The language of sexual violence and impropriety

Abstract

In Canada, which has two official languages, sexual violence and impropriety have been identified as problems in the military for at least 25 years (see Duval-Lantoine 2022). In the military’s efforts to address these problems, the institutional language has been identified as problematic (Deschamps 2015; Arbour 2022). This paper addresses the labels for sexual violence and impropriety in Canadian English and French using large corpora of language data: the Corpus of Historical American English, the Corpus of Contemporary Amerian English, the enTenTen20 corpus, the frTenTen20 corpus, the Strathy Corpus, and the Canadian Hansard. Findings show differences between the most widely used labels in American and Canadian data and between English and French. This raises questions about the labels adopted by the Canadian military and the extent to which sexual violence and impropriety can be addressed without a critical review of the language in use.