CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Roswell, Lea |
|---|---|
| Title | Barriers to Access to Justice for Racialized and Economically Disadvantaged Women Victims of Sexual Violence: A Study of Indigenous Women in Canada |
| Summary | This paper will examine how race, ethnicity and socioeconomic inequality intersect with gender to heighten the inequality that racialized women experience throughout legal processes, to exacerbate their vulnerabilities to sexual violence, and increase their dependence on the justice system. By engaging in socio-legal empirical study and analysis of access to justice with intersectional feminist theory and critical race theory perspectives, this paper will explore how intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and colonialism interconnect to influence the experiences that marginalized groups have with the law and in accessing justice. The examination will analyze the social consequences of law and policy and provide deeper understanding about the multifaceted barriers to access to justice that exist for marginalized victims of sexual violence who live at the intersection of racial, gender, and colonial oppression. To demonstrate the cumulative impact of differential and discriminatory treatment in access to justice based on marginalized facets of the identity of victims of sexual violence, this thesis will investigate the experiences of Indigenous women victims of sexual violence in Canada. Indigenous women in Canada exist at the crossroads of multiple facets of marginalized social identity. The intersection of multiple risk factors influencing the level of vulnerability of Indigenous women to sexual victimization, namely their gendered and racialized positions in a society afflicted by racial and gender-based systems of oppression, their intergenerational victimization by the colonial process, and their institutionalized socioeconomic disenfranchisement, places Indigenous women in Canada at an intensely vulnerable, marginalized and victimized position in society. These factors establish significant social, economic and structural barriers to access to justice. This paper will analyze how law and policy may function in ways that reinforce and perpetuate inequality and sexual violence and propagate barriers to access to justice. |
| Supervisor | Károly Bárd |
| Department | Legal Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/roswell_lea.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University