A quiet community two hours northwest of Edmonton became a site of true human horror last month when a young woman of only 18 — dressed for a night out in the city, not a weekend of camping — was found bleeding from numerous stab wounds in a ditch. Her attackers had dumped her there to die.
And because those accused of butchering her were under 18, there’s a good chance we’ll never get to learn their names, even if they are convicted.
That’s the obscenity that’s folded into the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). Designed to give youth offenders a generous shot at turning their lives around in adulthood, when they’re more likely to make better choices, the law bans their identities from being published unless, upon conviction, they receive an adult sentence. It’s completely sensible in most cases: the graffiti someone scrawled on the school as a foolish teen shouldn’t follow them on the internet forever. But the same can’t be said about cases of extreme violence.
Examples of highly violent people remaining unknown to the public hence can be found throughout the country. Here’s a cross-section: last month, four male suspects were implicated in the “targeted gang sexual assault” in St. Catherines, Ont. Among the alleged rapists was a 17-year-old teen.
That same month, a nameless youth (at least, at the time of the crime) was convicted in Ottawa for shooting, “execution-style,” a man through a car window. The youth did so as an act of revenge — his friend had recently died of an overdose, and the now-dead victim had made a joke about it on social media.
In August, in Toronto, two teens, aged 15 and 16, believed by police to have links to numerous shootings in the greater ecosystem of tow-truck crime, were charged with first-degree murder of a 28-year-old.
In April, a 16-year-old Halifax high school student was stabbed to death in a mall parking lot; four teens (two aged 14, two 16) were charged with second-degree murder in the aftermath.
In 2020, a man who’d come to Canada from Iraq was shot and killed by teen gang members aged 15 and 17. He had walked up to a drug house they intended to rob (likely to buy drugs, said the Crown prosecutor of the case, as he wasn’t a gang member). The assailants were convicted of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
And famously, in December 2022, eight Toronto girls ranging in age from 13 to 16 were charged in the fatal swarming and stabbing of a homeless man; three have since pleaded guilty to manslaughter, one to assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon; the other four await trial.
It’s easy to dismiss these as outliers in a much more mild statistical trend. Though the national youth crime severity index measured by Statistics Canada has nearly halved since 2010, most of that is due to a steep drop-off in non-violent youth crime. The youth violent crime severity index also decreased in that time, but only by a mere seven points.
How those numbers shake out on the ground in recent years depends on where you are in the country. Some urban centres have been hit tremendously hard: Windsor, Ont. which was the site of a widely shared mobbing attack involving teens in 2022, saw the number of youths committing violent crimes rise by 35 per cent that year from the one prior. Out west, Kelowna, B.C. saw a 156 per cent increase in youth violence from 2023 to 2022.
Toronto, meanwhile, has seen a 161 per cent incline in youth gun arrests over the past two years.
Many, though not all, of these cases are a factor of gang activity. The world of organized crime is well aware that minors have a much easier time before the law, which makes them useful drug dealers and hitmen — who enjoy a blanket of anonymity when caught.
Well, we shouldn’t continue to grant it, at least for a portion of minors, anyway. The worst violent crimes on the books — murder, manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery with a firearm, aggravated sexual assault — should not entitle young offenders over the age of, say, 13 to a publication ban.
It’s a simple matter of public safety: employers should be entitled to know whether that 19-year-old they’re about to hire was not long ago taking hit jobs from the tow truck mafia. Women deserve to know if they’re headed out for an evening with men who, at age 17, took part in group stabbings and gang rapes.
And it’s also a matter of justice. That poor woman who was found in a rural Alberta ditch clung to life only because a couple of groups of ATV riders camping in the area happened to find her in time. She’ll have to carry the cruelty of her attackers on her body for life: she was described as “mangled” by her rescuers, with a gash on her head and stab wounds on her back.
You shouldn’t be able to do that to another person and receive the privilege of a blank slate at 18. For some heinous acts, fresh starts are less important than fair warnings to the rest of society.
Of the four teens who are now in trouble for this cruelty, three have been arrested and are now sitting in jail awaiting court; a warrant is out for the fourth. A trial will provide some justice, but, like so many others that came before it, it’s most likely to fall short.
National Post