London Hockey Players’ Trial Sends a Dangerous Message to Survivors
By: Laverne Blake, Ernestine’s Women’s Shelter
Date: May 29, 2025
The headlines change every day in the high-profile sexual assault trial of the five former World Junior hockey players, but the dangerous message to survivors doesn’t. Regardless of the verdict, this trial has made one thing clear: survivors still face a justice system that treats them like suspects.
E.M., the young woman at the centre of this case, spent nine days on the witness stand — seven of them under brutal cross-examination from the five defense teams. She’s been scrutinized not just on facts but on her behaviour, character, and gaps in her recollection of details.
This isn’t unique to E.M. It’s how the system works. Survivors are still treated like they’re lying, and the system continues to delay justice and ignore what we know about how survivors respond under traumatic circumstances.
Approximately 94% of sexual assaults in Canada still go unreported (Statistics Canada, 2019). One of the leading reasons? A fear of not being believed. The courtroom scenes from this trial — adversarial, invasive, often dismissive — only reinforce that fear. And they send a broader message: if you come forward, this is what you’ll face.
A common tactic in cases like this is to scrutinize the survivor’s behaviour – questions like, why they didn’t fight, scream, or run away.
But a report from the Justice Department of Canada tells us that fight or flight is actually the least common response during violence. Many survivors freeze. Others “fawn,” appease, or dissociate — going mentally numb, detached, or on autopilot to survive the experience.
These are instinctive, automatic responses. They aren’t choices. They most definitely don’t mean consent.
Still, these trauma responses are twisted into demonstrating compliance or even enthusiasm. The reality? These are signs of someone trying to stay alive.
Another tactic is to seize on minor inconsistencies in testimony — like the time of day, what they wore, who said what first. Misremembering peripheral details is used to suggest the survivor is lying about core details of the alleged event.
But this overlooks a fundamental truth: trauma changes how memory works. Under extreme stress, the brain often struggles to encode peripheral or neutral details. It’s not lying — it’s neuroscience.
“But this overlooks a fundamental truth: trauma changes how memory works. Under extreme stress, the brain often struggles to encode peripheral or neutral details. It’s not lying — it’s neuroscience. ”
A study published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology found that sexual assault survivors had poorer recall of neutral content compared to a control group — but no difference in how they remembered trauma-related content. This suggests a survivor might forget what shoes they wore, but can recall what was done to them.
Another tactic too often used is that survivors are subtly or directly framed as responsible for the violence. They drank. They flirted. They went to the room. They consented to some of the sex.
That framing asks us to believe that presence implies consent — that being in the room was the same as saying ‘yes’. And it ignores one of the most obvious dynamics in these situations: power.
In the London case, we’re talking about a young woman alone in a hotel room with multiple young men, all physically stronger, all bonded by team culture, all part of an institution. That’s not a neutral environment. Neither are the overwhelmingly common incidents of survivors abused by their partners — the people who have significant influence on all manner of their lives, from their finances to their housing, to the safety of their children.
We do mental gymnastics to make survivors to blame for the violence done to them. We portray them paradoxically: able to foresee and avoid all crimes against them – yet also that they mistake a night of “fun” for violence.
Can our justice system ever honestly say it has found “reasonable doubt” when it treats survivors so unreasonably?
Whatever the verdict in London, one truth remains clear to us at Ernestine’s Women’s Shelter:
We believe E.M. Just as we believe every survivor who walks through our doors.
If you or someone you know is experiencing sexual or gender-based violence, call our toll-free 24/7 crisis line at 416-746-3716. You will be heard. You will be believed.
Laverne Blake is the Interim Executive Director at Ernestine’s Women’s Shelter, where she has been delivering trauma-informed frontline support to women, gender-diverse folks and child survivors of violence for more than a decade.