Rape Narratives in Motion: Edited by

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE
Rape Narratives
in Motion
Edited by
Ulrika Andersson · Monika Edgren
Lena Karlsson · Gabriella Nilsson
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
Series Editors
Michelle Brown
Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA
Eamonn Carrabine
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship
for research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm
and punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a grow-
ing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the
ascendant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to
break down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of
mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cul-
tural studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers
into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame
and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both
cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media,
and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for
circulation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control
play a powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we
become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are rep-
resented in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very
reach of global media networks is now unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale
of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and
new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and
tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm,
culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information
flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing
relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexual-
ity, and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media
and culture nexus.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15057
Ulrika Andersson · Monika Edgren
Lena Karlsson · Gabriella Nilsson
Editors
Rape Narratives
in Motion
Editors
Ulrika Andersson Monika Edgren
Lund University Malmö University
Lund, Sweden Malmö, Sweden
Lena Karlsson Gabriella Nilsson

Lund University Lund University
Lund, Sweden Lund, Sweden
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

ISBN 978-3-030-13851-6 ISBN 978-3-030-13852-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13852-3
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Contents
1 Introductory Chapter: Rape Narratives in Motion 1

Ulrika Andersson, Monika Edgren, Lena Karlsson
and Gabriella Nilsson
2 Excluding Power from a Narrative: Sexual Harassment

in a Criminal Law Reform 17
Johanna Niemi
3 Conditional Vulnerability: Rape Narratives in Swedish

Courts, 1990–2014 43
Monika Edgren
4 Narratives, Credibility and Adversarial Justice

in English and Welsh Rape Trials 71
Olivia Smith
5 The Visible Vagina: Swedish Legal Narratives About

Rape Through the Lens of Gender, Place
and Vulnerability 101
Ulrika Andersson
v
vi
Contents
6 Narrating the Moral Geography of Rape in Swedish

Newspapers 119
Gabriella Nilsson
7 Who Is the “Real” Victim? Race and Gender

in the Trial of an Elite Australian Footballer 147
Deb Waterhouse-Watson
8 Digitised Narratives of Rape: Disclosing Sexual

Violence Through Pain Memes 171
Kaitlynn Mendes, Katia Belisário and Jessica Ringrose
9 A New Age of Believing Women? Judging Rape

Narratives Online 199
Tanya Serisier
10 Testimonies in Limbo? Swedish News Media’s Framing

of Digital Campaigns Against Sexual Violence 223
Lena Karlsson
11 The Persistence of a Masculine Point of View in Public

Narratives About Rape 247
Nicola Gavey
Index 257
Notes on Contributors
Ulrika Andersson is an Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the

Faculty of Law, Lund University, Sweden, working as a teacher and
researcher in criminal law and criminal procedural law. Her main
research focuses broadly on questions concerning law and power. She
is particularly interested in issues of sexuality and gender, in addition
to power related to class, age and ethnicity. She has done research on
sexual offenses and human trafficking regulations, highlighting the gen-
dered structure of legal definitions, as well as the proof process.
Katia Belisário is a Professor in Communication, Marketing and
Gender at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. She is an expert in gender
and media studies and was visitor scholar at the University of Leicester,
UK, from 2017 to 2018, supervised by Dr. Kaitlynn Mendes. She
has written many articles and books about domestic violence against
women and femicide in Brazil and the United Kingdom.
Monika Edgren is an Associate Professor in history and professor emer-
ita in Gender Studies at Malmö University. She works interdisciplinary
crossing history, intersectional gender studies and legal practices. Her
current research focuses on rape narratives in contemporary legal settings.
vii
viii
Nicola Gavey is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University

of Auckland, in New Zealand. Her research has focused on under-
standing the connection between sexual violence and everyday taken
for granted norms around gender and sexuality. She has just published
a second edition of her book Just sex? The cultural scaffolding of rape
(Routledge, 2005), which received a Distinguished Publication Award
from the U.S. Association for Women in Psychology.
Lena Karlsson is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Lund
University, Sweden. Her research can be situated in the field of femi-
nist cultural studies; she has written extensively in the field of life writ-
ing, reception and genre studies, and sexual violence. She is continually
interested in the genres and politics of life writing in different media.
Kaitlynn Mendes is an Associate Professor in Media and
Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. She is an expert in
representations of feminist activism in the media, and the ways femi-
nists are using digital tools to challenge misogyny, sexism and rape cul-
ture. She is currently working on developing a series of digital literacy
lessons to better equip feminists to engage safely, and effectively in their
activism.
Johanna Niemi is Minna Canth Academy professor and professor of
procedural law, University of Turku, Finland. Her work on law and gen-
der has focused on criminal law and procedure, violence against women
and the construction of gender in legal discourses. She coedited several
books, including Responsible Selves, Women in the Nordic Legal Culture,
2001 and Nordic Equality at a Crossroads, Feminist Legal Studies Coping
with Difference, 2004.
Gabriella Nilsson is an Associate Professor in Ethnology at Lund
University, Sweden. Her research is focusing on discourses and antag-
onistic conceptions of gender and violence in contemporary history, as
expressed in politics, research and debate. Presently she studies intersec-
tional narratives of rape in news reports.
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education
at the UCL Institute of Education. Her research is about transforming
ix
sexualized media cultures, and activating gender and sexual equity in

Secondary Schools. Her latest books are Ringrose, J. Warfield, K. and
Zarabadi, S. (editors, 2018) Feminist Posthumanisms, New Materialisms
and Education, London: Routledge; Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and
Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019
with Kaitlynn Mendes and Jessalynn Keller).
Tanya Serisier is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck College,
University of London. Her work is interdisciplinary, and is situated at
the intersections of cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies and
feminist criminology. Her research focuses on cultural narratives of
sexual violence and sexuality, with an emphasis on survivor narratives
and feminist politics. Her recent book in this area is Speaking Out:
Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics (2018), Palgrave Macmillan.
Olivia Smith is a Senior Lecturer in criminology at Anglia Ruskin
University, UK. Her research focuses on feminist examinations of jus-
tice responses to sexual violence and she has previously written on var-
ious aspects of the English and Welsh rape trial. Olivia has previously
been the co-convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Violence
Against Women Study Group, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Corinna
Seith Prize and the 2014 Bath University Ede and Ravenscroft Award
for Best Ph.D.
Deb Waterhouse-Watson is a Lecturer in the Department of Media,
Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University,
Sydney. Her research is naturally interdisciplinary, crossing media stud-
ies, law, sports studies and gender studies, with a particular focus on
discourse and narrative. She is interested in the way gender and sexual
violence are imagined and represented in different media.
1
Introductory Chapter:
Rape Narratives in Motion
Ulrika Andersson, Monika Edgren,
Lena Karlsson and Gabriella Nilsson
This book investigates the contemporary processes involved in the telling

and hearing of narratives of sexual violence and rape in a number of pub-
lic arenas: mass media, social media, the courts and the legislative appa-
ratus. Who can say what, by what means and where, and what counts as
U. Andersson 
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
e-mail: ulrika.andersson@jur.lu.se
M. Edgren 
Section of Gender Studies, Global Political Studies,
Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden
e-mail: Monika.Edgren@mau.se
L. Karlsson (*) 
Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
e-mail: lena.karlsson@genus.lu.se
G. Nilsson 
Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
e-mail: gabriella.nilsson@kultur.lu.se
© The Author(s) 2019 1
U. Andersson et al. (eds.), Rape Narratives in Motion, Palgrave Studies
in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13852-3_1
2
U. Andersson et al.
important? What stories mobilise activists to work for legal change? What
stories move from social media to mass media and the legal realm, and in
the other direction, and how do they do so? Through the contributors’
empirical case studies, stemming from a broad range of disciplines (his-
tory, law, media studies, criminology and ethnology), this volume seeks to
understand current movements between the criminal justice system and the
cultural imaginary. Through a broad narrative approach, the contributors to
this volume investigate the narratives told of rape, how they move within a
minefield of charged terms, the contexts of narration and the appraisals of
the storyteller. Thus, at the heart of the volume are narrative inquiries into
the very conditions of speaking out and listening to narratives about rape:
context, genre, audience, technological affordances and institutions.
The current historical juncture is marked by two prominent ten-
dencies: intense reform in sexual offences legislation and a general
trend towards the heightened visibility of sexual violence in the pub-
lic domain (Alcoff 2018). Transnationally, and particularly in the west,
the last few decades have witnessed a great deal of criticism towards the
legal construction of rape and the judicial procedure, and a great num-
ber of changes in rape legislation (Little 2005; Dripps 2008; Spohn and
Horney 2013). Alongside and preceding the changes in rape legislation,
we have seen intense struggles in the realm of culture and politics about
what constitutes the sexual and violence, victim and offender, consent
and coercion. Words and narratives, as this volume amply demon-
strates, “shape the ways in which it is (not) possible to understand the
issues at stake, they are legislated against, measured and resourced and
the responses which are deemed most urgent and appropriate” (Boyle
2018: 2). In the legal realm in particular, consent has become “the cen-
tral concept employed by most legal systems today as a way to demar-
cate legitimate from illegitimate sex” (Alcoff 2018: 125). Historically,
this has long been the case in common-law systems, but from a Nordic
perspective it is new. Iceland introduced a consent-based rape provi-
sion in the early summer of 2018 (Legal proposal 148, 2017–2018). In
Sweden, where a majority of the volume’s contributors and the editors
reside and mainly study, non-voluntariness was introduced as a basis for
the definition of rape in July 2018 (Prop 2017/2018: 177). Previously,
in contemporary Nordic legislation, force has been the decisive criterion
1 Introductory Chapter: Rape Narratives in Motion
3
in the provisions on rape, whereas in, for example, English and other
common-law systems, the law has long focused on the victim’s will, or
lack of consent (Andersson 2001; Temkin 2002; McGlynn and Munro
2010). The expectations of the new Swedish provision are high, from
the crime victim’s perspective (Leijonhufvud 2015; Fatta 2018). The
move from force to involuntariness is expected to improve the victim’s
situation in the criminal process, lead to more convictions and better
protect the victim’s sexual integrity. At the heart of these expectations
is the thought that the victim’s lack of a “yes” instead of a “no” should
mark the boundary of the individual’s sexual and bodily integrity. In
other words, it would no longer be all right to assume consent as long
as “no” is not spoken, but rather to ensure that there is an explicit “yes”.
This in turn is expected to influence sexual and social norms, requir-
ing people to reflect upon and perhaps change their patterns of sexual
communication.
At the same time, internationally, several scholars are critical of the
legal construction of rape and the judicial procedure, regardless of
whether the focus is on force or consent (Halley 2016; Little 2005;
Dripps 2008). Irrespective of where the definitions stress the demar-
cation, on force or consent, rape law, like other areas of law, rests on
the liberal assumption of the individual’s autonomy and agency, which
means that the legal subject is free and competent to make rational
choices. The shortcomings of a one-sided individualistic and liberal
perspective on rape were long ago discarded by feminist researchers in
legal studies. This liberal understanding of agency is argued in femi-
nist literature to be a barrier to understanding vulnerability as a struc-
tural issue. Feminist scholars argue that a person’s vulnerability should
be recognised from a contextual perspective and as dependent on social
positioning in terms of gender, class and race (Grear 2010; Lacey 1997;
Naffine 2002).
Undeniably, sexual violence has garnered increased visibility in the
public sphere over the last few years, especially in the media, and to
some extent, in some parts of the world, in crime statistics. In gen-
eral, sexual violence is extremely underreported. However, a study on
reported rape across Europe showed that a high level of reported rape
along with low conviction rates distinguishes both the Nordic countries
4
U. Andersson et al.
and Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland, central areas in this book.1
These countries also share a long tradition of gender-equality policy.
Sweden, however, has the highest number of reported rapes in Europe,
owing partly to a broadened concept of rape. There is also a readi-
ness to report rape, even within close relationships, which is greater in
Sweden than in many other countries (Lovett and Kelly 2009). Thus,
statistical visibility does not necessarily lead to a greater number of con-
victions, nor does it reflect a gender-equal society, yet the tendency to
report and what to report are clearly related to cultural frames of the
tellable.
As we write this introduction in mid-autumn 2018, we are tempo-
rally positioned exactly one year following the most intense months
of the #metoo resurgence, a worldwide movement that has made sex-
ual violence visible in social media and the mass media to an unprec-
eded degree. #Metoo was initially launched in 2006 by Tarana Burke,
an African American (US) activist striving for better support structures
for victims of sexual violence. Then, in mid-October 2017, #metoo was
re-launched by actor/activist Alyssa Milano in an enormously influen-
tial tweet urging others to make visible their experiences of sexual vio-
lence. The #metoo hashtag began trending on Twitter on 24 October
2017. The #metoo campaign is exceptional in many ways: intense
multi-platform media coverage, transnational reach and a tendency
for accounts to be believed. However, in other ways, #metoo is one of
many joint efforts to mobilise against sexual violence (Loney-Howes
2018; Mardorossian 2014). Also, importantly, the national takes on
the campaign have played out very differently both in the significance
given to the campaign and in the national developments of sub-cam-
paigns. #Metoo is a situated phenomenon. In Sweden, the campaign
soon branched off into several sub-campaigns focusing on sexual har-
assment and violence in the workplace. Sixty-five sub-campaigns within
specific vocational fields were established: actors #tystnadtagning, legal
work #medvilkenrätt, construction work #sistaspiken i kistan etc. In the
UK and the USA, celebrities were very much in focus for the inquiries
(see Serisier 2019).
5
Thus, the present is characterised in many ways by the increased vis-

ibility of sexual violence and a notable global echoing of narratives. Yet,
as Linda Martín Alcoff has recently and forcefully argued, the politi-
cal effects of this increased visibility have been highly variable and the
effects and reception of witness accounts need to be studied with care
(2018). We need to be attentive to the selective and situated political
uptake of narratives and demands for justice. The force of #metoo illus-
trates how some victims’ stories are deemed believable and how some
subjects can protest and have their protest amplified speedily and trans-
nationally, based on the operation, above all, of race, class and sexuality
(Hemmings 2018; Onwuachi-Willig 2018). We need to pay attention
to the context of narration at the same time as we need to be wary of
how it is “unwise to assume that a restricted reference to a geograph-
ical context can settle the indeterminacy, pluralism and fluidity of
meanings” as “nearly every urban context today operates within a multi-
cultural discursive context in which people have access to multiple dis-
cursive formations and competing regimes of truth” (Alcoff 2018: 150).
Next, we provide a backcloth for the volume’s overarching narrative
approach, and thereafter we present the chapter contributions.
A Narrative Approach to Sexual Violence

