11  “This Type of Thing Doesn’t Happen in Small Cities” The Discursive Framing Racism and Sexual Violence in Lethbridge

Racism, Sexism, and the Canadian Legal System

The same year that Denzel Dre Colton Bird was arrested and charged, Alexander Wagar was acquitted on charges of sexual assault by Calgary judge Robin Camp, which earned him the dubious title of “The Knees Together Judge.” Camp had asked the woman who had been assaulted why she “couldn’t just keep her knees together” (Camp Inquiry 2016, 127) or “skew her pelvis slightly” to avoid penetration (394). Camp also gained notoriety for referring to the woman who had been assaulted as “the accused” (348, 360, 379, 380, 432, 437, 440, 443, 445, 446, 450, 451, 454) throughout the trial and for claiming that “sex and pain sometimes go together and that isn’t a bad thing” (407). The woman was identified in the media as young, homeless, and Indigenous. Published court sketches of Wagar indicate that he is white, and the court transcripts identify him as also having been homeless at the time. Irrespective of the fact that sexual attraction has nothing to do with sexual assault, and in contravention of the rape shield law that is supposed to prevent the admissibility of prior sexual history in court, Wagar’s lawyer questioned the complainant in a way that forced her to testify repeatedly that she was attracted to women. He also invented scenarios where she was forced to testify that she would fight off hypothetical attackers. The case was sent back for retrial, and Robin Camp was subject to a Canadian Judicial Council inquiry, during which three judges and two lawyers unanimously concluded that he was unfit to remain on the bench. He later resigned. Alexander Wagar, however, was acquitted a second time by the same judge who tried and sentenced Denzel Dre Colton Bird.

That same year, two more Alberta judges were brought under review for similar kinds of statements (National Post 2016). In another case that was heard almost twenty years earlier, John Wesley “Buzz” McClung earned himself the moniker of the “Bonnets and Crinolines Judge” for his acquittal of John Ewanchuk on the grounds that the woman he assaulted had provoked the attack both because of the way she dressed (McClung 1998, para. 4) and because she had failed to try hard enough to fight off her assailant (McClung 1998, para. 21). McClung’s decision was later overturned at the Supreme Court of Canada where, in her reasons, Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé (1999) took it upon herself to debunk a series of rape myths. Judge McClung retaliated in a letter to the National Post, where he wrote, “The personal convictions of the judge, delivered again from her judicial chair, could provide a plausible explanation for the disparate (and growing) number of male suicides being reported in the province of Quebec” (Oler 1999). He later apologized when it was released that Justice L’Heureux-Dubé’s husband had taken his own life in 1978.

These cases are situated in a representational context that supports differential public, police, and judicial responses to interracial sexual assault, including widespread violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual) people; land dispossession; and the overincarceration of Indigenous people more broadly (TRC 2015; National Inquiry into MMIWG 2019). Acknowledging that Canada is a settler-colonial state, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) highlights that policing and the criminal justice system exist in the lives of Indigenous people not as means of accessing justice, safety, or protection but instead as way to continue “to traumatize, abuse and control them” (38). In the cases described previously white assailants were acquitted at trial, while in Denzel Bird’s case, he was given a sentence of fifteen years.

Five months before Denzel Bird was arrested, the Blood Tribe held the opening ceremony for the Big Claim, one of the largest and longest outstanding Indigenous land claims in Alberta (Oka-Wells 2016). It was heard in three phases over the same period that Denzel Bird was arrested, charged, and sentenced, speaking to a much larger challenge to settler colonialism in Treaty 7 territory and thereby also providing a broader context for the racist backlash against their members in response to Bird’s arrest. In 2019, Federal Court Justice Russel Zinn found partially in their favour, ruling that they had been shortchanged when the boundaries of Treaty 7 were drawn in 1877, yet he excluded key areas such as Cardston and Waterton Lakes on the grounds that claims to these areas were time barred (Zinn 2019).

Within the broader context of Canadian settler colonialism, the racist backlash that often appears in public responses to Indigenous territorial claims to sovereignty, the number of MMIWG and 2SLGBTQQIA people, and the lack of access to justice or meaningful responses or remedies all work in conjunction with the disproportionate incarceration rates of Indigenous people across the country to further the settler-colonial project. Simpson (2017) has articulated settler colonialism as a gendered structure invested in controlling sexuality, gender performance, family forms, parenting, and self-care that has built within it “escalating magnitudes of structural and interpersonal discipline and violence” levelled at those who do not conform. As such, it works in service of the “perpetual disappearance of Indigenous bodies for perpetual territorial acquisition” (44, 45). It is thereby a structure, not an event, and “its history does not stop” (Wolfe 2006, 402).

Despite reports of falling crime rates in Canada, the Office of the Correctional Investigator’s 2016–17 report revealed that the year Denzel Bird was arrested, although Indigenous people only represented 4 percent of the Canadian population, they represented 26.4 percent of the total federal prison population. Despite only a 5 percent increase in the total federal inmate population between 2007 and 2016, the Indigenous prison population increased by 39 percent, revealing higher conviction rates, longer sentences, and lower parole grant rates because of systemic racism (48). In this context, news reporting that focuses exclusively on the sexual violence meted out against the woman in Lethbridge, to the exclusion of the racist backlash faced by members of the Blood Tribe and a critical look at the broader context within which Denzel Bird was arrested and convicted, contributes to the forces that lead to the overincarceration of Indigenous men. Conversely, when reporters represent the case predominantly in terms of racist backlash, “they belittle the fact that woman particularly, and all people generally, should be outraged by the gender violence” (Crenshaw 1991, 1282) that the Bird case represents.

The Good Victim: Privileged (White) Femininity

The 1980s and 1990s saw an upsurge in whiteness studies in both the US and Canada drawing attention to the emergence of whiteness as a social category and aesthetic ideal in different settler-colonial contexts. McIntosh’s (2003) popular essay contributed to the discussion by outlining forty-six examples of gender and white privilege, referring to both as part of “an invisible weightless knapsack” that contains all the necessary capital to successfully compete within dominant US culture. Almost thirty years later, it has become standard curricula in universities, colleges, and high schools across the US and Canada as a means of introducing students to the concept of white privilege and the gendered nature of the symbolic, material, and cultural ramifications of white supremacy.

