ects, if some cases succeed it will be a great victory. Thus, the problem of identification of a perpetrator is not insurmountable. There is at least some jurisprudence which would give judges the tools to offer redress where individual perpetrators cannot be identified. In particular cases there may simply be single or multiple defendants, or there may be an identifiable class of defendant where the particular perpetrators are unknowable. In either case, the Ontario courts have available to them the conceptual tools to deal with the matter. The addition of the indeterminate perpetrators doctrine from the DES case would be a welcome addition to the judicial treatment of a modified ordinance, but successful actions would not depend on it. It is not impossible to imagine the kind of material that would be claimed to be harmful - it would contain pictures or words where women in a sexual context are dehumanized, objectified, shown as enjoying pain, rape or humiliation, bruised, bleeding or hurt, etc. Once the identification of harmful material is accomplished, the publishers, distributors, etc. need to be identified and named. Then the major problem for a woman to overcome as plaintiff under s.3.2(iii) is to demonstrate that some genuine quasi-social harm to her came about from the propagation of pornography, although she was not assaulted or forced to view or participate in it. As the Ruth M. testimony indicates, this is not entirely implausible. To sum thus far, a modified version of the ordinance would give individual women a cause of action for quasi-social harms they have suffered as a result of trafficking in pornography. While the hate literature provisions of the criminal code suggest that our legal framework can deal with the notion of social harm, greater success can be expected if the modification is adopted. This modification would bring the feminist notion of harm suggested by MacKinnon and her proponen...