This book connects to the narrative turn in the social sciences and
humanities. The theoretical and methodological variation in narrative
studies is extensive, albeit not as extensive as the number of empiri-
cal themes that are guided by a narrative approach. Feminist narrative
research is a growing field. Our main aim is to contribute to this field
of research by showing, through empirical examples, how feminist
knowledge of sexual violence benefits from a narrative approach. Unlike
some feminist narrative publications, which contain diverse empirical
themes relating to feminist issues (McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2014;
Woodiwiss et al. 2017), this volume focuses on a sole theme: narratives
of sexual violence. Some contributors to this volume explicitly link their
chapters to narrative research and some contributors take a broader dis-
cursive approach to sexual violence.
6
U. Andersson et al.
Narratives and storytelling play a prominent role both in the lives of

individuals, and in broader aspects of social, cultural and political life
(Woodiwiss et al. 2017). Broadly, a departure point for our approach to
narratives is that, in line with Arthur Frank’s socio-narratological meth-
odology, we attend to “what the story does, rather than understand-
ing the story as a portal into the mind of a storyteller”, and are equally
interested in storytellers as story listeners (Frank 2010: 14–15). A nar-
rative is never individual, but rather co-constructed, constitutive of and
shaping the social, which it is shaped by (e.g. Kohler Riessman 2008;
Squire 2013; McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2014; Plummer 1994).
From a narrative perspective on sexual violence, we are interested
in how narratives are structured and produced within narrative frame-
works, how they are transformed as they move between different gen-
res and platforms, and how they improve or delimit people’s lives. For
whom is a story constructed and for what purpose? How are events
“selected, organized, connected, and evaluated as meaningful for a par-
ticular audience” (Kohler-Riessman 2008: 3)? What is the narrative
“glue” that binds events together (Brooks 1996: 18)?
Conceptions of sexual violence and rape are formed by and between
different producers, voices and genres in specific historical and cultural
contexts. What is hearable depends upon the conceptions of the witness
(Gilmore 2017) and their social position. Class, race and age intersect
with gender in the narrative production of both victim and offender, as
several contributions show. The narratives of rape told in different are-
nas are not only representations, but are actively producing, and con-
straining, our conceptions and understandings. Speak-outs, testimonies,
hashtags, news reports and court reasoning are all examples of storytell-
ing that affect the ways in which both the individual and society come
to understand, and, as a consequence, handle sexual violence.
As shown in the contributions to this volume, what is tellable and
what is hearable depends upon the specific location of narration, such
as a courtroom, the mass media or feminist platforms in social media.
In court narratives, for example, Kohler Riesman argues that “certain
forms of storytelling are privileged” (Kohler Riessman 2008: 97). Over
the last few decades, a narrative that has become increasingly hearable in
the courtroom is the trauma narrative, which, although it highlights the
7
victim’s vulnerability, privileges an individualising view of sexual vio-

lence at the expense of a contextual and structural perspective (Murray
2012; Gavey and Schmidt 2011). As narrative criminologists Lois
Presser and Sveinung Sandberg argue, the legal arena fails to recognise
that culturally available narrative frameworks create experiences and
advocate a narrative approach to contextualising legal practices (2015).
Narratives produced within new narrative technologies and spaces
seem to have the capacity to challenge the commonality of rape narra-
tives, enabling new ways of communicating experiences of sexual vio-
lence and as such opening up space for a new narrative agency (Mendes
et al. 2019). However, as shown in this volume, “new” media does not
automatically result in “new” narratives. Instead, social media narratives
are situated in the same historical and cultural context as other genres.
Additionally, different social media platforms encourage different ways
of disclosing sexual violence and rape, forming a “platform vernacu-
lar” for what it is discursively, stylistically and visually possible to say
and have heard in specific social media contexts (Gibbs et al. 2015). In
the words of Linda Martín Alcoff, some stories of sexual violence are
more “palatable” than others (Alcoff 2018). Regardless of the location,
narrated experiences of sexual violence can thus be seen as curated
processes in which victims carefully decide how the narrative must
be shaped in order to approach different audiences in the courts, the
papers or feminist social media spaces (Fileborn 2018). Inevitably, these
curated processes are affected by master narratives of rape, which frame
individual narratives.
Master narratives are “culturally shared stories that provide frame-
works within which individuals can locate and story their own experi-
ences” (McLean et al. 2017: 3). Characterised by wide acceptance and
frequent reproduction, master narratives of rape act as deeply embed-
ded frameworks through which value is given to both a person’s char-
acter and their experiences. The master narratives make general claims
about what marks a victim and a perpetrator of rape. They are not least
characterized by their designation of those who deviate as being less val-
uable (McLean and Syed 2015). Hence, the concept of master narra-
tives is a way to combine a structural, discursive understanding of the
preconditions for the individual narrative. As such, master narratives
8
U. Andersson et al.
can be viewed as both the cause and consequence of power structures

(McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2014).
The contributions to this volume show how specific elements are
drawn from the master narrative in order to dismiss both testimonies
of rape and the rape victim as storyteller. Sometimes referred to as rape
myths, themes like “she’s lying”, “she was asking for it”, “she wanted it”
and “he’s not the type” are commonly highlighted (Franiuk et al. 2008).
Other themes include the view that a woman who has sex with a man
she has just met can be considered “fair game” for other men (Kahlor
and Eastin 2011), or that women are emotional liars and blackmailers
who “cry rape” to conceal their own immorality or to gain profit (Salter
2013). Franiuk et al. (2008) have argued that rape myths are key to the
perpetuation of sexual violence as they lead people to question the accu-
racy of rape narratives.
Central to the master narrative of rape, and recurring in all the ele-
ments drawn from this narrative, are practices of “negate or blame”,
as identified by McKenzie-Mohr (2014), where experiences of rape
are either negated as “just sex” or blamed on the victim’s actions and
behaviour. For decades, “victim blaming” has influenced autobiograph-
ical stories, news reports and the voices heard in court, affecting who
is produced as the “ideal victim” and the “ideal perpetrator” (Christie
1986). Aside from being respectable, in the sense used by Christie
of being in the right place at the right time, the position of the ideal
victim presupposes ideas of “worthiness”, where some groups are by
definition afforded more authentic claims of victimisation over oth-
ers. Additionally, the position of the “ideal victim” is connected to the
definition of the event as either “real rape”—the classic scenario of an
unknown man attacking a woman in a public space—or “simple rape”,
such as acquaintance or intimate partner rape, which are rendered less
serious in comparison (Estrich 1987; Carter 1998; Mardorossian 2014;
Soothill and Walby 1991). With the concept of the tainted witness,
Leigh Gilmore describes the narrative strategies designed to discredit
women’s experiences and voices (2017). Gilmore mentions two key
ways in which a victim and her story of sexual violence are tainted with
disbelief: “deforming it by doubt” and “substituting different terms of
value for the ones offered by the witness herself ” (2017: 5). As shown
9
in some of the chapters in this volume, the story told by a “worthy” vic-
tim of “real rape” is less likely to be tainted with doubt than less “ideal”
narratives.
McKenzie-Mohr points out that the development of the trauma
narrative can be viewed as a reaction to the blame narrative. However,
although the trauma narrative aims to free the victim from blame,
instead s/he is captured within a position of victimisation (McKenzie-
Mohr 2014; Edgren 2019). From within this position, the victim’s
weakness and lack of agency are underpinned. This reproduces a tra-
ditional heteronormative and race-neutral femininity (Bumiller 2008;
Bourke 2012; Mardorossian 2014). The trauma narrative, as Nicola
Gavey argues, is double-edged (Gavey and Schmidt 2011). Rather than
seeing it as a reaction against the master narrative of rape, the trauma
narrative could be viewed as yet another element of this same master
narrative.
Chapter Overviews—From the Legal Realm

to the Media and New Media Spaces
Johanna Niemi states that an abuse of power is usually present in dis-
courses on sexual harassment. Often the perpetrators are in positions
of power and, if not, they benefit from a culture that protects harass-
ers against women and others in less powerful positions. However, these
power relations are not always acknowledged. In her chapter, she analy-
ses a law reform to criminalise sexual harassment that was presented and
debated in the Finnish Parliament without any discussion of the power
relations in harassment. She discusses the consequences of this dismissal
of the power dimension in the formulation of the new law, which is
limited to touching, and in its implementation, in which more serious
sexual violations are processed as sexual harassment. Even though inter-
sectional grounds for discrimination were not discussed during the leg-
islative process, they come across in the court cases; for example, gender
and age were intersectional with social status, as the victims were often
students, trainees or working in low-status, precarious jobs.
10
U. Andersson et al.
Monika Edgren argues that Sweden, with its international reputa-

tion for a long-standing recognition of gender inequality, is nonetheless
characterised by paradoxes when it comes to sexual violence. She inves-
tigates how rape narratives are built up in court to generate a meaning-
ful story. What distinguishes the five written rape cases presented in her
chapter is the shaping of the victim’s vulnerability as conditional and
related to both the victim’s and the perpetrator’s social positions. This
occurs repeatedly, and in defiance of the political and legal changes tak-
ing place in Sweden during the period 1990–2014. A court is a con-
tested space. Persuasion in one direction or another depends upon the
rhetoric employed. A judgement must, however, be coherent in order to
stand up on appeal. Therefore, it is astounding to note in this investiga-
tion that rape narratives among themselves are anything but coherent.
Smith’s study of 18 rape trials demonstrates structural inequalities
in the justice system of England and Wales. Her ten months of court
observation shows how rape trial narratives are created in ways that dis-
miss complainants as non-credible “story-tellers”. Smith argues that the
idea of women being emotional liars pervades lawyers’ arguments and
acts as a justification for the ongoing use of rape myths. She highlights
that “historical” oppressions remain relevant in court today because of
their place in the master narratives that are both a cause and a conse-
quence of oppression. She also recognises that women’s experiences are
different, because trial narratives draw upon intersecting representations
of ethnicity, nationality, disability and social class.
Andersson claims that place is highly relevant in an analysis of rape
and ought be taken into account, both in legislation and in legal praxis.
She argues that place-related considerations can make aspects of power
visible in relation to rape and spur their inclusion in legal analyses. In her
study of two Swedish Supreme Court cases, Andersson explores the way
in which the sexual act of rape is linked to gender, place and vulnerabil-
ity. She finds that place is excluded from the Supreme Court’s reasoning.
Both cases were decided in 2008 and involved defining the kind of “sex-
ual act” that constitutes rape under Swedish criminal law, one case deal-
ing with an assault against a woman and the other against a man. Her
conclusion is that the exclusion of the relevance of place and the phal-
locentric and heteronormative legal notion of sexuality together frame
11
the male body as invisible in the legal narratives and render the Supreme
Court unable to conceive of the violation of a man’s body as rape.
In her analysis of news reports about two hyper-reported Swedish
rape cases, Nilsson shows how a moral geography is evoked in the news
media, based on the locations where the rapes were committed and the
movements within them by the young men and women involved. Her
main argument is that the narrative features of location and movement
are utilised as proxies for the socio-spatial dimensions of power and
morality that defines the matter of blame and guilt in the master narra-
tive of rape. Among other things, Nilsson shows that the actual crossing
of boundaries has the narrative function of transforming the individual
from vulnerable or marginalised to blameworthy. The news narratives,
Nilsson argues, thus effectively reproduce the norms for our movement
in space as they map the spatial dimensions of power formed by inter-
sections of gender, ethnicity, class and age.
Watson exemplifies the transformation from court narrative to news
narrative with an analysis of a rape case in which the accused man was
an elite Indigenous Australian footballer—a case, Watson shows, in
which the negotiation between race and gender became particularly
complex and problematic. More specifically, Watson investigates the
process of media reporting on race and sexual violence by compar-
ing court reporting with the transcripts of the trial. While the defence
counsel’s objective in court is to introduce “reasonable doubt” into
jurors’ minds, and thus lawyers commonly evoke both victim-blaming
stereotypes and racial stereotypes to do so, court reporters are ethically
obligated to present a balanced account. Nevertheless, references to race
drawn from courtroom narratives remain fraught in the news media
version, Watson argues, with the potential to reinforce these beliefs
within the wider community, presenting barriers to justice for rape vic-
tims and people of colour.
Social media offers a multitude of platforms for the narration of
experiences of sexual violence. In their study, which focuses on pain
memes in relation to materiality and genre, Kaitlynn Mendes, Katia
Belisário and Jessica Ringrose show that where we narrate affects what
we narrate. Mendes, Belisário and Ringrose employ the concept of
“platform vernacular” to study how experiences of pain are narrated
12
U. Andersson et al.
through pain memes circulating through the campaigns “Who Needs