In response to more recent backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement and the concept of white privilege, Sehgal (2015) has articulated, “It’s easier to find a word wanting than ourselves,” concluding that the concept of white privilege is “still the most powerful shorthand we have to explain the gross societal contrast[s]” in wealth, survival, benefits, and burdens at the same time as it is “emblematic of the kinds of pressures we put on language, our stubborn belief that the right word can be both diagnosis and cure.” Whiteness is not, therefore, static or fixed in its promise of privilege, nor does it exclude the penalties that make up the cost of living. Who can be white, or white enough, changes depending on location and historical moment (see López 1996), but it is nevertheless an important structural feature of social inequality. In Canada and the US, it works as an indicator of who is more likely to benefit from and who is more likely to bear the burden of penalty. Like the frames that support it, however, it does not stand alone. It works together with class, sexuality, gender identity, marital status, religion, and access to support systems and networks among many other things to maintain hierarchical social orders. As I have articulated elsewhere (Hodes 2017, 2018) and as Laura Mudde (2020) has since rearticulated, white supremacy and whiteness include public discourse that perpetuates “the oppressive systematic denial of colonialism within settler colonial society” (Mudde 2020, 51). This kind of denial, however, is not exclusively advanced by white people (Mudde 2020, 51; see also Hodes 2017, 2018). These insights highlight the need for critical discourse analyses that unpack both the frames and discursive strategies that go into reproducing white supremacy and its material consequences in the context of Canadian settler colonialism (Hodes 2017, 2018). As the Reconciliation Lethbridge Advisory Committee has articulated in this volume, it is, in fact, the responsibility of settler scholars such as myself to embark on these kinds of projects (see RLAC in this volume).

The words that come together to create the articles that tell the story of the Denzel Bird case are also bound by frames that promise both diagnoses and cures. The good victim frame is part of a racialized binary conception of gender that Frankenberg (1993) has articulated as “a location of structural advantage, of race privilege [. . .] a standpoint” through which people look at themselves and others. It is also an “unmarked and un-named set of cultural practices” that reinforces gross inequities in wealth, power, and penalty (1). She articulates that white people are “raced” the same way that men are “gendered” and white women’s lives are no less shaped by whiteness as a racial structure than they are by gender. bell hooks (1993) has gone further to articulate how the privileged white femininity characteristic of the good victim frame is also structured through marital status and proximity to cisgendered, white men. This implies sexuality and access to social and cultural mobility through heteropatriarchal family forms, class, and the successful performance of gender norms related to work, pay, the public and private spheres, the nuclear family and its practices of relationship, consumption, and inheritance. De Welde’s (2003) study of white femininity in the context of the “fear of crime,” read rape, and self-defence classes also illustrates the myriad ways that white femininity is constructed and reproduced around conceptions of normalcy. Privileged white femininity is often used as the standard by which others are measured and found lacking (78). Maintaining a hierarchy between women who deserve to be protected and those who do not, fear of crime works together with whiteness as a means of social control to produce good victims, bad victims, and mixed messages. Representations of violence, innocence, and the distinction between public and private in popular media create moral panics that reinforce the idea that white women should stay in the home, “away from the dangers of the crime ridden streets” (De Welde 2003, 78).

In the articles surveyed here, the good victim is constructed through a series of discursive strategies that structure privileged (white) femininity as a precondition to the frame. The goodness and innocence that accompany whiteness in the context of these representations, however, are reinforced through a fear of crime discourse that is underwritten by the “stranger danger” rape myth. The good victim thereby implies the culpability of those who have been sexually assaulted but do not meet the criteria of white femininity reinforced through the frame. This frame, therefore, reveals the fragility of the good victim at the same time as it reinforces the carceral logic at the heart of the representations of Denzel Bird. The discursive strategies that produce this frame create narrative descriptions of the woman who was assaulted, including her everyday activities, her faith, age, character, marital and employment status, her physical mobility, and her connections to the Lethbridge community. Often this is accomplished through a series of statements given by the men who act as spokespersons for her family and broader social network.

Fifty-two of the articles surveyed for this chapter refer to her as a victim, with only seven that also include either headlines or internal references to her self-identifying as a survivor. This mode of self-identification, however, takes place primarily through intertextual references to her Victim Impact Statement (VIS). Throughout the corpus of articles, the privileged (white) femininity alluded to in these referential strategies structures events to simultaneously exceptionalize the assault yet imply the pervasiveness of “stranger danger.” This is done at the same time that they paradoxically preserve the purity and innocence of the woman who becomes fixed as the good victim yet also implies the possibility of culpable others and a fall from grace. In contrast to a wide range of different articles that appear across news sources describing a court-ordered publication ban on her identity, two of them also explicitly identify her by name.

In an early article announcing Denzel Bird’s arrest on the front page of the Lethbridge Herald, reporter Bill Schnarr (2016) names the woman who was attacked below a photograph of a police officer dusting the crime scene for fingerprints. In contrast, Calgary Journalist Michael Lumsden (2016) begins by anonymizing her but later references the family’s Facebook page. This article is also accompanied by a photograph of the woman wearing what looks to be a white wedding dress. As a result, her whiteness need not be named; it is readily apparent through her image, and her marital status is implied before readers move through the text. Despite anonymizing her at the start of the article, Lumsden’s intertextual citational strategy works in combination with the photograph to clearly identify her by both appearance and name. I have replaced her first name with “X” in the following excerpt:

The victim remains in critical condition, however, a Facebook page called “[X’s] Journey” has been updating her progress from hospital. “[X’s]” pressures continue to go up and down and through the medication, thankfully, they are able to continue to bring it down to safe levels. Physio is now in there working with her joints to keep mobility. Family is so overwhelmed by the amazing support of Lethbridge as well as people around the world. (Lumsden 2016)

The referential strategy of using visual representations to signify her whiteness and marital status reinforces her privilege by also including textual evidence of family support, both local and global networks, and her access to health care, including a range of different health care providers.

