Ginny Roth: The Hockey Canada trial exposes our bereft sexual ethics 

It’s hard to read specifics from the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial without reacting emotionally. And our emotions are complicated. We’re mostly sympathetic to, even heartbroken for, the young woman. We’re often repulsed by, and angry about, the behaviour of the young men. Sometimes, uncomfortably, we feel the reverse.

But these emotions are fleeting. Quickly, our common sense of ethics takes over, and the trial becomes a proxy for the only question—moral or legal—that seems to matter these days: did she, or did she not, consent?

And yet, despite Canada’s bar for sexual consent being among the highest in the world, for most decent people, this feels painfully inadequate. Some of us reconcile this feeling by arguing that the bar should be even higher. But many of us are uncomfortable with the potential miscarriages of justice that such a standard could lead to.

So, where does that leave us?

If the hockey players in this year’s highest profile sexual assault case are found not guilty (and increasingly it seems like either they will, or they’ll have a strong case for appeal), must we simply accept that as the moral final word?  Ought we to be silent as a society about this ordeal and its ramifications? Must exoneration mean that these men are indeed innocent, not just in the eyes of the law, but in our eyes as well, as if what happened that night changes depending on what the judge finds? Of course not. So why do we act like it does?

The inadequacy of our liberal feminist sexual ethics

Unfortunately, as social and cultural norms have fallen away, replaced by limitless maximization of individual choice and self-actualization, we’ve attempted to replace them with legal and procedural rules, hoping a bare minimum of legality can stand in for centuries of common sense and good judgment. Where the law has felt inadequate, we’ve implemented policies or developed trainings, hoping that, absent a moralistic upbringing, firm parents, and spiritual guidance, boys can be online trained into behaving like gentlemen, and that girls will be protected by paying close attention to frosh week orientation sessions. We attempt to erase the physiological differences between girls and boys, strip virtue from school curricula, and tell kids to follow their truths and sow their wild oats.

What remains of a sexual ethics preaches that with birth control and disease-prevention, sex can and should be consequence-free and we refuse to limit access to pornography as its increasingly violent and dehumanizing content worms its way into our children’s brains, the algorithm shaping their sense of what’s acceptable and teaching them what to want.

This isn’t to say that many great parents don’t raise children with a higher standard than the law. Indeed, if our culture weren’t so secular and our communities so values-neutral, that would likely be enough. But our liberal, feminist fixation on instilling autonomy, especially in girls, and our unwillingness to model honourable male behaviour for boys (lest it be perceived to be too traditional), means nights like the one examined in gruesome detail at the trial will keep happening, often without being exposed.

It’s time we accept that while freedom and equality for women are crucial to human flourishing, today’s flawed version of liberal feminism—that takes radical individualism to its extreme, erasing all sex difference and pressuring women to behave like men—is failing both sexes.

The Hockey Canada trial is happening not despite liberal feminism, but because of it.

We need more than the law—we need a proper moral framework

This is not a call for the victim-blaming of the date-rape era. Indeed, a high legal bar for consent and an understanding that the law ought not to make any excuse for harmful male sexual aggression is critical to a society that is safe for women.

But our legal standard, and a justice system that upholds it, should serve as a last resort—a final safety net, not a behaviour guide. Before these young men landed in court, they should have grown up in a society that taught them, at every turn, that the choic they made that night was wrong, even evil, and that if they behaved that way they would be judged not merely by a court, but by their family, friends, coaches, mentors, and future employers.

If indeed they are not found guilty, despite our liberal rights-obsessed instincts, we should resist the urge to seek a legal or policy solution. A procedural solution will wind up either undermining the rights of the accused (as in the kangaroo courts of many American colleges in the pre-Me Too early 2000s) or the evidently true wants and needs of women (as in the Jian Gomeshi trial). What was missing here was not greater legal protections for individual rights, but rather the duties that should accompany those rights.

There is a moral framework that can supplement a necessary but inadequate legal system. But to develop it, we must 1) get more comfortable with biological and evolutionary truths about manhood and womanhood—namely that women are, generally, more easily victimized by men, and 2) recognize how necessary it is for leaders and institutions to promote morals and values, even if that can come into tension with the individual rights and preferences of its’ members, especially when those members are young and their characters are being formed.

Above all, Canadians should feel more comfortable trusting our intuitions, informed by the collective wisdom of generations. Regardless of whether what the hockey players on trial did was legal, it was clearly wrong. Regardless of whether or not the young victim technically gave consent, she was clearly violated.

Not only should we trust our instinctive reaction, but we should not believe the myth that we ought to mind our own business, ought not to judge, ought not to preach or moralize. Those of us in mentorship roles—not just as parents but as coaches, teachers, and leaders—should rely not just on training resources and legal education but on overt moral formation to influence the young people in our lives.

We should do this in the hopes that one day, if they find themselves in an group chat being invited to take advantage of another human, their first concern is not whether or not they can extract technical consent, but whether or not doing so would, in good faith, be the right thing to do.