Feminism?” and “Project Unbreakable”. In part, their study reveals that
the pain memes on these forums reiterate master narratives of rape and
seek to evoke the sympathy of the reader through the narration of “pal-
atable” experiences. In addition, their study demonstrates that these
sites offer a venue for narrative agency and the opportunity to speak
back to dominant rape narratives. In sum, their study points to both the
pitfalls and possibilities of digital storytelling.
The reception of women’s testimonies of rape, and in particular of
the “high-profile” cases that circulate extensively in the media, is the
focus of Tanya Serisier’s paper. She complicates the notion that we
have now entered an era in which women’s stories of sexual violence
are believed and validated. She draws on Leigh Gilmore’s concept of
the “tainted witness” to reveal reception patterns of doubt that often
reproduce notions of “real rape” (attack rape by a stranger) and “simple
rape”. Serisier’s intersectional analysis demonstrates not so much that
some stories are either validated or doubted as that some storytellers are
validated or doubted due to the workings of class, race, sexuality etc.
Serisier identifies two main patterns of doubting online: firstly, ama-
teur investigations assessing the “facts” gathered online and, secondly,
how the frame questions the interpretation that the victims give to their
experiences.
In her chapter, Lena Karlsson investigates mainstream media’s recep-
tion of three Swedish digital campaigns against sexual violence dur-
ing the period 2010–2013: #talkaboutit, #theunreported and #getit.
In order to mobilise widely, activists seek to disseminate their message
broadly across multiple platforms. This chapter explores how the cam-
paign messages are translated across media. Which witness accounts are
seen as valid grounds for political action? Which audience is presented
as implicated by the campaigns? Through an analysis of citation politics,
Karlsson shows how some campaigns are presented as majority concerns
by the validation of the spokespeople as knowledge producers who can
speak for general national concerns, whereas other campaigns and the
testimonial voices within them are rendered minority concerns by the
way in which their accounts are presented as age and place specific, and
the concerns of these campaigns are supported by various expert voices.
13
Karlsson thus provides an intersectional analysis of mainstream media’s

representation of online campaigns against sexual violence.
In her end discussion, “The persistence of a masculine point of view
in public narratives about rape”, Nicola Gavey assesses the findings in
this volume as the contested place of rape at this historical juncture. She
points to both a persistent masculine viewpoint in what can be said,
heard and understood concerning sexual violence as well as how rape
as how rape “as a practice, as a claim and as a social problem” (Gavey
2019) gets used in other agendas, in particular nationalist and racist
agendas.
Note
1. The editors Ulrika Andersson, Monika Edgren, Lena Karlsson, Gabriella
Nilsson have compiled this volume as part of the research project Rape
in Sweden: Historical Intersectional Perspectives on Rape Narratives in
Different Genres 1990–2013 (421–2014–732) funded by the Swedish
Research Council.
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2
Excluding Power from a Narrative:
Sexual Harassment in a Criminal
Law Reform
Johanna Niemi
Introduction1
Sexual harassment is a widespread practice. A Europe-wide study
conducted in 2014 showed that more than 50% of women had expe-
riences of sexual harassment and one-fifth had these experiences during
the year immediately prior to the survey (FRA 2014). These harass-
ment incidents took different forms, such as unwelcome touching,
offensive and intimidating verbal comments and harassing behaviour on
the internet and other electronic fora.
In the autumn of 2017, the #metoo campaign made sexual harass-
ment visible and drew attention to the power relations that make it pos-
sible. The campaign was triggered by cases of sexual harassment in the
movie industry in which power relations are often quite obvious: young
actors and actresses are dependent on the directors and producers for
J. Niemi (*) 
Faculty of Law, University of Turku, Finland
e-mail: Johanna.niemi@utu.fi
18
J. Niemi
getting roles and having their careers promoted (Kleppe and Røyseng
2016). In 2017 and 2018, several areas, such as film, universities and
law, have started their own internal investigations.
In the legal sphere, sexual harassment is usually framed as an issue
of gender-based discrimination within the workplace. Sexual harass-
ment was first taken into the courtroom in the USA during the 1970s
as an issue of sex-based discrimination in the workplace. Power relations
in the workplace have been part of the conceptualisation of the issue
(MacKinnon 1979). Sexual harassment in working life was discussed
in the European Union during the 1990s, and in 2002 the Gender
Equality Directive was amended (Dir 2002/73/EU; now 2006/54/EU)
to include sexual harassment as a form of discrimination (Zippel 2009;
Numhauser-Henning and Laulom 2011). Today, sexual harassment and
violence against women more generally are seen as forms of gender-
based discrimination (European Parliament 2017; Istanbul Convention
2011).
As #metoo has brought to light, sexual harassment is not limited to
the workplace. Harassment also increasingly takes place in cyberspace
(Franks 2012; FRA 2014). Even though #metoo has been predomi-
nantly conceptualised as a campaign against sexual harassment, it has
also brought to light more serious sexual crimes, such as sexual abuse
and rape.
Sexual harassment is also intersectional: Young women are more
likely to be harassed and women with higher educational and profes-
sional positions are more likely to report it (FRA 2014; Latcheva 2017).
Young women in particular are likely to experience sexual harassment
outside traditional workplaces, because their jobs are often precarious,
and they are more likely than middle-aged women to be outside the
workforce, either in education or unemployed. The film industry is just
one example of a precarious job market with short contracts and unre-
liable working hours. On the other hand, young men, and especially
immigrant males in public places, are more likely to be identified as har-
assers than persons who abuse positions of power.
The European Union seems to have a basis for counteracting inter-
sectional harassment because harassment on the basis of sexual orien-
tation, age, disability, religion or belief (Dir 2000/78/EU) and race or
2 Excluding Power from a Narrative …
19
ethnicity (Dir 2000/43/EU) is defined as discrimination. However, the

scope of these directives is limited to working life, work-related social
security and vocational training, leaving much harassment outside the
regulations.
Thus, there is a need to think about alternative forms of regulation.
Sexual harassment can be conceptualised as an issue of criminal law
and a violation of personal integrity (Numhauser-Henning and Laulom
2011). In various national laws, we find examples of this approach. For
example, France has relied on a criminal-law definition (Saguy 2018).
In Sweden, sexual harassment (sexuellt ofredande ) has been recognised as
a sexual crime, including both physical touching and verbal harassment,
even though the law has rarely been enforced in cases of verbal harass-
ment (Wegerstad 2015; Andersson and Wegerstad 2018).
As the question of violence against women has risen up the agenda of
international organisations since the early 1990s, sexual harassment has
been included as a form of violence against women (UN Declaration
1993: art 2; CEDAW GR 1993). Now, violence against women is con-
ceptualised in international law as a form of discrimination against
women. These forms of violence are also seen as criminal offences.
When it comes to sexual harassment, the attitude is more ambivalent.
For example, the Council of Europe Convention on Violence against
Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention 2011: art 40)
does require policies and legal remedies against sexual harassment but
does not require that these be of a criminal nature.
Both anti-discrimination law and the violence against women
approach position sexual harassment in the context of gendered power
relations. However, sexual harassment is so embedded within the domi-
nant power relations that policies and regulations challenging these rela-
tions often provoke resistance (Tinkler 2012; Pate 2017).
Recent contributions to legal scholarship have opened up the dis-
cussion about whether a criminal law approach to sexual harassment is
desirable (Luzon 2017; Saguy 2018). It is often argued that it is badly
suited to criminal regulation. The imprecise definitions of sexual harass-
ment would be incompatible with the criminal law principles of legality,
proportionality and individual culpa (Luzon 2017; RP 216/2013: 3.2).
In addition, feminist criminal law scholars have cautioned against
20
J. Niemi
unwarranted optimism in the possibilities of criminal law (Smart 1995;

Lacey 1998; Nousiainen 1999; Burman 2010).
This chapter discusses the role of criminal law as a tool to counter
sexual harassment in the case of the concrete legislative process of mak-
ing sexual harassment a criminal act that took place in Finland during
2014. The main focus is upon whether and how gendered power rela-
tions are stressed or dismissed in the legislative process and what the
consequences of the approach to gendered power are on the formula-
tion and implementation of the law. Furthermore, the relationship
between sexual harassment and other sexual crimes is of interest: Are
there borderline issues and, if so, does a new regulation underline or
dilute the seriousness of sexual crime in general?
Theory, Method and Data

This research draws on social constructionism, critical discourse analy-
sis and feminist theory. This is a study about a process of social con-
struction: how a discourse of sexual harassment, filled with references
to gender inequality, is transformed into a crime of sexual molestation
couched in objective and gender-neutral terms. This process is seen
as part of a broader narrative of equality in the Nordic countries and,
especially in Finland, of equality which is already an achieved state,
excluding any need to discuss gendered power relations (Nousiainen
and Niemi-Kiesiläinen 2001; Svensson et al. 2004; Kantola 2006;
Pylkkänen 2009).
Thus, the aim of this chapter, to research how power is narrated in
legal texts, means analysing a narrative that is elusive and often non-
existent. Critical discourse analysis is interested in revealing the natu-
ralised power relations in discourses (van Dijk 2001; Fairclough 2010).
Thus, in reading the legislative works, parliamentary documents,
case law and case summaries, attention is paid to how power rela-
tions are discussed, sidelined or ignored. As power is seldom explicitly
addressed, attention is paid to how the discourses address structural
factors, such as employment and hierarchical positions (Andersson and
Mattsson 2011).
21
As a counter-argument to introducing sexual harassment into crim-

inal law, the general principles of criminal law are invoked and used as
a defence against foreign elements. Thus, the identity of criminal law as
a legal discipline seems to be in question. Identity is often constructed
by defining the “other”, in this case other legal disciplines, which are
better suited to regulate the issue. Thus, one focus of the analysis is how
the criminal law discourse demarcates itself as distinct from other legal
disciplines.
Liz Kelly’s widely used theory of a continuum of violence places dif-
ferent forms of violence against women on the same continuum, reflect-
ing power and control over women (Kelly 1987). The idea that control
is an integral part of most forms of violence against women is by now
a generally accepted part of understanding such violence (FRA 2014,
2017). Kelly places sexual harassment along the continuum with other
forms of sexual violence, such as: sexual assault, pressure to have sex,
coercive sex and rape. In the concept of the continuum of violence,
different forms of violence are not necessarily distinguished from each
other along the continuum, nor in the definitions and descriptions
given by victims (Kelly 1987; Hlavka 2014). Thus, it is important to
examine how sexual harassment is distinguished from other sexual
crimes in case law.
The data in this study consists, firstly, of the preparatory works on
the crime of sexual molestation in the Finnish Criminal Code and,
secondly, of the summaries of the 65 verdicts that had been deliv-
ered by October 2017. The legislative works include the Bill of 2013
(HE 216/2013) and the Reports of the Parliamentary Committees
(LUB 4/2014; GlUU 6/2014), which have been subject to discourse
analysis. The analysis has marked references to power, including as sub-
categories discrimination and references to other fields of law, as well
as discussions of criminal law as a system, as a set of principles and the
protected good of the new crime. As one of the principles of Finnish
criminal law is gender neutrality, references to sex/gender (sukupuoli)
were marked as a specific category for analysis.
By 2017, there was already a cluster of cases in the district courts.
Finland’s major newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, collected the decisions
and published summaries of them, and these have been used as the data
22
J. Niemi
for this analysis. By November 2017, there was a total of 65 verdicts.