Lumsden (2016) shares this emphasis on family, community, and global supports with Villeneuve (2016) and a small subset of the corpus. Some of these articles rely on a range of statements provided by people who identify as having never met her. Villeneuve offers a brief sketch of Bill Fox, identified as a father and the person who organized the “Power of Love Candlelight Vigil” at Henderson Lake. Despite not knowing her, Fox is quoted as saying, “Hopefully when she wakes up, she can just see that she has a whole lot of love and support behind her” (Villeneuve 2016, D3). Villeneuve (2016) also covers the “Communities in Unity” round dances that were organized to share concerns and heal the rift that was the result of the racist backlash that emerged in Lethbridge after Denzel Bird was identified as being a member of the Blood Tribe. She then goes on to include a discussion of several community fundraisers that had raised over fifty thousand dollars to support the woman’s recovery and the team of people who assembled to move the couple out of their rental home into a new place. Mikkelsen and Miller (2016) also cover fundraisers, describing a website that had been created to raise money for her husband, who is described in the article as remaining “at her side while she continues to fight for her life.”

CBC News Calgary (2016a) covered one of the fundraisers in more detail, profiling event organizer Maggie Hall by publishing her picture and a personal account of her own abuse. Despite also not knowing the woman who was assaulted, Hall describes her decision to organize the fundraiser as part of her own healing. In the same article, the family’s pastor, Daniel Zopoula, is also profiled through his image and a series of direct quotations. Emphasizing his broader connections to both community and country, he impersonalizes events through spatialization, claiming that Canada, Alberta, and Lethbridge come together when tragedy strikes: “When there is a tragedy . . . when there is a sadness, we all stand together. This has really allowed me to see the soul of our country and . . . the soul of our city and this province. People really care for one another, it’s a big, big, fat, little village.” The figurative language used in this passage emphasizes local and national support for the woman who had been assaulted but also engages in a discursive process of erasure through implicature and metaphor. Published one month after the Blood Tribe released its public statement condemning Denzel Bird’s violence and all retaliatory racist violence against their members, the pastor’s description emphasizes unity but simultaneously erases the anti-Indigenous racism that came with the support for her in this case. He also describes his close association with the family through his role in helping raise the woman’s husband. Despite his more direct relationship to her husband, identifying the pastor as the man who married the couple also implies her faith primarily through her relationships to men.

Faith thereby becomes a part of what goes into building her privileged (white) femininity. Her faith and marriage presume her sexuality, thereby securing her place in a heteropatriarchal gender order. The figurative reference to miracles weaves together a set of articles that also emphasize both faith and what the woman’s stepfather deems to be an appropriate emotional response to the violence. In an article headlined “Nothing but a Miracle: Lethbridge Woman Who Survived Brutal Assault Leaves Hospital,” CBC News Calgary (2017b) published a photograph of the woman’s father-in-law, who is identified across a range of articles as the spokesperson for the family. The image creates a scene where both he and the camera overlook a parking lot, the sun featured in the top left-hand corner casting down rays of golden light. The caption emphasizes that the “woman was hospitalized by an unprovoked attack,” and under a bold heading halfway through the article, her release from the hospital is again referred to as “nothing but a miracle.” The text further indicates that “the woman’s father-in-law said that their faith has really helped the family get through the past four months.” In this same article, her father-in-law is quoted at length claiming that the family harbors no ill will toward Denzel Bird, articulating that “nothing good ever came out of anger” and repeating the rhetorical question “How would being angry help?” implying the misogynistic, heteropatriarchal trope that anger suggests the ability to defend oneself against sexual violence, thereby making angry women deserving of assault if they failed to do so.

A second article published by CBC News Calgary one year earlier used the same image with the headline “Family of Lethbridge Assault Victim Say Faith Is Helping Her Heal” (Adach 2016). This article emphasizes the power of positive energy and the number of people, including her family, who have offered prayers, well wishes, and “words of support,” referring again to the money raised on behalf of the woman and her husband. The article then highlights the stepfather’s decision to prioritize love over anger. Again, an article published in the Calgary Herald (2017) references the family’s Facebook page, this time articulating that “some doctors and therapists treating the woman told family members that the victim’s healing was a miracle.” Finally, in a Global News article profiling Victor Girbu, the man who found her, he is quoted as saying, “Maybe God sent me” (Heidenrich and Tams 2016). This quotation becomes both a headline and a hyperlink used to connect readers to a video clip. Using this statement generates both intertextual and interdiscursive connections by inserting a new text and a discourse about faith into other articles, one of which featured the racist backlash against members of the Blood Tribe (Tams 2016).

In contrast to the figurative, emotive language, and impersonalization, Monk (2016) instead individualizes the woman by pointing to her personal characteristics, directly stating her status as a good victim in opposition to those who are deemed culpable and blameworthy. In Monk’s account, the woman’s whiteness is positioned in opposition to those who are not white as a means of acknowledging systemic racism and the differential treatment and access to supports for survivors of sexual violence. Before admonishing readers to imagine that the woman “wasn’t white but her attacker was,” she articulates,

Some of the outrage at this tragedy is in the devastating details. She was simply walking to work between 6 and 7 am, and it’s been reported that she was working extra shifts to pay for her recent wedding. She is young, petite, blonde and beautiful. Never in a million years did she deserve something so atrocious and vicious against her.

Monk’s lexical choice of deserving is upheld by the normalcy and respectability that is reinforced through representational strategies that individualize the woman as someone who not only is married but is also young, employed, and physically mobile and embodies white Western ideals of beauty. Describing her as someone who is working to pay for her wedding suggests that the work that she engages in is primarily a means to maintain her connection to a cisgendered white man. The repeated references to her youth in conjunction with her new marital status also essentialize her through implicature: the possibility of having children. All the articles in the corpus identify her on the basis of age as either a twenty-five-year-old woman or a young woman. While Denzel Bird ages as articles describe his trial and sentencing over a period of three years, her age remains the same across articles, with the exception of one indicating that she was twenty-six in 2018.

