Police Sexual Violence and Corporate Crime

Abstract

Scholarship on corporate crime focuses, quite naturally, on profit-motivated crime. But there are crimes with an institutional dimension that are not recognized in this framework of corporate crime. In this article, I present a case study of a police organization where multiple employees committed sexual assaults to show that these crimes can have an organizational dimension. This analysis shows two things: first, that the corporate-culture model of attributing mens rea is more effective at identifying corporate crime than the one currently in force in Canada and second, that organization-facilitated sexual assault is a corporate-entity crime, broadening the conception of corporate crime generally. The corporate-culture model explains why corporations should be liable for crimes they encourage employees to commit even when these are not in line with the organization’s objectives.