In additions, 12 district court decisions were obtained. The analysis
has focused on the structural elements of power relations, such as age,
the place where the harassment occurred and the hierarchical relations
between the parties.
The Legislative Process

The Bill
The idea of introducing the criminal offence of sexual harassment was

first briefly mentioned in the Government Bill for a reform of sexual
crimes in 1997 (RP 6/1997: 162). At that time, the idea was dismissed
with a statement that criminal law was not considered an appropriate
tool to address sexual harassment.
The Bill to criminalise sexual harassment was introduced in
Parliament in 2013, when the ratification process of the Istanbul
Convention was also pending. Notwithstanding, there are only very
brief references to this Convention (e.g. RP 216/2013: 46, 52), stating
that the Convention does not require any change in the legislation.
These few references do not position sexual harassment in the context
of violence against women or gender inequality as the Convention does
(e.g. Preamble and art 3; Explanatory Report 2011: 209).
In the Bill, the Finnish Government presented a lengthy discussion
on the issue of whether a new law was needed. However, the objectives
of the proposed new law were stated rather briefly. The law was aimed
at underlining the reprehensible nature of sexual harassment. In addi-
tion, the aims emphasised the need to bolster the identity of criminal
law as a discipline: to sustain the coherence of the criminal law system,
to respect the criminal law principles of legality and proportionality and
to use criminal law only as a last resort, ultima ratio, to meet social need
(RP 216/2013: 50).
A discussion on gender equality took up considerable space in the
Bill. However, sexual harassment was not addressed as an equality
23
problem that should be counteracted, nor was any statistical informa-

tion about it presented, ignoring two domestic studies that had reported
similar results as the FRA study of 2014 (Heiskanen and Piispa 1998;
Piispa et al. 2006). Gender equality was addressed as an issue that is reg-
ulated, defined, promoted and addressed elsewhere than in criminal law,
namely in the Equality Act. Furthermore, “[s]exual and gender-based
harassment as well as an order or encouragement to harass are deemed
as discrimination as defined in the Equality Act ” (HE 216/2013: 12,
italics added). Thus, the Bill demarcated equality as a matter for equal-
ity law, as opposed to criminal law. The rather detailed description
in the Equality Act and a shorter one in the labour safety legislation,
including crimes of work-safety offences (CC 47:1) and work discrimi-
nation (CC 47:3), serve the purpose of designating issues of discrimina-
tion and inequality to those fields of law that lie outside of criminal law
and criminal sanctions.
A full eight out of a total of 19 pages in the Bill discussing sexual
harassment were devoted to the Equality Act. These pages did not,
however, include any analysis of the relationship between sexual har-
assment and inequality or discrimination. Instead, the paragraphs of
the Equality Act (Law 609/1986) were spelled out. The definition of
sexual harassment, which since 2015 (Law 1329/2014) has included
harassment on the basis of gender identity or gender expression, in
the Equality Act echoes definitions in the EU directives (Numhauser-
Henning and Laulom 2011):
In this Act sexual harassment means verbal, nonverbal or physical

unwanted conduct of a sexual nature by which a person’s psychological
or physical integrity is violated intentionally or factually in particular
by creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive
atmosphere. (Equality Act 7.7 §)
The culmination of the analysis of the Equality Act was to argue that
acts that would be considered sexual harassment according to the defi-
nition of the Equality Act could be addressed in criminal law, as the law
stands.
24
J. Niemi
The main focus of the Bill was to analyse the limitations of the
criminalisation that follow from the principles of criminal law (RP
216/2013: 50–52). The first concern was that the provisions should
define the prohibited conduct precisely enough so as not to violate the
principle of legality; that is, all criminal offences must be described
in law, which is also stated in the European Convention on Human
Rights, article 7. This was considered to be challenging in respect of sex-
ual harassment, especially if the crime includes verbal harassment:
In a criminalisation like this, the formulation of the legal provision pre-

cisely and with clear borderlines is challenging… (RP 216/2013: 52)
Other measures and policies apart from criminal justice should be pri-
oritised in order to meet the desired goals, known in Nordic criminal
law as the ultima ratio principle, and also considered as part of the pro-
portionality principle (Tulkens 2011; Melander 2012). Thus, criminal
law should be the final option to sanction behaviour, and other legal
measures such as equality law and work-safety regulations should be pri-
oritised. And in the name of the consistency of the system, if the repre-
hensible conduct was already an offence under some other paragraph of
the Criminal Code, it should not be made doubly criminal (Pihlström
2018).
Indeed, after careful consideration of these systematic limitations set
by the criminal law system, the dominant discourse in the Bill is that no
reform is needed:
…the forms of harassment that do not violate sexual self-determination

but rather cause resentment do not necessarily represent an interest that
should be protected by criminal law…It has been argued that if the pur-
pose of a criminalisation is solely to “deliver a certain message” the rea-
sons for it should be considered very carefully… (RP 216/2013: 51)
Somewhat paradoxically in the light of the legality and ultima ratio

principles, a large part of the Bill was used to show that sexual har-
assment was already covered by the criminal law. Firstly, several cases
were presented to show that sexually harassing behaviour towards
25
adolescents, that is, children under 16 years of age, are already consid-
ered to be child sexual abuse (CC 20:6). Secondly, the crime of coer-
cion to a sexual deed with a sentence of up to three years’ imprisonment
(CC 20:4) was dismissed as irrelevant because it requires an element of
violent coercion or threat of violence. Besides, the Bill stated that sex-
ual harassment would not fulfil the requirement of intensity and the
essentially sexual nature of the deeds, which are elements of this crime
(RP 216/2013: 46).
Thirdly, the discussion turned to the crime of assault (CC 21:5). Two
cases were presented as examples in which the perpetrator had been
convicted of assault in district courts. The cases had proceeded to the
higher courts because the perpetrator had appealed against the com-
pensation for suffering. The case that had proceeded up to the Supreme
Court (KKO:2012:14) played a central role in the Bill’s argumentation
for the new law. The case and the subsequent erroneous argumentation
will be briefly presented here.
The facts of the case were quite simple. A, a male passenger in a taxi,
had grabbed the breasts of the female taxi driver, B, pushed his hand
between the driver’s legs and drawn her towards him during the jour-
ney. The district court convicted the passenger of normal grade assault
(CC 21:5) and ordered him to pay €100 in compensation for suffer-
ing. (No zero is missing.) A appealed to the appeal court, which upheld
the verdict. A then appealed to the Supreme Court on the compensa-
tion. The Tort Liability Act (412/194) was amended in 2004 (Law
509/2004) to allow compensation for suffering. The Supreme Court
undertakes a relatively complicated reasoning of the relevant section of
the Tort Liability Act. In contrast to the Appeal Court, which had con-
sidered the violation to be serious, the Supreme Court held that the vio-
lation was not serious, but according to the preparatory works of the
amendment (RP 167/2003: 54), a violation of sexual self-determination
and liberty carries the right to compensation notwithstanding how the
crime is labelled. Therefore, A was ordered to pay the compensation of
€100 for suffering to B.
According to the Bill, this example shows that sexually harassing con-
duct is a criminal assault. Thus, the main problem was that the cases do
not fall nicely into the criminal law system. The Bill concludes:
26
J. Niemi
The problem is not that the deed would go unpunished but that it is
necessary to apply regulations the purview of which does not naturally
cover these deeds. (RP 216/2013: 46)
This legal reasoning is problematic at best, and I would argue that it

is outright erroneous. It is true that the conduct in case KKO:2012:14
was criminal, not as an assault but as coercion to a sexual deed. The
Supreme Court gave no opinion on the criminal characterisation of the
deeds because they were not at issue there. Referring to expert opin-
ions, the Bill holds this case to be an example of the “least serious vio-
lation of sexual self-determination”, quoting the opinion of the Judge
Association. Such an assessment cannot be read in the SC verdict. On
the contrary, the Supreme Court seems to hold the deeds to be rather
serious in finding that “The sexual advances by A were, by their nature,
humiliating and caused fear and anxiety in B, underlined by her limited
opportunity to protect herself while she was driving a car”.
In addition, the Court positioned the case under violation of lib-
erty, which suggests that perhaps the offence of assault, which is a crime
against health, was not the correct characterisation of these deeds. The
crime of coercion to a sexual deed was not part of the prosecution, and
thus the courts never assessed whether the deed amounted to such.
Additionally, this crime has included the abuse of a helpless situation
since 2011 (Law 495/2011). In my opinion, this should have been a
textbook case of coercion to a sexual deed (CC 20:4). There is no
doubt that the conduct was essentially sexual. While the violence was
not very serious, force was used to such an extent that in the context of
rape it would have counted as violence and threat (ECtHR in M.C. v.
Bulgaria; Finnish SC:2013:96).
In a similar vein, the Bill discussed the offence of defamation
(CC 24:9), taking up an example in which a 30-year-old man had
touched a girl of 16 and kissed her cheek in a public place. The inci-
dent was presented as a typical investigation of defamation, defined as
an offence against someone’s honour. In my opinion, the analysis should
have related the conduct against coercion to a sexual act. In contrast to
SC:2012:14, the conclusion could have been that the conduct was nei-
ther coercive nor sexual enough to fall under this crime.
27
In discussing verbal harassment, the Bill lined up a whole set of

offences, such as disturbance of domestic peace, trespass, eavesdrop-
ping, illicit viewing, threatening, coercion, harassing communication
and stalking as examples of how different forms of sexual harassment are
criminal offences according to the Criminal Code.
After referring to all these different crimes, the Bill concludes
that the law already offers enough protection against sexual harass-
ment. In working life and education, the protection provided by the
Equality Act and work-safety regulations were found to be sufficient
(RP 216/2013: 45). In other situations, the protection of criminal law
covered most of the deeds, but it was illogical to prosecute for crimes
that primarily serve some other purpose to respond to sexual harass-
ment. The conclusion was that a new criminalisation was needed:
…because of the internal coherence of the criminal justice system. It

cannot be considered appropriate to apply provisions of assault and def-
amation in actions in which the perpetrator’s actions are clearly sexual in
nature, not actions against honour or health. (RP 216/2013: 53)
The Bill found that there is a lack of protection concerning occasional

sexual harassment in public places, especially groping. There were likely
to also be other examples of situations in which the existing offences
could not be used (RP 216/2013: 46). What these other situations
would be was not specified, but they referred to verbal harassment.
Thus, the Bill proposed to make a crime of “violations of sexual self-
determination by touching or similar acts” (RP 216/2013).
The language of the Bill is symptomatic. It is strikingly gender neu-
tral; gender is not mentioned at all, and human beings are described
as being a man or a woman only in the case examples. Sexual harass-
ment is not seen as a consequence or an expression of gendered power
relations. Power is explicitly mentioned only once, explaining that sex-
ual harassment can be a means to obtain a power position over another
person (RP 216/2013: 60). Even though equality is seen as a matter
belonging to the domain of the Equality Act, one outcome of the new
law is seen as improving equality (RP 216/2013: 52). Even here, the
28
J. Niemi
possibility of gendered power relations is downplayed by the gender-

neutral language:
It can be estimated that the accentuating of the integrity and self-

determination of other persons shall also lead more generally to positive
effects especially on gender equality. (Italics added RP 216/2013: 52)
Intersectionality is not mentioned in the Bill; thus, the phrase “other

persons” in the quote does not refer to gender identity or sexual
orientation.
While the Bill refrains from placing sexual harassment in the context
of inequality and discrimination, it does underline the sexual nature of
the harassment and the violation of sexual self-determination. The argu-
mentation and the actual proposal seem to be contradictory. While the
dominant argumentation states that the necessary protection is already
in place, and only less serious incidents may fall outside the existing
protection, suddenly there is a need to convince the reader that sexual
harassment in a public place may be shocking and that criminalisation
is necessary to prevent harassment (RP 216/2013: 52).
The Parliamentary Committees
The Constitutional Committee of Parliament plays a predominant

role in the organisation of the constitutional review of Bills and leg-
islation in Finland. The system relies on constitutional review during
parliamentary hearings by the Constitutional Committee, as the courts
can declare a law unconstitutional only if the incongruence is obvi-
ous. The Constitutional Committee consists of thirteen MPs and relies
on expert opinions on constitutional law. In this case, the committee
heard three experts, two in constitutional law and one in criminal law,
all of them male.
At the outset, the Committee seems to be devoted to gender equal-
ity: “It is also possible to argue for the criminalisation of sexual harass-
ment with arguments related to gender equality” (GrUU 6/2014). After
this statement, the gender-equality argument is dropped. Instead, the
29
Committee discusses the constitutional principles that may limit the

powers of the legislature. In particular, it focuses on the principle of
legality. It agrees that the Bill defines touching according to the prin-
ciple of legality, but it critiques the nonspecific nature of “other similar
conduct” in the Bill, asking for a more specific description and examples
of the prohibited conduct. In addition, the Committee suggests that
the offence title should be something other than “sexual harassment”
because the proposed crime was different from sexual harassment as
defined in the Equality Act.
Next, the Bill was discussed by the Committee of Legislation,
which solved this problem by deleting “other similar conduct” from
the proposed paragraph. In addition, they changed the title to “sexual
molestation”. Consequently, the new offence covers only sexual acts of
touching that violate sexual self-determination. The punishment is a
fine or imprisonment for a maximum of six months.
Concluding on the Legislative Process
The legislative work includes several paradoxes. They underline the

essentially sexual nature of harassment. As the Bill describes it:
…the deeds should have a certain intensity. It would be stroking,

squeezing, patting and equivalent acts…. the target of these actions

should be parts of the body that normally have a sexual meaning, such as,
breasts, sexual organs, butt or thighs. Kissing should also be counted as
touching as defined in this paragraph. (RP 216/2013: 59)
At the same time, the legislative documents underline that the purpose
is to make minor violations, such as “least serious violations of sexual
self-determination”, into criminal offences. The proposed and con-
firmed maximum penalty of six months in prison underlines the minor
nature of the offence.
Both the Committee and the Bill emphasised that the new crime
should not lead to diminished responsibility for sexual offences. Thus,
deeds that were offences according to existing law should not be
30
J. Niemi
convicted as sexual molestation, if the latter is a less serious crime. This

argument seems to contradict the problem of inconsistency; the crime
of assault, with a maximum penalty of two years, one of the unnatu-
ral ways of confronting sexual harassment, is a far more serious crime
than sexual molestation, carrying a maximum penalty of six months. In
the next part of the chapter, we will look at how this paradox is met in
practice.
Case Law: Sexual Molestation

