Jonathan Kay: The dangerous expansion of ‘battered woman defence’ in Canadian law

Article here. Excerpt:

'“In the Doucet case, the claim of an ongoing pattern of spousal abuse was central to her defence,” says James Morton, a former president of the Ontario Bar Association. “So in theory, it should have been proven the way you would prove every other element, with solid evidence. But in reality, claims of past abuse typically are not proven with the same degree of rigour. It’s often merely asserted, and the person whom the allegation is made against has to disprove it. The burden of proof is effectively reversed.”

“It’s in family law cases where you see this a lot,” he adds. “As a practical matter, once the allegation is made by the woman — and it’s usually the woman, though not always — the burden is on the other side, the man, to disprove it. And how do you do that? How do you disprove something that happened months or years ago — stuff that was never complained about at the time?”

Grant Brown, a longtime men’s-rights activist, traces the roots of the Doucet decision to a bias against men that he believes is now encoded deep in the Canadian justice system.
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“Nobody wanted to look as though they were not sympathetic toward women, and it became anathema for any politician or judge or police officer to question the [feminist point of view] in this area,” Mr. Brown says. “Whereas every other aspect of the criminal-justice system strives to eliminate false [accusations of guilt], when it comes to domestic violence, the reverse [has become] the case.”'