Describing her walk to work as taking place between six and seven in the morning not only indicates that she is physically mobile but also implies her normalcy and her respectability. As Monk (2016) points out, she was not walking home at two or three in the morning after a night of partying. This detail is something that was included in over half of the articles covering the case. Many identified the specific hours, others identified the time of day as morning, and a cross section of them identified her as being “on her way to work” or “walking to work.” One of them identified the darkness at that time in the morning. Several articles also included details about how she was “texting her husband” on her way to work and both implied her to be and directly identified her as someone who was innocent and undeserving of her attack. Writing for Global News, Mikkelsen and Miller (2016) combine her employment status and her good character through implicature by quoting her colleagues who say, “It’s unimaginable to think someone could attack someone like her.” They then include the voice of a friend who corroborates her good character: “When you know her, when you know what type of person she is, you can’t imagine something like that happening to her.” CBC News Calgary (2016a) included direct quotations from a community organizer who referred to her as “an innocent young lady.”

In this context, identifying the time of day exceptionalizes the attack as something shocking that is highly disruptive to the everyday, indirectly normalizing violence that takes place at night. In addition to statements about her innocence and good character, one of the articles identified the time of day in conjunction with descriptions of the attack as “random,” and two emphasized that it was “unprovoked”—one in both the headline and the content of the article, the other in the caption below the photograph of the woman’s father-in-law described earlier (CBC News Calgary 2017b; Adach 2016). These details work in conjunction with those articles implying the woman’s innocence by emphasizing that she did not know her attacker. Together, these discursive strategies indirectly reinforce the populist “stranger danger” rape myth. This is something that is accomplished through the remaining discursive strategies that paradoxically exceptionalize the violence at the same time as they imply its prevalence.

One of the earliest articles that was reproduced across news sources was a warning. This was issued before Denzel Bird was arrested, prior to any knowledge of whether the two had a pre-existing relationship and irrespective of the time of day in which the assault occurred. This warning reinforces the presumptions endemic to the “stranger danger” rape myth that suggests women are most likely to be assaulted at night by someone they don’t know:

• Always be alert and be aware of your surroundings.
• Use well-lit, well-travelled routes—paths and sidewalks near main roads.
• Avoid Dark, Vacant or Isolated Areas.
• Plan your route in advance and let someone know where you are going and when you’ll be back.
• Intentionally vary your route if you use it on a regular basis.
• Do not wear headphones or at lease wear one out, so you can hear what’s going on around you.
• Don’t walk or run alone if possible.
• Carry a noise making device, such as an alarm, and use it if you feel in danger.
• If you think someone is following you, look behind you and change your route.
• If you feel you are in danger, run to a well-lit place and yell and cause a commotion as you are running.
• Carry a cell phone and ensure the battery is charged.
• Don’t be complacent. Always report suspicious activity to police immediately.
• Call 911 in an emergency. (Bowen 2016)

Although the warning’s delivery is gender neutral, statistics documenting self-reported sexual assault indicate that those targeted are disproportionately women, women under the age of twenty-five, Indigenous women, lesbians, bisexual women, and neuro-atypical women. The same statistics reveal that most offenders are men under the age of thirty-five and that over half of those assaulted know their attacker(s) (Conroy and Cotter 2017).

This warning sets the stage for a sensationalized moral panic. This case, however, shares many of the statistical criteria of typical sexual violence cases. It became newsworthy because the sexual violence was interracial, it was severe, and the people involved did not know each other. Together, these features led to the tabloidization of its details. When combined with the discursive strategies that appear in other news sources—including perspectivization, nominalization, and impersonalization—this warning supports the kind of social control identified in De Welde’s (2003) study.

The articles that engage in this seemingly contradictory discourse do so in a number of ways. As already discussed, the “walking to work” series does so through time of day, marital status, and destination. The other articles do so by including graphic details of the woman’s injuries after she was assaulted and by nominalizing the verbs assault and attack in their headlines through a range of different adjectives, including brutal, vicious, horrific, and savage (Schurtz 2016b). These articles also include the perspectives of friends and individual police officers and the impersonalized perspectives of the Lethbridge Police as an organization. All this together leads to a tabloidized construction of sexual violence through the “stranger danger” rape myth that also structures the representations of Denzel Bird in ways that reproduce the carceral logic endemic to the broader settler-colonial context. In Mikkelsen and Miller’s (2016) article, Staff Sergeant Scott Woods is quoted describing the violence as follows: “It certainly ranks up to the top of the list of some of the most disturbing things I’ve seen.” Their article is also interdiscursively linked to a range of other articles through the discourse on shock that appears in the headline.

The paradoxical account of the violence as exceptional yet also a cause for generalized fear of crime also appears through reporting on the perspectives of the woman’s friends. The following quotations are featured in a larger font and set apart from the body of Mikkelsen and Miller’s (2016) article, accompanied by a red line in the margin for extra emphasis: “It’s just shocking, it could be anyone right?” and “This type of thing doesn’t happen in small cities.” These statements are accompanied by descriptions of the woman as “happy and cheerful,” as caring and “loved by customers” at her work, as kind and somebody who “would never hurt a fly.” The need for corroboration in the first statement is signified through the rhetorical question “Right?” This question would be later answered through repeated references in future articles to the random, unprovoked nature of the attack and her lack of connection to Bird, implying her innocence.

A second layer of implicature thereby emerges, leading to an unstated variation on Monk’s (2016) rhetorical question: Had she been less nice, less cheerful, or as described in the articles discussed earlier, less beautiful, less responsible, less married, less employed, less able bodied, less white, less passive, less heterosexual, would she have instead become a culpable and more blameworthy victim? The statement that it could be anyone appears again in later articles across news sources quoting police officers. Like the statement issued by police, it implies that the violence could happen again, but this time to a generalized person. Together with the presumption that this doesn’t happen in small cities, this collection of statements also simultaneously exceptionalizes the violence. As in the police warning, at the time this article was written, the information about whether she knew her attacker was not yet known.