Parliament confirmed the law in 2014, and it came into force on 1
September 2014. The law received publicity in early 2016 after sexual
harassment had occurred among people celebrating the New Year.
The complaints were later withdrawn, but the police had publicly
announced that they take all reports of sexual harassment seriously
and encourage women to report. Thus, this incident drew attention to
sexual harassment as a violation committed by immigrant men against
Finnish women in public places.
By November 2017, the police had received 1200 reports of sex-
ual molestation, more than 500 in 2016 alone. So far, 72 cases have
advanced to a verdict in the district courts. The data from the first 65
district court cases, reported by Helsingin Sanomat, includes essen-
tially sexual and explicit cases, in which the deeds have been obviously
non-consensual and usually included a combination of surprise attack,
mild force and a young and confused victim.
So far, all the perpetrators have been male. Their average age was
43, with a range from 16 to 87. The ethnicity of the parties was not
reported, but names suggest that about one-third of perpetrators had an
immigrant background (HS, 7 November 2017), far exceeding the pro-
portion of the Finnish population with such a background (less than
5%). Of all professions, taxi drivers were most commonly represented
among the perpetrators (5 cases).
KH, a 45-year-old taxi driver with a Muslim name, drove a client home
after a night in a restaurant. After some discussion, the driver proposed
31
to spend time with the client, who declined. Then they stepped out of
the taxi and the advances became more insistent, leading to KH holding
the client’s hands and pressing her towards the wall. The court found the
client’s testimony credible. It also found that “the defendant had abused
his trustworthy position as a taxi driver and that the client had a well-
founded fear that the defendant knows where she lives.” The defendant
was convicted of 80 day-fines totalling €1680 and to compensate €800
for suffering. (District Court Varsinais-Suomi, 16 November 2016,
Judgement 16/148050)
Three victims were male, and most other victims seem to be female,
although their gender was not reported in all cases. There is no infor-
mation about the ethnicity of the victims. It is important to note
that this data does not give a general picture of sexual harassment in
Finland, only of these very specific cases that have proceeded to a ver-
dict in the courts. We know from other sources that young people with
minority ethnic backgrounds suffer more harassment than majority
youth (Ollus et al. 2018; Isotalo 2016) and that LGBT persons expe-
rience multiple harassment in Finland as in other European countries
(FRA 2013).
The average penalty was 50 day-fines, varying from 5 to 100.2 The
victims were granted compensation in 55 cases, ranging from €100–
2500, with an average of €758.
The gap in protection identified in the Bill was a surprise groping by
an unknown person in a public place. This indeed was a typical case.
Almost half of the incidents occurred in public places, on the streets and
yards, in restaurants, in schools and one in a library. A special feature of
the Finnish context was that one group of cases had taken place in pub-
lic saunas or Jacuzzis (8%). Yet, almost 40% of the cases had taken place
in private locations: apartments, taxis and workplaces.
The power relations were generational and positioned. Even though
information about the ages of the victims was anecdotal, the perpetra-
tors were clearly older than the victims. More than one in four victims
were less than 18 years old.
In contrast to the assumption in the preparatory works that equal-
ity law and labour law offer sufficient protection against harassment at
32
J. Niemi
work, work-related harassment was not uncommon. In these cases, the

physical groping was preceded by verbal harassment. In seven cases, the
harassers were clients harassing women in service professions, and in
seven further cases, the harassers were superiors or other employees. In
these cases, the district courts were well-informed and sensitive to the
power relations between the parties:
A 30-year-old man had harassed two girls of 16 and 18 who worked on

the premises of a congregation. The parties did not know each other. The
man had kissed the girls on the breast area and taken their heads in his
hands and kissed them on the mouth and cheek. The court saw that the
man “abused the situation in which the girls had to take a polite attitude
towards the clients”. The penalty was 80 day-fines. (District Court Espoo,
27 January 2017, Judgement 17/103606)
In the workplace harassment, victims were often in precarious jobs,

such as trainees. Most of them were in service jobs, such as cleaners or
waiters:
A was a 16-year-old trainee at a restaurant where M was a chef. M, a

32-year-old with an immigrant background, according to the verdict
“used to talk suggestively to the trainees, among other things he had
asked for the colour of A’s underwear…M had ‘groped’ A in the crotch
and over the breast through the clothes. This had been brief and quick so
that not even A’s co-worker had seen it.” A was shocked and suffered from
insomnia. Together with her mother, she made a complaint to the police
immediately. The court “found no reason to doubt A’s testimony… even
if no one else had seen the event.” (District Court Oulu, 10 November
2016, Judgement 16/147008)
The courts showed sensitivity to the power relationships in the work-

place. Notwithstanding the exclusion of verbal harassment from the
crime, the courts did usually include a narrative of the preceding verbal
harassment in their reasoning. For example, in a case between a 27-year-
old male supervisor and a 17-year-old cleaner, the touching had not
been intensive but it was accompanied by verbal harassment. The court
reasoned:
33
In the assessment, it has to be taken into account that the defendant has
been the supervisor in the workplace and it has been a kind of position
of trust. Thus, the deed has violated the sexual self-determination of the
claimant. (District Court Pirkanmaa, 1 July 2016, Judgement 16/128757)
All of the actions were undoubtedly sexual in nature. A typical case in a

public place was a sudden groping of the breasts by a stranger. Holding
and kissing, pushing a hand between a woman’s legs and groping the
buttocks were typical actions. In some 20% of the cases, the action
was a smack on or pinch of the buttocks or thighs, but in most cases
the groping targeted breasts and/or other essentially sexual parts of the
body.
In five cases, the actions bordered on rape. Rape is defined as pene-
tration of the sexual organs or by use of the sexual organ using violence,
threat or the helpless or fearful state of the victim (CC 20:1). In three
cases, the perpetrator pushed his fingers into the woman’s vagina or tried
to do so. In one case, he pushed the head of the victim against his penis
and in one case he took the panties off a sleeping victim with the pre-
sumed intention of having intercourse. Given the intention of the leg-
islators that the new crime should not replace any more serious offence,
the legal issue in all these three cases is: why was the indictment for sex-
ual molestation and not for rape or attempted rape?
F and 27-year-old M, both of whom had typical Finnish names, “had

gone to M’s apartment, where they had kissed consensually and started
to sleep in the same bed. F had woken up when M’s fingers were in
her vagina and M had put her hand on his penis. M had stopped when
F stepped out of the bed.” M had confessed and was convicted to
100 day-fines, that is, to €600 and to compensate €800 to F. (District
Court Kainuu, 7 April 2016, Judgement 16/114120)
The borderline of coercion to a sexual deed (CC 20:4) was present in

several cases. There was no doubt that in all cases the deed had been
done without the consent of the victim. What distinguished them
from coercion to a sexual deed was the level of violence. The combined
effect of surprise action with the use of a low level of force meant that
34
J. Niemi
it was not considered as violence or threat of violence. In some cases,

the borderline seems to be set quite high: In one case, a man had fallen
on a woman in a restaurant, groping her on the breasts and body. The
woman had tried to resist and push him off. In another case, a man had
touched a sleeping woman on the crotch through her clothes.
In a typical case, a man of 34 had used sexual language with a
17-year-old victim and hugged her, put his arms around her, clasped
her on the buttocks, held her by the hips and massaged her thighs. The
seriousness of this case was signalled in the sanction: 75 day-fines and
€2000 in compensation to the victim.
The prosecution was brought for sexual molestation. In one sauna
case, the victim filed a charge of coercion to a sexual deed, which was
dismissed, and the defendant was convicted of sexual molestation:
The perpetrator, who had a typical Finnish name, had removed the claim-
ant’s bikini and touched her outer labia while she lay with her eyes closed
in a mixed sauna. The court argued that “It has not been shown that she
was unconscious. Given that the claimant was awake in a sauna, to which
other gym users have access, she was not in a helpless state, or unable to
express her opinion or defend herself as required in CC 20:4” (coercion
to a sexual deed). (District Court Helsinki, 20 July 2016, Judgement
16/13141)
The data suggests that intersectional factors are important. The intersec-
tion of age and gender is evident in the data: The victims are all young
women, several under 18, and the perpetrators are of all ages, with an
average age of 43, clearly older than the victims. In the workplace har-
assment, the victims were often in precarious work relations as trainees,
cleaners and helpers, underlining the relevance of class and, thus, the
power relations in harassment.
The data also points to the need to analyse the impact of sexual
harassment law on ethnic groups. The incidents at the 2015/2016
New Year’s Eve event drew attention to immigrant men as perpetra-
tors. The data that is used in this article confirms that native Finns
are also well represented among the perpetrators. However, it is possi-
ble that the law is applied differently to different groups. In the small
35
sample of verdicts, perpetrators with both Finnish and immigrant

names had harassed women in both work situations and restaurants.
Perpetrators with Finnish names were also charged for deeds in apart-
ments and saunas, and some of these cases bordered on rape. This
suggests that the intersectional effects of the crime need further study:
does the new crime mitigate the criminal responsibility of native
Finns for sexual crimes?
The data reveals a confusion between the crimes of coercion to a
sexual deed and sexual molestation. The prosecutors do not charge

perpetrators for sexual coercion, and therefore the elements of coer-
cion, a helpless state and fear are not discussed in the courts. The reason
seems to be that preparatory works did not discuss these elements but
dismissed the crime of coercion to a sexual deed as irrelevant. As rape
law is shifting from the use of force towards lack of consent as the
central element (Jokila and Niemi 2019), this case data manifests an
opposite trend; situations in which there has been no opportunity to
give consent are considered to be minor offences of molestation.
Conclusions
Gendered and intersectional power relations are essential in creating the
conditions for sexual harassment and in understanding it. At the begin-
ning of this study on the process of legislating for a new crime of sexual
harassment, I knew that I was looking for a narrative that is not there: a
narrative of power. Therefore, my reading focused on how the criminal
law discourse was constructed, as an area of neutrality in which gen-
der plays no role. Indeed, the narrative made a demarcation between
equality law and criminal law. While the law proposal discussed gen-
der equality at length, it did this by referring to the gender-equality
law and work-safety regulations. The main discussion in the legislative
works was the sustaining of the system of criminal law and its central
principles, legality and proportionality, which delimit the possibilities
for criminalising sexual conduct. While this narrative did not include an
analysis of gendered power, it clearly defined gender equality as a matter
for equality law, not criminal law.
36
J. Niemi
The omission of power from the legal narrative on sexual harassment

