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@proudkaur21 ? No-one that you know? Lol ! https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/02/02/in-your-culture-gta-sex-assault-conviction-tossed-over-crowns-impermissible-racial-or-cultural-stereotyping.html ‘In your culture’: GTA sex assault conviction tossed over Crown’s ‘impermissible racial or cultural stereotyping’ The Court of Appeal found the Crown had repeatedly referred to negative stereotypes of Sikh culture to convince a jury that the complainant’s family were lying to protect her father from prosecution. By Alyshah HashamCourts Reporter Wed., Feb. 2, 2022timer3 min. read READ THE CONVERSATION ( 3 ) A man’s conviction and eight-year sentence for sexually assaulting his daughter when she was a child has been overturned by the province’s top court because the Crown relied on “highly pejorative assumptions about the witnesses’ culture that were not established in the evidence.” The case involves a woman from a Brampton-based Sikh family who accused her father of beating and sexually assaulting her between the ages of six and 14. She made a police report in 2016 when she was 31. During the jury trial in 2019, the woman’s family, including her mother, aunt, sister, brother, two female family friends and her father testified and all denied her allegations. In the Court of Appeal decision released Wednesday, the court concluded the trial was unfair and ordered a new trial, finding that a Crown prosecutor invited the jury to rely on “impermissible racial or cultural stereotyping” in her cross-examination and closing arguments, including suggesting the arranged marriages of some of the women showed they were controlled by the men in their families, lacked the agency to make their own decisions and were willing to lie to protect family honour — despite the women explicitly rejecting this as inaccurate. The Crown also repeatedly used the term “in your culture” when questioning the woman’s family members, which “had the effect of exoticizing them in the eyes of the jury, of insinuating that they were not only different, but operated according to a different ethical system in which the obligation to tell the truth was subordinate to protecting the family from shame,” Justice Bradley Miller wrote in the decision on behalf of the three-judge panel. The Crown was entitled to pursue the theory that the accused’s family members were lying to protect him, the court said, but the questioning was so steeped in negative stereotypes that it could have led the jury to reason based on stereotypes rather than actual evidence. The trial judge, Justice Leonard Ricchetti, also failed to properly instruct the jury not to rely on such stereotypes, the court found. When the defence objected that the questioning about the arranged marriages of two family friends was irrelevant, Ricchetti allowed it. “It’s very clear to me that the Crown is going to be alleging … that the families are tight, that the males dominate, the males control it, that’s part of the Sikh culture, part of the culture from India and that’s why there’s a little more latitude being given as to what happens in India, how they discipline the children and so forth,” he said. Instead, Miller said, “the jury ought to have been expressly instructed not to reason from the facts that the witnesses were members of ‘traditional’ Indian households that value family honour, and that several of the witnesses had been married in accordance with Indian custom, to the stereotype that Indian women are culturally conditioned to submit to the domination of men, tolerate physical and sexual abuse by the family patriarch, and lie about it under oath to protect family honour.” Lawyer James Lockyer, who represented the accused man along with Alexander Ostroff, said the decision is “important for us as a multicultural society.” The court’s “language is very strong and, in my opinion, it needed to be,” Lockyer said. “The prosecution argued six women weren’t worthy of belief because of negative cultural stereotyping.” The identity of the complainant is under a publication ban available to sexual assault complainants. The Court of Appeal noted that the woman had sought to have the publication ban lifted but said that decision would have to be made by the trial judge. Alyshah Hasham is a Toronto-based reporter covering crime and court for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alysanmati