After Bird was arrested and it was released that the woman did not know her attacker, Villeneuve (2016) restates the perspective of Staff Sergeant Scott Woods quoted in Mikkelsen and Miller’s (2016) piece, thereby intertextually connecting her article to theirs. Like so many of the articles, Villeneuve’s (2016) paradoxically and simultaneously exceptionalizes the violence and reinforces the fear of crime discourse that presupposes its pervasiveness and potential for recurrence. In contrast, her article in conjunction with some of the others limits this discourse to the Lethbridge Police and their officers. In another article published for CBC News Calgary (2016b), Woods is also quoted as indirectly acknowledging that sexual violence is less often perpetrated by strangers, saying, “The fact that the two were strangers is something police don’t see very often.” Nevertheless, in the broader context, this quotation underscores a generalizable fear of crime. For instance, Woods is further quoted as saying, “It hits home to everybody that as this family is going through that, it could have happened to anybody. The fact that somebody is just doing what they should be allowed to do any day of the week—walking down the street—and have this happen to them.”

This phenomenon also takes place through impersonalization not only in the article citing Woods, but also throughout the “walking to work” series and those that emphasize discourses on shock and the privilege of youth. The exceptional nature of the violence, innocence, and “stranger danger” all come together in one succinct comment attributed to the Lethbridge Police as an organization: “Lethbridge Police are absolutely rattled by the savage attack by an apparent stranger on a young woman as she was walking to work in Lethbridge” (CBC News Calgary 2016b). Again, the everyday juxtaposed against the exceptional reproduces a generalized fear of sexual assault.

A range of graphic details further reinforce these mixed messages. Two CBC News (2017a; Grant 2018) articles went so far as to include trigger warnings. Fifty of the articles describe a range of graphic details in eighty-six separate references across the corpus. Because of the volume, I have referenced only single examples of each detail, although quite often they appear together in the same article. The most common were descriptions of the skull fractures and broken bones in the woman’s face (Graveland 2018a); that she had been struck with a weapon or a metal pipe (Grant 2018; Graveland 2018a, 2018b); that she was left naked and partially stuffed in a garbage can (Graveland 2018a); that she had to relearn how to walk and talk (Graveland 2018a); that she struggles with her speech, emotions, and balance (Huffpost 2018); that she had spent weeks in a medically induced coma (CBC News Calgary 2017a); and that she had contracted a sexually transmitted infection from Denzel Bird (Graveland 2018a). Many of these articles were originally written for the Canadian Press and reproduced in news sources across the country. In contrast, the Lethbridge Herald included two stock paragraphs with specific details that were reproduced unchanged over time. These details included that the woman had been struck with a weapon, sexually assaulted, and found by a passerby with life-threatening injuries and was making a slow and steady recovery in the hospital (Schurtz 2016a, 2017). The majority of the graphic details referenced here appear in conjunction with headlines nominalizing and individualizing the violence as a “brutal sexual assault,” a “vicious sexual assault,” and a “savage attack.”

A small sample of the articles that tabloidize the violence through graphic details also quote the following passage from the VIS: “I’m more alive than ever. He hasn’t taken away my will to live. I am a survivor.” Two of these articles include her self-identification as a survivor in the headline, one written by Meghan Grant (2018) for CBC News Calgary and one produced for the Canadian Press (2018) that was also reproduced in two other news sources: the Calgary Sun (2018) and the Medicine Hat News. Despite outlining her strength and the wounds she incurred from fighting off her attacker, in order to preserve the aura of passivity and victimization and to deflect any possibility of provocation, each article also repeatedly refers to her as a victim.

The headline of Grant’s (2018) article passivates the woman by negating her self-identification in favour of her family’s characterization of her experience by implying that one cannot simultaneously experience ongoing trauma and also be a survivor: “Lethbridge Victim of Violent Sexual Attack Says She’s a ‘Survivor’ but Family Details Ongoing Trauma.” Both Grant and the Canadian Press (2018) also include the following excerpt: “I am not the same person I was. [. . .] At times I even wished Bird had finished me off, but then I remember how strong I am and I don’t want to give him that power over me.” These excerpts were cited in both articles that named her as a survivor in their headlines in addition to Bill Graveland’s (2018b) article, originally written for the Canadian Press and subsequently reproduced in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Calgary Sun (2018), and the Red Deer Advocate. Additional excerpts of the VIS referenced in other news sources indicate, “She hasn’t returned to normal after the attack and has years of therapy ahead of her” (Schmidt 2018; Franklin 2018), thereby reinforcing a pathologizing, ableist script suggesting that recovery means a return to a standardized set of mental and physical capabilities.

The discursive strategies that go into constructing the good victim through privileged (white) femininity play a role in reinforcing and normalizing an ableist, heteropatriarchal, racialized gender order characterized by violence and misogyny. Together, these criteria fix the woman who was attacked as privileged, white, and cisgendered, as someone who has a broad network of social support and is intimately connected to white cisgendered men and to cisgendered men of colour who provide public access to information about her employment status, faith, and moral character. As Constance Backhouse (2008, 2001) has documented, the need for corroboration by male relatives, community leaders, and/or spouses was at one time foundational to sexual assault law in Canada and other settler-colonial contexts. Although this has changed over time, the reporting on this case reproduces this expectation primarily through the voices of cisgendered heterosexual men. The implication of this is that proximity or distance from any of these criteria, including having access to cisgendered men to corroborate their existence, can lead to one’s movement closer to or further away from the good victim.