had consequences. Firstly, it led to the reduction of sexual harassment
to physical acts only, leaving verbal harassment out of the new crime,
now called sexual molestation. The process that led to this outcome
was contradictory: On the one hand, it minimised the deeds that the
new crime should encompass, while on the other hand it stressed that
sexual harassment is reprehensible and, actually, already covered by
existing crimes, such as assault or defamation. Notwithstanding these
already-existing crimes, the new crime should target less serious actions.
The court cases since 2014 show that there was a need for the new
crime of sexual molestation. Some 1000 reports to the police have led
to less than 100 convictions. The typical case was a surprise groping of
the breasts of a young woman.
The proposal for the law had envisioned the need to regulate the pub-
lic sphere, but several cases concerned molestation in private domains
and workplaces. While equality and work-safety law focus on employ-
ers, there seems to be a need to sanction the harassers as well, be they
supervisors, workmates or clients. In these cases, the discourses in the
district court verdicts expressed sensitivity towards power relationships
in the workplace.
Intersectional grounds for discrimination were not discussed during
the legislative process, but they come across in the court cases. Sexual
harassment is predominantly directed towards young women, many of
them under 18 years old, while the perpetrators in the data were males
of all age groups and older than the victims. Gender and age were inter-
sectional with social status, as the victims were often students, train-
ees or working in low-status, precarious jobs. Ethnicity played a role
as well. While there was scant information on the ethnicity of the vic-
tims, the perpetrators were both native Finns and immigrants. However,
the law seems to work differently for different groups of perpetrators.
While men with an immigrant background had mostly harassed women
in public places and sometimes in the workplace, native Finns had also
harassed in private apartments and other semi-private locations, such as
bathing places.
In all cases, the deeds were essentially sexual. What distinguished
them from more serious sexual crimes was the degree of force that was
37
used. Some of the cases included elements of rape and several cases
could have been prosecuted as coercion to a sexual deed, a much more
serious offence. The intention of the legislators was not to replace more
serious sexual offences by the new crime or to minimise sexual violence,
but this seems to have happened.
The analysis underlines the importance of understanding power in
gender relations. Equality law and criminal law are not alternatives in
legislating for sexual harassment, but both are needed. Equality, gender
and power relations are not issues for equality law only, they permeate
all fields of law. Discussions about gender-specific legal issues, in crimi-
nal law as well, should be informed by gender and gendered power rela-
tions. Otherwise, the outcome can be a law and practice that minimise
the harm suffered by the victims, both women and men.
The legislative process studied here took place just three years before
#metoo, a campaign that gives reasons for optimism. In the prevention
of sexual harassment, a change in attitudes, along with internally open
and transparent processes in workplaces and professions such as the
movie industry, are the key to success. However, equality laws and crim-
inal law have a role in forming these practices. The raised consciousness
about power relations in sexual harassment should inform the criminal
law processes in legislative bodies as well as in the courts.
Notes
1. The starting point of this article was a Nordic seminar on rape law in
Oslo, April 2016, in which I first spoke about power and sexual harass-
ment. I want to thank the organisers for putting me on this track. Much
has changed since then, and I have spoken about sexual harassment on
several occasions and received valuable feedback from many people.
Special thanks to Associate Professor Ulrika Andersson for her valuable
feedback, and to Istvan Rytkönen for research assistance. The chapter
was written with the academy of Finland Grant 281788/2014.
2. In four cases, the conviction also included other crimes, leading to
imprisonment.
38
J. Niemi
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3
Conditional Vulnerability: Rape Narratives
in Swedish Courts, 1990–2014
Monika Edgren
Introduction
In many cultural contexts, a woman who voluntarily takes part in a sex-
ual encounter that ends in rape may have difficulty being recognized as
a victim. This may apply equally to a prostitute or a married woman,
and men in subordinate positions may also face a similar dilemma.
This predicament relates to the premise that individuals are only seen
as vulnerable when their agency is dissociated from structural condi-
tions (cf. Mardorossian 2014; Stringer 2014). However, we are all vul-
nerable, some more than others. We all have agency, although some
of us have more constraints upon our agency than others, depending
upon our social positions. The difficulty of being recognized as both a
victim of rape and as having agency at the same time may, as Carine
Mardorossian argues, depend upon a dichotomous framing of vulnera-
bility and agency, which makes it “difficult for people to recognize that
M. Edgren (*) 
Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden
e-mail: monika.edgren@mah.se
44
M. Edgren
one may have sexual agency, even be extremely ‘promiscuous’ and still
be the victim of rape or that a person does not have to be or act ‘inno-
cent’ to be a victim, that completely immoral individuals can be victim-
ized too” (Mardorossian 2014: 35).
This chapter will examine if and how such dichotomous thinking
frames narratives of vulnerability and agency in rape cases brought
before Swedish courts. The Swedish context is particularly interest-
ing since Sweden is well-known internationally for its long tradi-
tion of acknowledging gender inequality; thus, one might imagine
that rape victims in this context would not be blamed. The choice
of context is further motivated by changes in Swedish gender equal-
ity policy and legislation from the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury to the present day: for instance, the criminalization of spousal
rape in 1965 and an ongoing push to achieve freedom from violence
against women since the 1990s. A general policy of gender equal-
ity was established in the late twentieth century (see, for example,
Borchorst and Siim 2008); it included a ban on the purchase of
sexual services in 1999, a linchpin in constructions of Swedishness
(e.g. Wendt Höjer 2012).
In a study on reports of rape across Europe, Jo Lovett and Liz Kelly
(2009) show that high rates of reported rape and low rates of con-
viction distinguish the Nordic countries as well as Ireland, England,
Wales and Scotland. These countries and regions have in common a
long tradition of gender equality policies and legislation, as well as a
long tradition of women´s movements. Sweden has the highest num-
ber of reported rapes in Europe, owing to a broadened definition of
rape as well as effective police recording mechanisms. Additionally,
willingness to report rape, even partner rape, is greater in Sweden
than in many other countries. Yet the number of rape convictions
is low (Lovett and Kelly 2009). The UN Special Rapporteur on vio-
lence against women said in 2007 that Swedish equality policy “was
not effective in dealing with the deeply rooted unequal power rela-
tions between women and men” and “perpetrator and victims can be
found in all segments and at all levels of society” (FN Human Rights
Council, A/HRC/4/34/Add.3, Ferb. 3, 2007: 9). The UN has also
urged Sweden to tackle stereotyped images and beliefs about gender
3 Conditional Vulnerability: Rape Narratives …
45
expressed in the media and advertising, as well as the sexualizing of

the public space (Wendt 2010: 137). In addition, criticism has been
directed against Swedish gender equality policy for exclusion on the
base of nationalistic and heteronormative principles (Martinsson et al.
2016). Hence, with respect to gender equality and sexual violence,
Sweden appears to be a country of many paradoxes.
My aim here is to examine written court narratives about rape as
cultural texts, and to shed light on some of the apparent paradoxes in
the Swedish context, by analysing the construction of vulnerability and
agency in relation to female rape victims from a historical and inter-
sectional perspective. My examination covers the period 1990–2014, a
time of comprehensive political change and discussion as regards gen-
der equality, increased social inequality, and immigration. Rape laws, for
example, were amended several times during this period. A key issue is
whether these years saw any change in how Swedish courts perceive the
vulnerability and agency of women.
I am inspired by Peter Brooks, who argues that in order to under-
stand how rapes are both alleged to have taken place and not to have
taken place, we must analyse how narratives are built up in court: how
“incidents and events are made to combine in a meaningful story”
(Brooks 2002: 3). The production of a meaningful story is also depend-
ent upon how both the plaintiff and the defendant are presented in the
narrative. Brooks claims that it makes sense, for instance, if a raped
woman is presented as bar-hopping (Brooks 2002). Because each court
case in Sweden’s legal system consists of a variety of fragmented stories,
each making a truth claim, it is important to also investigate how the
final story, the assessment of the court, is constructed. As Brooks argues
in The Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (1996: 18), we
must ask how a case that is “decided by a jury ‘beyond a reasonable
doubt’, then go on to appeal, and have the narrative that won in the
courtroom reversed?” In such cases, he suggests, the Court of Appeal
“retell[s] the story with a different outcome, using a different narra-
tive ‘glue’ to bind events together”. I regard court narratives as cultural
texts. This includes not only the final assessment of the court, but also
the background narrative it assembles first, wherein plaintiffs, defend-
ants and other witnesses are (re)presented and present their stories. As
46
M. Edgren
feminist researchers in this volume argue, narratives of rape are condi-

tioned by historical and cultural context, power, and social order.
Taking Brook’s reflections as a point of departure, I will examine
whether a dichotomous view of female vulnerability and agency func-
tions as a kind of ‘glue’ in court narratives about rape, and whether any
changes are discernible during the period 1990–2014. The feminist per-
spective, which will be further outlined below, challenges a narrow and
common framing of rape victims as associated with either vulnerability
or agency (cf. Lacey 1997; Mardorossian 2014; Gilson 2016).
Rape, Vulnerability, and Agency:

Theoretical Considerations
In Sweden, rape is defined with reference to intercourse, which, as
Ulrika Andersson argues, denotes mutuality. Force or exploitation have
been the necessary prerequisites for rape convictions during the period
I am investigating (Andersson 2018). Since the 1980s, the perception of
what makes rape particularly atrocious has shifted in Sweden, from the
infliction of physical violence to a focus on harm to personal and sexual
integrity (Andersson 2004; Nilsson 2009; Asp 2010: 60). In the 1980s,
sexuality became the prime factor at issue in acts of rape, undergirded
by women’s demands for freedom (including sexual freedom) and the
right to control their own bodies. This shift made sexuality a central
focus in the crime of rape (Leijonhufvud 2015: 24f ).
In legal doctrine, a legal subject is understood to be autonomous,
meaning free, rational, and disconnected from historical, social, and
patriarchal contexts (cf. Lacey 1997; Andersson 2004; Mardorossian
2014). This liberal understanding of the subject as an autonomous
agent is sometimes referred to in feminist literature as “robust agency”
(Mardorossian 2014: 36). Here, I take issue with the liberal understand-
ing of agency. My theoretical starting point in this chapter is inspired
by Carine Mardorossian, who argues that we are all vulnerable to oth-
ers and that a victim is someone whose vulnerability has been abused.
Agency should not be lumped together with autonomy, free will, and
47
subjectivity (Mardorossian 2014; see also Lacey 1997; Fineman 2008).

This means it is also crucial to rethink “the historical association of
masculinity with an ennobled or vilified form of self-reliant agency”
(Mardorossian 2014: 14).
It is an issue if a woman who initially agreed to a sexual encounter
cannot be recognized as a victim whose vulnerability has been abused. It
is an issue if a person must act and be perceived as “innocent” in order
to be recognized as a victim (Mardorossian 2014: 35). And it is an issue
if a young woman who is drunk and in the “wrong” place later has dif-
ficulty being recognized as a rape victim. Follow the logic of binarity, to
achieve victim status, this young woman must first be declared weak.
In other words: she must be stripped of agency. The dichotomization
of vulnerability and agency has been reinforced since the 1990s due to
a professionalization of the psychological counselling of rape victims,
where the implication is that the victims are weak and in need of help.
The result is to make rape an individual matter rather than a structural
problem tied to ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity
(see Fineman 2008; Bourke 2012; Mardorossian 2014; Stringer 2014;
McKenzie-Mohr 2014; Gilson 2016).
Case Selection and the Narrative Approach

For this chapter, I made an initial selection of twenty-three cases from
various judicial instances in different regions of Sweden. These cases all
attracted media attention, mostly owing to outrage over the verdicts.
All involved female plaintiffs and male defendants. The vulnerability of
the plaintiff was a central aspect in the media outrage, as I will make
brief note of when relevant. From these twenty-three cases I chose five
that were particularly notable and medialized: the first from 1990, the
others occurring in conjunction with the introduction of new legisla-
tion in 1998, 2005, and 2013. I will discuss these changes to the law
in my analysis of the cases. Of course, such a small number of cases can
give only a few indications of how vulnerability and agency may be con-
structed, relative to legislative changes and the historically situated and
48
M. Edgren
social positionings of plaintiffs and defendants. Even this small number,

however, allows for in-depth discussion. The elements highlighted in
the court narratives differ across cases and across judicial instances. For
each case, my analysis begins with the district court, which in Sweden
is presided over by one judge and three lay judges who are political
appointees. It continues with the appellate court, presided over by three
judges and two lay judges. The Supreme Court is presided over by five
judges. Following cases through the levels of the judiciary reveals differ-
ences between those levels, deepening my analysis of constructions of
vulnerability.
Narrative research covers a wide range of subjects and perspec-
tives. There is no single view of what counts as a narrative, where
a narrative begins or ends, or how to conduct this kind of research
(Andrews et al. 2013; Kohler-Riessman 2013). The analytical focus
in this chapter is on the background narratives and assessment narra-
tives offered by the court. Background narratives are based on evi-
dence presented to the court; they mediate witness stories and form
the basis for the assessment narratives. All court narratives are co-
constructed and contested and serve to shape a social context that in
turn shapes them: namely how we understand, interpret, and e xperience
rape. Here, I explore how narratives are made to carry meaning, how
they define the events and contexts that matter/do not matter. Even
an apparently objective compilation of events suggests an explanation
of the relationship between those events that might lead the reader
to certain conclusions about who is to blame, and on what grounds.
The intersectional positioning of plaintiffs and defendants is also
important. One position often underemphasized in analyses of sexual
violence is class (Anthias 2014). Other pertinent social positions are
race/religion and civil status. To approach the issue of vulnerability
and agency I will identify how different hierarchical social positions
operate. Court judgement, to withstand appeal, must be coherent:
to that end, judgements rebuff vagueness, ambiguities, and what
look like unclear boundaries. I will be alert to potential vaguenesses,
inconsistencies, and ambiguities that can be linked to constructions
of vulnerability and agency.
49
Narratives of Female Vulnerability

in Five Court Cases
An Agent Free to Exploit Her Body May
Be Vulnerable Too
In my first case, from 1990 (Stockholm DC, B 579/90), the district

and appellate courts reached different conclusions about the vulnera-
bility of a woman who presented herself in her testimony as a prosti-
tute with a heroin addiction. The background narrative places a series of
events in chronological and spatial order. The parties in the case met at
Malmskillnadsgatan in Stockholm, a well-known red-light district. In a
taxi to the defendant’s apartment they agreed on a price for sex. As they
began to undress, it became apparent that the defendant did not have
enough money, whereupon the plaintiff began to get dressed again. The
defendant struck the plaintiff with his closed fist and threatened her,
saying he had served six years in prison for assault. By eliciting fear, he
prevented the plaintiff from leaving the apartment (p. 3).
The adequate signifiers of the rape were narrated in sexually erotic
terms: the same used in the agreement on the sale and purchase of sex-
ual services, as will be shown. Intercourse was the narrative pivot, sig-
nalling reciprocity. “They had intercourse in the sofa”, “he started…
intercourse in the so-called missionary position”, “he wanted anal sex”,
and “had intercourse from behind”. The same vocabulary, extended to
“sexual activities”, recurs in the assessment narrative (Stockholm DC,
B 579/90). Any reciprocity, however, was abruptly ended by the force
and violence that injured and harmed the plaintiff. The plaintiff first
reported the rape three days later, because she “thought that as a pros-
titute, she would not be believed” (p. 5). The assessment narrative actu-
ally accepted this explanation plausible and found “it unreasonable that
[she] would have voluntarily stayed in the apartment with an unknown
man and agreed to intercourse against the promise of future payment”,
as, being a heroin addict, she was in desperate need of quite a lot of
money every day (s. 9). The district court judged her story credible and
ruled the assault to be rape through physical force. The defendant’s story
50
M. Edgren
of consensual sex was dismissed. His violent criminal record was men-
tioned, further boosting the credibility of the plaintiff, who had been
forthcoming about her unfortunate situation. The defendant was sen-
tenced to two years in prison.
The question of vulnerability and agency is reflected in the issue of
mental harm. The assessment narrative did not deal with harm in men-
tal terms, an issue when it came to damages. The plaintiff argued that
after the rape, she was “afraid of being alone”, “suffered from sleep dis-
order” and “had nightmares” (p. 10). On the basis that the plaintiff
was a prostitute, the defendant argued for lower than normal damages,
which was codified opinion in the late nineteenth century (Svanström
2005). The district court, however, argued that rape is a violation of
personal integrity no matter the occupation of the victim. In doing so,
the court normalized prostitution by viewing it as an occupation and
framed the plaintiff as what I will call an agent free to exploit her body.
Although prostitution was on the political agenda at the time, prosti-
tutes were not always, as in this case, cast as free to exploit their body
while also being vulnerable and deserving of protection. In fact, as I will
show below, the appellate court contested this view.
The court of appeal (RH 1991: 35) did not change the jail sen-
tence but reduced the damages by half, even though the plaintiff
argued that the normal damages for rape should be assessed. She
insisted that this was a rape of a woman, not of a prostitute. The
argument of the appellate court rested on doubt as to whether a
prostitute could be considered vulnerable. The plaintiff was ascribed
agency in a liberal sense: according to the sequence of events set out
in the background narrative, she had voluntarily consented to inter-
course, and she had also continued to work as a prostitute after her
rape. Hence, she had not been injured enough. Her potential vulner-
ability was assessed and evaluated in relation to her supposed agency,
in the sense of being a determined individual. In a dissenting opin-
ion, one of the three professional judges argued for equality before
the law, noting that “prostitutes are exposed to severe repression by
men” (RH 1991: 35). This judge recognized the possibility of vulner-
ability arising from patriarchal structures. His standpoint, however,
was the exception.
51
In dealing with vulnerability, the two courts reached different con-

