Abstract

Consent – walk the walk, a geo-locative audio documentary walk in St. John’s, Canada, explores a 2017 sexual assault trial that led to days of protests in the Newfoundland city: an on-duty police officer is charged with sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman he drove home from the town’s nightclub precinct. Producers Chris Brookes and Emily Deming’s work of ‘landscape journalism’ was designed to highlight the tension between popular and legal understandings of the term ‘consent’ in sexual assaults. While the audio walk is a compelling place-based listening experience, Consent raises issues around the impact of dramatised re-enactment in the documentary field, and the role that sound design treatment can play, in affective influence over the audience’s response. To protect the identity of the assault victim, the producers were not permitted to use the court audio recordings, so they employed actors to perform the court transcripts. While the original trial acquitted the police officer, the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019 has ordered a re-trial on the grounds the trial judge erred in directing the jury. This article explores the design choices and the aesthetic, ethical and legal challenges faced by the audio walk’s producers in applying journalistic concepts of objectivity and balance.

Keywords: Sexual assault, ethics, objectivity, locative audio, audio journalism, sound design

How to Cite:

St Clair, J., (2019) “Consent: Objectivity and the Aesthetics of Re-enactment in Locative Audio Journalism about a Sexual Assault Trial”, RadioDoc Review 5(1).