This is a surprising book. Written by Constance Blackhouse, who has published several books on women and race in Canadian law and who has received too many awards to count, it is a compulsively readable, engaging, and even gripping survey of the main issues involved in rape and rape prosecution in Canada. Blackhouse chose not to present an exhaustive statistical analysis of how rape law shaped victim's experiences not just in the courtroom but also in their daily encounters with men. Instead, she powerfully illustrated victim's experiences and the power of the law through detailed narratives of nine cases. These cases explore the familiar issues of consent, corroboration, and character, and some less familiar topics such as attitudes toward the reliability of children's testimony, disability, and even the legal possibility of sexual assault in same-sex relations. Her cases span the continent from Quebec City to British Columbia, even including a case from Yellowknife, and cover three-quarters of the twentieth century, allowing her to analyze how region, urban geography, and changing social and sexual norms shaped legal understandings of rape. It is a wonderful primer for anyone interested in the history of rape.

While this reviewer does not believe that Blackhouse necessarily intended to break new ground with her analysis, she nonetheless raises a few thought-provoking issues for scholars of rape. First, while it seems obvious in retrospect, Blackhouse explicitly points out how ridiculous Hale's famous comment that rape “was an accusation easily to be made” truly was. Virtually every history of rape has shown that for violated women, choosing to bring a charge of rape was inordinately difficult and promised to bring considerable suspicion and pain. Accusing a man of rape invariably opened all of a woman's intimate life to public scrutiny—it affected her future marriage prospects and her relationships with her family and community. It surely was not easy to accuse a man of rape. Similarly, women did not falsely accuse men of rape in numbers greater than in other crimes, yet the fear that women might accuse men falsely required additional legal requirements to obtain a conviction. Indeed, adages like Hale's became legal truths virtually without scrutiny, and without any legal or statistical inquiry to back them up. These “truths” instead worked to maintain men's sexual license. Another insight Carnal Crimes suggests is that perhaps it is time to change our understanding of the word “consent,” at least as it pertains to rape cases. Consent in law means something entirely different than everyday use would imply. We normally think of consent as agreement, and applied to rape cases, it would suggest that consent meant that the woman agreed to, even wished for, sexual relations. In a courtroom, consent did not signal agreement, much less desire, but rather a lack of forceful opposition—the victim did not refuse vociferously enough to produce physical effects or evidence of resistance. A woman could submit to sex unwillingly, but a court might still determine she consented. As long as proving the absence of consent remained a legal requirement for rape, men would be free to interpret women's words and efforts to resist in a way that justified their sexual demands and legitimated their actions. Women's wishes, their desires even, became largely irrelevant. A third point worthy of mention involves the numerous cases involving groups of men who were accused of gang-raping young women. Blackhouse suggests that gang rape was part of masculine bonding, suggesting the continuation of what other historians have called a “male sporting culture,” which saw most women as legitimate sexual prey, well into the twentieth century. Deciding that individual women “asked for it” served to ensure young men's sexual (and patriarchal) entitlement and reinforced the idea that male sexual pleasure was a right that demanded women's acquiescence. The bonding of friends over the bodies of women continued into the 1950s and 1960s and was revealed in numerous rape cases in both Canada and the United States. Finally, rape cases are terrific historical windows into how communities sought to deal with changing sexual norms. Whether it was the dancing and dating culture of the 1920s, or a newly oppressive culture for gays and lesbians in the 1950s, how victims articulated their efforts to avoid rape, defendants justified their actions, and juries negotiated between the two reveal much about a society's sexual beliefs and values. Blackhouse's fine book makes this abundantly clear.