clusions (cf. Brooks 1996). The lower court constructed the image of a
woman free to exploit her body while also recognizing her vulnerability
in relation to the defendant’s social position: namely criminal mascu-
linity. She was offered the position of the rape victim, injured in her
innermost being. This victimizing discourse contributes to what Gilson
has called “heteronormative conceptions of gender, sexuality and desire”
(2011: 94). The higher court gave the plaintiff “robust” agency and
minimized her vulnerability by pointing out the evidence of her contin-
ued prostitution. Embedded in this reasoning is a discourse of mutual
sexuality that disguises power. All in all, the question of whether it was
possible to violate the personal sexual integrity of a prostitute proved
debatable, revealing contradictions and paradoxes in constructions of
vulnerability and agency.
From Weak Victim to Robust Agency and Back Again
Swedish law in the 1990s stated that rape requires force/violence. My

second case, from 1997 (recently explored from a somewhat differ-
ent angle in Andersson and Edgren 2018), was precedential (Supreme
Court B 2078/97) in that the statutory requirement of a “helpless state”
was used after changing the rape charge to one of sexual exploitation.
Thus, in contrast to the previous case, the conviction did not hinge
solely on the use of violence, and it was along these lines that the plain-
tiff was perceived as vulnerable. In this case, constructions of plain-
tiff vulnerability and agency shifted back and forth from one judicial
instance to another. The case also reveals a trauma discourse with an
impact on agency, something that was visible in the previous case in the
matter of damages and also appears as a significant aspect of later cases.
In this case, four young men were charged with the rape and attempted
rape of a young woman. The background narrative assembled by the dis-
trict court (Södertälje DC, B 1695/96) began in the conventional way,
tracking the whereabouts of the parties in space and time. After spend-
ing the evening in a restaurant where she consumed a great deal of alco-
hol, the plaintiff took the underground to Södertälje, an industrial suburb
52
M. Edgren
town of Stockholm known for its high concentration of immigrants.

While sitting on a bench, she was approached by a man who agreed to
take her home. She followed him to his car where four other men were
waiting. They were “talking together in a foreign language” (p. 11). In
the plaintiff’s own language, as filtered through the background narrative
of the court, the men raped her, one after the other, in the car and later
in a nearby flat. The violence was described in sexual terms—“the inter-
course hurt”; “this intercourse hurt more than the two earlier”—allowed
the plaintiff’s story to fit into a general narrative of erotic heterosexual sex
(pp. 11–12). In general, the sexualized vocabulary of rape explicitly con-
nects it to erotic sex rather than a problem of violence (cf. Wegerstad
2015: 194–313) or another exercise of power.
The sequence of events as narrated created an image of contradic-
tory vulnerability. The plaintiff was prompted to describe how she was
dressed: in “a short black dress, an orange see-through top”. She herself
called her clothing disgraceful (p. 10). Although not further emphasized
in the narrative, this blameworthy sign of femininity still weakened the
plaintiff’s status as a deserving victim. Even though the narrative stated
that one of the defendants was “very aggressive and violent and since
[the plaintiff] was sad and frightened she did not dare to resist”, the
meaning of this changed to be about the male sexual drive. The plain-
tiff became the victim of the young men’s “sole purpose to satisfy their
own sexual drives without regard to [her] feelings” (p. 27). A specific
discourse about male sexuality governs this narrative. The plaintiff was
portrayed as a victim of the youthful male sexual drive. Based on witness
testimony and forensic evidence, the assessment narrative asserted that
the plaintiff was very drunk and that “the intercourse had taken place”
(pp. 26–27). She was a victim with no power to resist, and the men
received “no clear signals that the offences were non-consensual” (p. 26).
In a cultural context other than the Swedish one, the fact that a
young girl out late, drunk and wearing a transparent top, escaped
responsibility for what happened to her might be perceived as astound-
ing. In the Swedish context, however, she was constructed as a victim.
In part, her age and the fact that she was assaulted by multiple men
played a role. Another not insignificant factor in the plaintiff appearing
weak and ‘innocent’ may have been the racial markers assigned to the
53
young men. The violence was attributed to the male sex drive. Thus, a
contradiction was created between vulnerability and agency.
In addition to discussing sex drives, the assessment narrative wove in
threads of alienation, including the Middle Eastern backgrounds and
potentially pathological family relationships of the defendants. Remarks
such as “child number three in an Assyrian family with parents origi-
nally from Turkey” and “the third of eight siblings” (p. 32) divided these
men from the Swedish community (cf. Bergenheim 2005; Bredström
2002; Andersson and Edgren 2018). The mention of eight siblings
may be read as a reference to lack of family planning, which signals
gender equality and social welfare in the Swedish context. The charge
was changed from rape to sexual exploitation and the defendants were
convicted.
The appellate court (Svea AC, B 286/97) took a different approach
to female vulnerability by assuming that the plaintiff could have said
no: that she had the capacity to leave the scene. This is comparable to
the previous case. The plaintiff had free will and could have left, and her
failure to do so constituted consent (p. 9). The appellate court rejected
the idea that the plaintiff was in a helpless state, deeming this condi-
tion not fulfilled in accordance with existing legal precedent. And since
rape was not the charge in the appellate court, it was not adjudicated
there. The new assessment narrative implicitly underlined an image of
“robust agency” through the conventional erotic language of mutuality
embedded in words like “intercourse”. The plaintiff was cast as having
full agency in a liberal sense.
The rape narrative produced in the appellate court (Svea AC, B
286/97), which denied the vulnerability of the plaintiff and instead
portrayed her “robust agency”, downplayed the racial markers of the
defendants which the lower court had highlighted. This sparked a
debate about the criminal justice system, which was criticized for
ignoring the perpetrator’s responsibility (Motion 1997/1998: Ju703).
Nonetheless, the case became precedential when the Supreme Court
ruled that the plaintiff was in fact in a helpless state, owing not only
to her drunkenness but also being surrounded by men she did not
know, in an unfamiliar place (B 2078/97). Two of the defendants
were sentenced to prison and the third to probation. In 2005, Sweden
54
M. Edgren
broadened its legal definition of rape to include having sex with some-
one in a “helpless state” (Prop. 2004/2005: 45). Gabriella Nilsson
argues in this volume that this case and other rape cases, so-called gang
rapes, paved the way for this amendment (Nilsson 2019).
The debate following the rejection of the helpless state claim by the
appellate court also showed intercessors for rape victims beginning to pro-
fessionalize and claim a stake in rape crimes. Two specialists spoke widely
on the mental violation of the plaintiff and argued on psychological
grounds that her blaming herself for the clothes she wore was not remarka-
ble, but a “normal reaction” for a victim (Lindgren and Malm 1997). Ken
Plummer claims that psychotherapy, among other phenomena, started to
affect rape stories in the 1990s (1995: 62–80, 136ff.). McKenzie-Mohr
points out that a trauma discourse was developed into a master narrative
in rape cases as a reaction against the blame narrative (McKenzie-Mohr
2014; see also Gavey 2011). The Supreme Court accepted that the plaintiff
was in a helpless state and suggested an additional view of vulnerability by
arguing that unknown men in unfamiliar places are dangerous to women.
This makes a neat contrast with my next case, in which the perpetrator was
an intimate of the plaintiff and a high-ranking Swedish military officer.
In the Södertälje case, the district court used gender equality and
immigration as building blocks in its narrative, in which it acknowl-
edged the vulnerability of the plaintiff by positioning her as weak and
“innocent”. Those building blocks, however, are absent from the narra-
tive of the appellate court. Its narrative gives the plaintiff robust agency
by characterizing her as a determined individual who could have said
no, who had the capacity to leave, and who, by not leaving, consented.
What both narrative strategies share is a dichotomous view of vulnera-
bility and agency: either the plaintiff was recognized as being vulnera-
ble, or having free will, but not both.
A Narrative Strategy Creates “Bitter Woman” Agency
In the wake of the precedential case discussed above and the extensive
public debate that followed, in 2005 Sweden expanded its legal defi-
nition of rape to include the “sexual exploitation of a helpless state”
55
(previously rape had been defined as aggravated sexual abuse). The

older “sexual intercourse” was amended to “sexual acts”, indicating
a broadening of the concept. In the two cases I have examined so far,
the parties did not know one another, and the defendants represented
criminal, violent masculinity and foreign, alien masculinity, respec-
tively. My third case, from 2005, involved a formerly married couple
on the upper rung of the Swedish social class ladder, adding another
intersectional marker to the constructions of vulnerability and agency
that occurred here. As noted above, Sweden outlawed spousal rape in
1965. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) pre-
sented a national survey of safety in 2017 in which 2.4% of respond-
ents reported having been victims of a sexual crime in 2016. Sixty-five
percent of these said they did not know the identity of the perpetra-
tor; 11% reported that the perpetrator was a relative. The latter fig-
ure is clearly an underrepresentation, even though women in Sweden
are generally considered to have a high readiness to report sexual vio-
lence within marriages (Brå 2017; see also Lovett and Kelly 2009). The
UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women in Sweden said in
2007 that there is “still a widespread perception in Sweden that ‘nor-
mal’ Swedish men do not abuse their partners. Instead, the perpetra-
tors are assumed to be somehow ‘deviant’—unemployed men without
education, men who are alcoholics or have a criminal history, men
of a non-Western cultural background” (Human Rights Council,
A/HRC/4/34/Add.3, Febr. 3, 2007: 9).
In the 2005 case, a woman’s former spouse was charged with aggra-
vated assault, rape, and aggravated violation of her integrity. The
background narrative is a very thorough, wordy, and detailed narra-
tive of the joint history of the plaintiff and defendant, including their
employment, finances, conflicts, and the events that formed the basis
for the indictment, which is unusual in that it relates to events taking
place over several years. The story told by the plaintiff, as mediated in
the court narrative, revolved around threats and physical violence.
Regarding the rape charge itself, however, it was mute, describing no
specific occasion and presenting no details. The court-mediated narra-
tive of the defendant described a financially demanding and moody wife
whom he never assaulted sexually. They “had had sex with each other
56
M. Edgren
for thirty years”, he told the court (Mariestads DC, B 54-05: 10). His
statement seems to be aimed at normalizing the couple’s sexual relation
and desire and was culturally plausible to his audience.
The plaintiff’s testimony brought up a delicate problem: she had
received no medical care for the injuries inflicted on her by the defend-
ant. She had called the police five times but hung up each time. At one
point, the defendant had persuaded her to hang up, reminding her that
if he went to prison, he would lose his job as a high-ranking military
officer (p. 12).
The assessment narrative adopted a strategy of systematically ques-
tioning the plaintiff’s testimony and ignoring her vulnerability, despite
arguments by the prosecution that the power and control exerted over
the plaintiff by the defendant lent her story credibility. The narrative
noted that the plaintiff had given the court false information, that her
testimony about violence and threats was vague and indefinite, and that
she tended to exaggerate (pp. 36–38). Her testimony that “she didn’t
want to participate in the sexual activities he demanded” was dismissed
(p. 36). In sum, this was a narrative strategy aimed at discrediting the
voice of the plaintiff and making her a “tainted witness”, to use Leigh
Gilmore’s term in regards to strategies designed to dismiss women’s
testimonial accounts (2016). Although willingness to report rape in
close relationships is higher in Sweden than in many other countries
(cf. Lovett and Kelly 2009), unclear boundaries around what character-
izes a sexual act as rape are even harder not only to talk about but also
to be “hearable” in close relationships (cf. Karlsson 2018 on grey zones;
see also Nilsson 2018).
Based on the testimony of several witnesses, the defendant was con-
victed of aggravated assault. Testimony by the couple’s two daughters,
however, was treated with caution, because of their supposedly stronger
relationship with their mother and aversion to their father. The sen-
tence was six months in prison. Standard assault damages were awarded,
solely for physical pain and suffering. Since it required the document-
ing of systematic harm, the charge of aggravated violation of a woman’s
integrity was dismissed, as was the rape charge. Hence, the assessment
narrative left out any discussion of harm to personal (sexual) integrity.
57
The background narrative in this case does not touch on the rape
charge at all. No details of sexual acts that might have fallen under
the definition of rape were provided to strengthen the case. This was a
rape case doomed to fail. The defendant’s intersections of social posi-
tion, class, and occupation may have restrained the telling and hear-
ing of rape likely due to this case being about the violation of a place
of sanctuary and involving the iconography of a woman’s (particularly
a married woman’s) proper place, i.e. the home (see Gilmore 2016:
137; see also Moran and Skeggs 2004; Andersson and Edgren 2018).
The case ran the risk of creating a public scandal. The rape and other
charges were taken up by the appellate court (Göta AC, B 1993-05).
Its background narrative included a memorandum from a police officer,
although this was not highlighted in the assessment narrative. The
police officer said he was certain that he had received a call from the
plaintiff a few years earlier. She had hung up, and he had understood
only during the course of the trial that it must have come from her. He
remembered it “because he never had experienced a call like that in his
18 years as a police officer” (p. 38). The informant on the other end of
the line was a desperate woman who said she had been beaten and “that
the man was not just anyone” (p. 38).
Because she did not “want to ascribe any positive qualities to
[the defendant]”, the appellate court considered that it had to treat
the information of the plaintiff “with caution”. She had ‘shown a great
deal of bitterness’, the court argued (41). This was a narrative strat-
egy aimed at tainting the witness (cf. Gilmore 2016) and silencing her
voice. The defendant, on the other hand, the court found had made a
credible impression but had provided incorrect information about the
abuse. The rape charge was dismissed due to lack of witness statements
besides that of the plaintiff, which was described as vague. The appel-
late court reduced the prison sentence to three months. The Swedish
Criminal Code states that courts, when sentencing, must assess the risk
of dismissal from employment. The Government Disciplinary Board for
Higher Officials and the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed
Forces submitted their opinion that the defendant would not be allowed
to continue in his job if convicted. Therefore, the court set the sentence
58
M. Edgren
at three months. The court increased the compensation for violations by

