery funds because the board had paid some of Aikins'
legal fees after her money ran out.
Kelly Redmond, board chair
of the crisis line, was one of those accused along with Aikins.
"I went to the police with the letter from the Ministry
of the Solicitor-General, instructing us to use fundraising money
to pay legal expenses, and asked how on earth this could be illegal?"
Redmond says. "The police asked me if I really expected
the solicitor-general's office to know the law."
The police not only proceeded
with the charges, but they also seized the crisis line's files,
with the result that the women could not prove their case. Then
they offered to drop charges against the board members, one by
one, if they would agree to point the finger of blame at Aikins.
None took the bait.
(In Redmond's case, the charges
were eventually stayed. A single mother, she says she is now
expected to repay $100,000 to legal aid.)
When, at last, the case went
to trial, defence lawyers expected to find the exculpatory letters
and permissions in the evidence disclosed by the crown. Shockingly,
the crown provided 3 CD-ROMs worth of evidence, containing 31,000
documents, without the appropriate search engine. It took hard
slogging to discover that the important letters of permission
from the solicitor-general were missing.
All the Barrie crown attorneys
had removed themselves from the case because they knew Aikins
and worked with her so frequently. The case was prosecuted by
a crown from another jurisdiction.
Last March, five long years
after the start of this second case, and only after defence lawyers
demanded the missing evidence, the crown suddenly stayed the
charges, citing "the costs to the public" of pursuing
the case.
By now, the mountain of trouble
that had fallen on Aikins had achieved what no other opposition
could have done: the silencing of women's dissent.
There was scarcely a murmur
when the province yanked every cent of funding and the crisis
line shut down. Feminist groups and women's shelters all over
the province went quiet, afraid of being targeted in the same
way.
Eleven years of Aikins' life
had been consumed with humiliating, costly and terrifying legal
battles. Single again, she has recently recovered from cervical
cancer. She works as a part-time waitress in downtown Toronto
and is bringing up her third son, now 9, in a tiny rented house
in a poorer part of town. She is close to her two adult sons,
but otherwise buries herself in anonymity. Her criminal record
has tripped her up every time she applied for a better job.
"I have given up on my
dream of getting back to working with women," she says now.
"Writing is solitary;
it's a new thing I created for myself, writing about social justice,
health and entertainment, and I hope I can make it a new career."
She copes emotionally by writing
daily in her journal, freelancing to community magazines and
advocating against violence at local forums when she can.
Mostly, Aikins keeps her head
down. I approached her for this story when I heard that the last
charges had been dropped, but she barely seeks vindication any
more.
When you work outside the mainstream
of society, dealing day in and day out with the grief and trauma
of violence while right-wing media bray their contempt at you,
your inner doubts are often triggered - especially if you're
a rape survivor. Aikins still blames herself for not paying enough
attention to paperwork.
"So many people were badly
hurt by the swarm of troubles that came upon me," she says
haltingly.
"I don't really blame
myself for what happened, but I still haven't entirely forgiven
myself for the hurt that people experienced when they lost their
jobs, lost their counsellors, lost their services.
"Even if I know I didn't
cause all this, I'm still grieving that so many people were hurt."
This is just a bad story, with
no happy ending, no superheroes swooping in to fix everything.
The women of Simcoe County lost a tireless advocate; the police
and crown attorneys in Barrie lost one of their strongest allies
in the struggle against violent crime; the feminist movement
lost a personable and eloquent spokeswoman.
Aikins' own losses are incalculable.
The only possible happy ending is the new beginning that the
remarkable Anne-Marie Aikins may yet write for herself.
Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in The Star
Saturday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is mlandsb@thestar.ca
|
Truth can never be told so as to be understood,
and not be believ'd. 