ABSTRACT

In April 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned the President of Afghanistan that critical Allied support for the mission could diminish if the Afghan government did not change a law that would ‘make it legal for men to rape their wives’ (Vancouver Sun, 4 April 2009). Drawing upon and restating the now familiar gendered rationalization of the ‘War Against Terror’, the assumed sexual autonomy of Canadian women is posed as an important symbol of Western democracy and progress. Obscured beneath this brief flurry of political and media attention to rape (in Afghanistan) is, ironically, the very disappearance of sexual violence as a critical and systemic problem affecting Canadian women. Over the past decade, sexual violence has been increasingly depoliticized and erased from political agendas.