Representations that fix her as someone who embodies the “good victim” do not mean that she lives it. As Frankenberg (1993) and McIntosh (2003) remind us, gender and whiteness are normative ideals that shift according to time and place, and these representations of this woman embodying them more likely erase her experience than depict objective truths or realities. The material consequences of these normative ideals emerge in the ways that they structure social, cultural, and representational hierarchies that lead to different forms of striving, competition, and social control through practices of exclusion and the policing of oneself and others. In the context of sexual violence, most women will never embody the criteria of the good victim. Even the woman who was assaulted in the Bird case remains under the shadow of an ever-present possibility that she too could become a bad victim. One moral transgression, expression of anger, or loss of any of these privileges can lead to her movement into the realms of the culpable, the blameworthy, those who lack credibility, and she will thereby join the ranks of those assaulted in both the Wagar and Ewanchuk cases.

The Guilty Perpetrator: The Racialized Other, the Stranger

The guilty perpetrator frame shares certain discursive practices in common with the good victim frame, but they are used to accomplish different things. Discursive practices such as implicature, visual imagery, and tabloidization often work to bracket whiteness as a present absence in the context of the good victim frame. As part of what goes into creating the guilty perpetrator, however, they are instead used in ways that not only explicitly racialize Denzel Bird and criminalize Indigeneity more broadly but also continue to mask the role of white supremacy and systemic racism in structuring the stereotypes that are reinforced through this representational violence. These frames work together as part of an oppositional structure rooted in binary relationships between victim and perpetrator, privileged white femininity and racialized masculinity. They also support and maintain the contentious distinction between “us” and “them.”

Media representations of Indigenous people typically unyoke present from past, erasing the impacts of genocide, the ongoing structural and direct violence of settler colonialism, and the toxic masculinities that these have engendered (National Inquiry into MMIWG 2019, 140–41). These representations have material consequences. As Carter (1997), Acoose (1995), Belanger (2002), Frances and Tator (2002), Harding (2005), Innes and Anderson (2015), the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), and the National Inquiry into MMIWG (2019) have all documented, representations of Indigenous people that rely on stereotypes reproduce and reinforce a type of settler common sense that supports ongoing dispossession and criminalization, overincarceration, the discrediting of claims to territorial sovereignty, and violence against Indigenous cis and trans women and girls across Canada. Like those who are fixed as good victims and bad victims, representations of perpetrators are also shaped by the invisibility of whiteness as part of a deeply gendered social structure that contributes to the racialization of those who are deemed to be other. Representations of both those who have been subject to sexual and physical violence and those who perpetrate it are widespread, systemic, structural, and constructed in very particular interdependent ways in genocidal settler-colonial contexts like Canada.

Innes and Anderson (2015) describe the impact of colonialism on the internalization of toxic masculinities. White heteropatriarchal notions of normative masculinity—coupled with the range of media representations that appear in everything from grade school textbooks, news reporting, and the names and logos of sports teams to film and television depictions—routinely inundate Indigenous men and boys with racist stereotypes that associate Indigenous masculinities with savagery, violence, and brutality. These contribute to an internalization process that limits the range possible expressions of masculinity. Innes highlights that patriarchy is about exerting power. He equates hegemonic masculinity with a type of glass ceiling that sets some men up for failure in the competition to achieve a certain ideal based on the experiences of white upper- and middle-class men who possess the necessary cultural capital to successfully compete in a white supremacist, capitalist marketplace.

Like privileged (white) femininity, the fragility of this normative ideal is such that nobody actually inhabits it. The policing of its boundaries through differential proximity fixes it in place as part of a gendered and racialized hierarchal social order that has built within it automatic exclusions. It nevertheless structures the striving, the competition, the jealous protection of privileges and resources, the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, the homophobic and transphobic violence that shore it up, and the differential access to benefits and opportunities that go into attempts to achieve it. It also often results in the creation of remedies for those who do not succeed in the settler-colonial contest in terms of what Crenshaw (2016) refers to as patriarchal enhancements. Innes and Anderson (2015) conclude that the inability to gain proximity to this ideal often results in cisgendered Indigenous men asserting their power over women, 2SLGBTQQIA people, and one another.

The goal, however, is not to achieve some sort of inclusion into or parity with white hegemonic masculinity. As Crenshaw (2016) elucidates, significant articulations of anti-racism have been built around patriarchal denial. Those that focus on masculinities, men and boys, often frame discrimination and exclusion in terms of patriarchal absences such as the denial of leadership in families, communities, work, and politics. These remedial strategies are often part of a politics of inclusion that ignores the historically situated structural, systemic, and gendered nature of discrimination and other forms of violence, thus creating the foundation for intersectional failure. Despite articulating how these absences work, Crenshaw, however, falls prey to a kind of intersectional failure of her own by not including settler colonialism and genocide as part of the structural foundation for the kinds of violence and discrimination that looking through an intersectional lens is meant to address.

Fighting for inclusion into normative gender regimes is counterproductive in this context because hegemonic exertions of white patriarchal power are just as violent as their toxic and rebellious counterparts. They perpetuate a range of ongoing settler-colonial processes of displacement and dispossession through gender-based forms of violence. Just as representations of privileged (white) femininity function through erasure, the white hegemonic masculinity that upholds it as a normative ideal also erases the violence at the heart of heteropatriarchal relations in all their forms, irrespective of economic status or how the violence plays out.

Harris (2000) and Maynard (2017) examine the ways that practices of law enforcement in carceral states like the US and Canada converge with gender-based violence to uphold law and order, thereby preventing more constructive ways of creating safe communities. In the context of media representations of the Bird case, law enforcement as an expression of hegemonic white masculinity is glorified through representations of police officers exerting militaristic control over Denzel Bird’s body. In this series of representations, both toxic and hegemonic forms of masculinity are juxtaposed against each other to fix Denzel Bird as the guilty perpetrator in ways that both rely on and generate stereotypical representations that contribute to not only his racialization and criminalization but also that of Indigenous men in general, as evidenced in the racist backlash faced by the Blood Tribe and the expectation that leadership in the Blackfoot community release a statement condemning the violence. The threshold that divides the toxic from the hegemonic is settler-colonial rule of law. Here the violence of hegemonic white masculinity is glorified and celebrated for its capacity to achieve social control and group management and in so doing enables the racist backlash faced by the Blood Tribe and its members. The lack of response to violence against Indigenous women and girls coupled with media representations of overt police control of Indigenous bodies are together among the ways that systemic racism becomes visible, and the originary violence of settlement takes place through policing in the present (Özcan, in this volume).

The first and most striking of these representations is the discursive and visual construction of the “perp walk.” Bird was arrested on October 5, 2016. The next day, he was charged with attempted murder, aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault with a weapon, aggravated assault, and breaking and entering. That same day, he was escorted from the police service station to a van where Global News (Burles 2016) captured a video and an image that were reproduced consistently across news sources until he was sentenced in 2018. In the video of the spectacle, following a three-hour interrogation, Denzel Bird is paraded in front of cameras wearing handcuffs and escorted to a police van by four white men that are all almost a head taller than him. Two of them are uniformed officers and visibly armed wearing bulletproof vests—one leads the group, and the other follows behind. The other two are wearing suits and ties, one on each side of Denzel Bird, and each of them has his hands on one of Bird’s arms. Just before he enters the van, one of the journalists asks, “Do you have anything to say?” Bird replies, “Sorry,” and as he enters the van, he repeats, “Sorry, man” (Burles 2016). Although it was released that he had turned himself in and confessed to the assault, on top of not yet having hired a lawyer, he had not yet stood trial, nor had it been ascertained that the confession had not been coerced. This was two days before he had retained a lawyer.

Both the Lethbridge Herald and Lethbridge News Now reported on the “perp walk.” On October 7, Bill Schnarr (2016), writing for the Lethbridge Herald, made it appear that he was quoting Bird directly. Instead of what can be heard in the contents of the video, however, Schnarr quotes him as saying, “I’m fucking sorry, man” (A1). On October 8, Delon Schurtz (2016a), writing for the Lethbridge Herald, also reported that Bird said, “I’m fucking sorry, man” in the context of another front-page story leading with the headline “Brutal Sex Assault Suspect in Court” (A1). While Schurtz’s article did not include the image of the perp walk and its subtitle is “Lawyers Criticize ‘Perp Walk,’” this large, bolded headline pointedly conflates the assault with the suspect by failing to include a comma between the words “brutal sex assault” and “suspect in court.” Instead of being a man arrested and charged in connection with a “brutal sex assault,” Denzel Bird becomes a “brutal sex assault suspect” who is identified by a photograph that looks like a mugshot, thereby presupposing his guilt. After misquoting Denzel Bird, the article then proceeds to identify why Bird’s lawyer at the time, Greg White, expressed concerns regarding Bird’s constitutional rights to be presumed innocent and to remain silent.

In contrast, Patrick Burles (2016), writing for Lethbridge News Now, reported what can be heard in the video; it was also embedded in the online version. He writes, “In the transfer—captured below by Global Lethbridge—Bird states I’m sorry when asked if he has anything to say” (Burles 2016). Despite Schurtz’s (2016a) embellishment following Schnarr (2016), both he and Burles (2016) include the details of defence lawyer Greg White’s concerns regarding Bird’s constitutional rights. Juxtaposing the content of Burles’s (2016) article against Schurtz’s (2016a) illustrates the different ways that, in combination with images and video, different discursive strategies can be used to either minimize or underscore and emphasize racist stereotypes.

Harding (2006) has documented a long history of Canadian media that have used highly judgmental adjectives to describe Indigenous people, notably words that convey moral outrage and savagery. In this context, the word “brutal” before “sexual assault,” together with Schurtz’s (2016a) decision to quote Bird as saying that he was “fucking” sorry, signifies anger and underscores what Belanger (2002) and Sanchez (2012) have identified as one of several broad categories of stereotypes associated with representations of Indigenous masculinity: “the bloodthirsty savage.” When read together with the opening sentence, this presupposes guilt through both implicature and othering: “The man accused of brutally assaulting a young woman on a Lethbridge street last week in May, when he appears for a court hearing later this month, will try to convince a judge he should be released from custody.” This choice of discursive strategies predicts the future by suggesting that Bird, who had not yet stood trial and whose bail hearing had not yet taken place, is not only a man accused of and charged with a violent crime but also a “brutal sex assault suspect” who will try to hide his brutality but will not likely be released from custody.

Burles (2016) also includes both the photograph and the video of the perp walk but reports on the same set events very differently. Instead of implying either guilt or innocence, Burles’s article is mainly descriptive. He quotes White’s concerns, impersonalizing what are variously recited in all the articles as the facts. He then attributes his description of the assault to the Lethbridge Police, writing, “They noted that the victim and the accused do not know each other and that this was a random attack.” The contents of the article do not sensationalize events in the same way that Schurtz (2016a) does; they instead minimize overt stereotypes. The photo in conjunction with the video and the last sentence emphasizing the randomness of the attack, however, creates a stranger, and an unpredictable other, out of Bird. Together with the handling of his body in both the photo and the video, the text invites readers to presume danger, impending violence, and guilt in spite of text indicating that Bird had not yet stood trial or been given time to prepare his bail hearing. The perp walk video thereby provides a visual record of the differential treatment accorded to Indigenous men who are accused of violent crimes, but the text that accompanies it, more often than not, serves as a justification for differential treatment instead of an account of systemic racism.

Ten of the articles in the corpus include large photos of the perp walk, but Burles’s (2016) is the only one that also includes the video. Several of the online sources include links to other articles that appear next to smaller thumbnail images of the perp walk. Over half of these articles contain the adjectives “vicious,” “horrific,” or “brutal” in their headlines. Where they do not use these adjectives, they indicate that the assault was an “attack.” Where they do use them, occasionally they appear in conjunction with “attack” and “assault,” thereby individualizing the violence through nominalization. One article references the woman’s VIS in a headline that reads, “‘I Had to Relearn How to Do Everything’: Statement from Lethbridge Victim Read in Court,” directly above the photo of the perp walk, two years after the image had been created and Bird had been sentenced (Franklin 2018).

Lisa MacGregor’s (2016) article for Global News is also illustrative of how interdiscursivity and intertextuality work together to reinforce stereotypes in online news sources. This article includes the image of the perp walk below a headline that points to the racist backlash that had emerged from the Lethbridge community against members of the Blood Tribe. It was published three days after the video was shot and combines a range of different discourses and texts to create a representation that directly connects the Blood Tribe to the image of Bird in handcuffs. Its lengthy reference to the statement that they released on their website condemning both the sexual violence and the violence that had taken place against their members is overshadowed by the visual representations of Bird. The passages of the Blood Tribe statement cited in the article emphasize that the Blood Tribe “do not condone violence of any kind and are working hard in [their] community to address social issues,” implying responsibility for the violence while condemning it (MacGregor 2016). When juxtaposed against the image, the meaning shifts to imply taking responsibility for what were still, at the time, Bird’s alleged crimes, despite his confession. This representation thereby not only presumes Bird’s guilt but also criminalizes the entire Blood Tribe through implication by association.

In contrast to MacGregor’s (2016) piece, which unyokes the past from the present, a small cross section of the articles includes details about Bird that point to Canada’s past and ongoing settler-colonial violence. Nevertheless, these articles do not acknowledge these details in a way that complicates the frame. They instead sustain negative stereotypes in much the same way as the perp walk. One of the CBC News articles published after Bird’s guilty plea in 2017 begins with a trigger warning and a Facebook profile picture. The photo identifies Bird as a twenty-one-year-old, but it was taken from his page at least one year prior to the publication date of the article. The same photo appears in early accounts of the case that indicate Bird was twenty at the time (CBC News Calgary 2017a). This piece provides a sensationalized and graphic account of the assault in addition to two specific details about Bird under the headline “‘I’m So Sorry for That Poor Girl’: Man Pleads Guilty in Vicious Sexual Assault in Lethbridge.” Although the content of the article contains no reference to this version of Bird’s apology, an apology that is described in greater detail across a range of news sources as taking place in court, the two details about Bird are included with a similar lack of context and are both unnecessary.

The first detail offered reads as follows: “Sentencing has been put off to Jan. 5, 2018, so that pre-sentencing reports can be compiled, including a Gladue report as Bird is a member of the Blood Tribe.” There is, however, no explanation of what a Gladue report is or why it is important in the context of sentencing. This implies that the Gladue report has something to do with Bird’s Indigeneity and that it somehow caused a delay. Gladue, however, is a sentencing principle designed to ensure that a trial would happen on the appropriate day following Bird’s ability to exercise his rights as an Indigenous person.

The Gladue principle is recognized in the Criminal Code of Canada as a means of addressing the systemic discrimination and racism against Indigenous people in the criminal division of the Canadian legal system. Gladue reports take into account the impact of residential schools, child welfare removal, physical and sexual abuse, and other physical and mental health concerns. In their 2012 report, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) prepared a primer on Gladue rights, pointing to the many ways that judges, parole officers, and others working within criminal law have a limited understanding of what systemic racism is and how the legal system is not equipped to rehabilitate offenders. Gladue reports thereby facilitate access to culturally appropriate programming, where it is available, and diversion programs that are meant to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons. However, concerns have been raised as to whether diversion programs can provide proper support (NWAC 2012).

A second article containing details about Bird’s life published in the Huffington Post (Huffpost 2018) also mentions the Gladue report, but this time in the context of the sentencing hearing and with an explanation. Justice Jerry LaGrandeur is paraphrased describing the mitigating factors in sentencing, including Bird’s “youth, his guilty plea and the fact that he was remorseful.” The judge is also described as having “noted that Bird’s family were survivors of residential schools [and that] he was also abused as a child and has lower than average intelligence.” Directly following these details, the woman’s stepfather is quoted as having said that “no sentence would undo what was done to his ‘little girl,’” and the crown prosecutor is then directly quoted as saying that Bird is a young man and that fifteen years was “still a significant sentence.” In lieu of the perp walk photo or the Facebook profile picture, this article includes pictures of the crown prosecutors and Bird’s second lawyer, Tonii Roulston. Despite offering clarification on the purpose of the Gladue report, like the CBC News article, this piece pathologizes Bird in a way that reinforces the ableist script from the good victim frame. Just as the woman who was assaulted must work to return to normal, Denzel Bird is irrevocably other than normal not only because he is a racialized Indigenous man but also because he is someone identified as having “less than average intelligence” and who has been abused himself (Huffpost 2018).

The second detail that first appears in the CBC News article in 2017 is reproduced in three subsequent articles one year later. Combining what Vowel (2012) has described as the pernicious stereotype of the “drunken Indian” with what Sanchez (2012) and Belanger (2002) have described as the stereotype of the “blood thirsty savage” (405), the discursive strategies that are used to narrate the assault create out of Bird an irredeemable other. CBC News Calgary published the first piece indicating that Bird had “been drinking whiskey hours earlier” and “was armed with a two-foot length of blue metal pipe” (CBC News Calgary 2017a). The following year, Grant (2018) and Graveland (2018a, 2018b) persist in reproducing sensationalized, graphic accounts of the violence, starting with their headlines. Graveland (2018a) describes it as a “sexual assault that left the victim in a coma.” Grant (2018) describes Bird as the “Lethbridge man who beat a woman unconscious with a pipe before sexually assaulting her.” In a second article by Graveland (2018b), the woman’s ongoing trauma is described by putting the word “survivor” in scare quotes, thereby backgrounding her own means of self-identification and passivating her as a victim.

Together, these discursive strategies reproduce stereotypical accounts of toxic, violent, racialized masculinity that is upheld through the production of passive, virtuous, privileged (white) femininity, each one reinforcing the other in a hierarchical relationship through representational violence. Both frames support and maintain the contentious distinction between “us” and “them” that not only criminalized Bird prior to his trial, bail hearing, and sentencing but also continues to criminalize Indigenous men in general. These discursive strategies also materialized in the racist backlash experienced by members of the Blood Tribe.