a specific amount for every instance of assault (two) (pp. 48–49).
The narrative strategy was to frame the plaintiff as a “bitter woman”
who spoke only ill of her former partner. She was viewed as a deter-
mined woman with the intent to harm her ex-husband. In this way,
the court constructed an opposition between what I would call “bitter
woman agency” and vulnerability. This narrative strategy weakened the
plaintiff’s case, positioning her as a loveless, bitter wife; so too, certainly,
did the social position of the defendant as a member of the upper class
and a high-ranking officer.
This case demonstrates complexities in the various ways it con-
structed vulnerability and agency. It touched upon class issues, seeing
an upper-class man as trustworthy, and showed how difficult it can be
for a woman in the plaintiff’s position to talk about rape that occurs in a
place of sanctuary. The court did not see silence as a sign of agency, one
which could have been combined with vulnerability. Instead, it ascribed
the plaintiff liberal agency, seeing her as scheming and determined to
promote her cause.
A sexuality discourse, although habitually present in narratives of
rape cases, was absent in this case. An exception was when the defend-
ant sought to confirm marital normality by saying he and the plaintiff
“had had sex with each other for thirty years”. After the conviction, the
plaintiff spoke out in an interview about the shame she felt as a woman
and as a mother. The female prosecutor said that “we still have a long
way to go in the way we handle inquiries that concern sexual violence
behind the bedroom door” (Nyman 2006). The intersections of class
and sexuality in this case lead fluidly to the next case, where social class
was also a central element, along with a trauma discourse.
From Robust Agency to Vulnerable Victim

via a Trauma Discourse
Case four, from 2007, involved a charge of aggravated rape (Stockholm

DC, B 7409-07). This case (discussed from a somewhat different per-
spective in Andersson and Edgren 2018) exemplifies how class and
59
masculinity matter in constructions of vulnerability and agency in

a context of increased social inequality: namely, an area of downtown
Stockholm known as an upper-class haunt. My analysis will also show
how constructions of vulnerability interact with the formation and
recognition of a trauma discourse.
The background narrative, in this case, drew attention to possible
consent and complicity on the part of the plaintiff by highlighting the
fact that the parties had had previous sexual encounters. It assembled a
sequence of events as follows: the two male defendants and the female
plaintiff had met at a downtown restaurant owned by the defendants.
From there, they had gone to the nearby flat of one of the defendants.
In her testimony, as mediated in the court narrative, the plaintiff stated
that she had agreed to sexual intercourse but had said no when the
defendants began “having anal sex” with her. She ‘cried and screamed as
they inserted a remote control into her vagina and anus’. She was told
to “shut up” and called a “whore” (p. 8). The defendants denied any
coercion.
The narrative touches on the plaintiff’s mental status at several points:
she was very drunk, she was able to leave the apartment, and she con-
tacted a police officer on the street early in the morning. The officer
confirmed that the plaintiff “was sobbing violently and shaking all
over”. The plaintiff had “difficulties describing verbally what had hap-
pened” and claimed she was “afraid of not being believed” (p. 12). This
statement and a psychologist’s report were among the evidence taken up
in the assessment narrative. The assessment narrative, however, replaced
the expressions of vulnerability recognized in the background narrative
with quite an opposite line, visible in statements such as the plaintiff
“might afterwards have felt raped”, she “might have been in love”, and
“through her sexual encounters with the defendants, [she] had become
part of their social circle” (pp. 18–19). This narrative strategy moves
in quite a different direction than the background narrative, where the
plaintiff appears as a victim. In the assessment narrative, a woman who
voluntarily engages in a sexual act is ascribed liberal agency and thus
cannot be seen as vulnerable: exactly the concern the plaintiff herself
expressed to the police officer when she said she “was afraid of not being
believed” (p. 12). A narrative strategy that forced apart vulnerability
60
M. Edgren
and agency framed the plaintiff as a woman who had broken barriers
of social class and social space. She was to blame for breaking a spa-
tial boundary. The rejection of her testimony, shored up by speculation
about her warm feelings towards the defendants, led to an acquittal. The
statutory condition of a “helpless state” was not brought up by defence
counsel, which is puzzling.
These narrative strategies are a perfect illustration of an attempt
to discredit and call into question—that is, to taint—the witness
(cf. Gilmore 2016). The narrative design relating to intersections of
power, heterosexuality, and class establishes a contradiction between
vulnerability and agency. The social location of the defendants and their
occupancy of a quintessentially upper-class Swedish space lent them
added credibility in the assessment narrative.
The documented mental reactions of the plaintiff became significant
in the appellate court. It was argued that she “was upset, sobbing…and
shaking badly” (Svea AC, B 3806-07: 8). The aim of Swedish rape law
is to protect the sexual integrity of the individual. This affects damages
claims, and in this regard mental conditions have significance. In this
case, however, the exhibition of trauma by the plaintiff affected the
assessment of evidence. The sentence was four years in prison.
A trauma discourse received a certain status in this case, in the sense
that it was not linked solely to damages but also formed a basis for the
assessment (cf. Edgren 2016). The plaintiff exhibited trauma and thus
was recognized as vulnerable; at the same time, she was victimized. In
this way, the narrative strategy constructed a weak femininity, with the
overall effect of masking structural masculine power.
An extensive media debate broke out after the acquittal in the district
court. One contribution relevant to this discussion was a newspaper
piece headlined “Yes! No means no”, which called the appellate court
decision a victory for women. It pointed out that women have the right
to be sexual. They “can have rough sex and still have the right to say no”
(Gunne 2007). In other words, having agency and being vulnerable are
not contradictions. The appellate court, however, did not acknowledge
the agency of the plaintiff in the sense of her right to be sexual, even
promiscuous (cf. Mardorossian 2014: 35). Instead, it ascribed weakness
to her.
61
Initially, this case was about a woman performing agency by

explicitly taking responsibility for her sexuality, but who was denied
vulnerability when she said stop. This is a striking example of how
vulnerability and agency are constructed as opposites. Another oppo-
sition was constructed by the appellate court: it acknowledged vulner-
ability by framing the plaintiff as weak and thus renounced her agency.
McKenzie-Mohr argues that in a rape case a woman must enact agency
in an intelligible and not contradictory way (McKenzie-Mohr 2014; see
also Stringer 2014).
Regardless of the time elapsed between the first case in 1990 and this
one in 2007 and regardless of new amendments the appellate courts
reversed the narrative of the lower courts, while continuing to frame
vulnerability and agency as opposites (cf. Brooks 1996). Their narratives
are created in different ways, however. The most recent narratives insert
a new aspect, one that is also central in the next case; a trauma discourse
(cf. Mardorossian 2002, 2014; Bumiller 2008; Gavey 2011; Murray
2012; Stringer 2014; McKenzie-Mohr 2014; Edgren 2016; Andersson
and Edgren 2018).
Notions of Mutuality Construct Liberal Agency
My final case is from 2014 (Lund DC, B 5865-13), and demon-

strates the interweaving of victimization and a trauma discourse. It
bears striking similarities to the last case (recently explored from a
somewhat different angle in Edgren 2016), except that—as presented
in the background narrative—the parties in the case, a woman and a
man, were strangers when they met at a restaurant, from whence they
went to the defendant’s flat. The narrative notes that the plaintiff ini-
tially consented to sexual acts, but later refused and started to scream,
saying no, while the defendant held his hand over her nose. The plain-
tiff said that “he liked that she didn’t like it”, and since she gave initial
consent, “maybe he thought she wanted it” (p. 9). The emotions she
displayed after leaving the apartment were narrated in significant terms:
she was in pain, felt humiliated, had anxiety, and felt scared. Later, she
also felt “paranoid when she went out”. The narrative noted that she
62
M. Edgren
had previously suffered from depression, for which she had taken med-
ication (p. 11). The court-mediated narrative of the defendant centred
on dominance, sex, and submission, and the fact that he interpreted
her protests as part and parcel of this kind of erotic sexual act, although
when he tried to penetrate her anally, she screamed. He then stopped.
The defendant did not take “no” to mean “no”, “since it was very clear
to him that she wanted dominant sex” (13).
The background narrative demonstrates the parallel existence of
what I would like to call a trauma discourse and a narrative of sexual
mutuality. In its run-through of events, the plaintiff was initially nar-
rated as a determined and sensible individual who gave full consent
to a sexual act, but was not fully aware of the rules. For her this was
a risky narrative of agency (cf. McKenzie-Mohr 2014), a risk that was
reinforced by her self-blaming when she stated that “maybe she could
have done more to make him understand” (p. 9). The initial casting
of the plaintiff as a liberal agent, responsible for her participation in
the “sex act” and for the defendant’s failure to understand her wishes,
could easily have flipped into victimization, in that the assessment nar-
rative stated that the plaintiff’s story was “supported by the testimony
of other witnesses regarding her behaviour immediately after the inci-
dent” (p. 19). The assessment narrative considered the indications of
mental harm displayed by the plaintiff and listed markers of a trauma
discourse: “upset”, “not really reachable”, “completely paralyzed”, “in
shock”, “didn’t want to live anymore”, “apathetic” (p. 20). The narra-
tive gave these as possible signs of non-consent but also argued that
they could be signs of prolonged anxiety, for which the plaintiff took
medication. The trauma discourse rebounded against the plaintiff in
full force when a discourse of sexual mutuality, established by the way
connections forged between events in the background narrative, came
to dominate the assessment narrative strategy: for example, in the state-
ment that the defendant did not understand that they were not playing
a sexual game. The assessment narrative noted that plaintiff had diffi-
culty “deciding what [the defendant] thought of her attempt to signal
that she did not consent”; meanwhile, the defendant had given a very
63
detailed explanation of why he believed she had given consent. On

these grounds, the defendant was acquitted. Two lay judges dissented,
arguing that the vagueness of the plaintiff’s story could be explained by
her situation and her behaviour.
The assessment narrative stated that the plaintiff’s story lacked suffi-
cient detail and was less coherent than the defendant’s story. It ‘tainted’
her testimony, along with the supporting evidence (cf. Gilmore).
Vulnerability was turned into liberal agency. The appellate court (Skåne
and Blekinge AC, B 409-14) upheld the lower court ruling and dis-
missed the charges.
Like the four previous cases, this case demonstrates how vulnerability
and agency operate as binary opposites and become a “glue” that binds
together and marks narrative strategies—here, however, with no disa-
greement between judicial levels. This case began with the background
narrative of the district court casting the plaintiff as a liberal agent by
putting together a sequence of events that highlighted her consent to
sexual intercourse. A cultural understanding of sexual mutuality was
thus established, and vulnerability was ruled out. Very quickly, however,
the narrative indicated exactly the reverse, through testimony about
trauma discourse exhibited by the plaintiff. Her vulnerability was then
acknowledged, at the expense of construing her as weak. Finally, the
assessment narrative stated that her trauma could have other explana-
tions and therefore there was no evidence that she had not given con-
sent. The trauma discourse seemingly proved a double-edged sword,
again turning agency and vulnerability into opposites. To understand
mental harm as harm to the individual’s interior is, as Lacey argues,
problematic from a feminist perspective. The trauma repertoire indi-
vidualizes definitions of victimhood, suppresses agency, and makes
the narrative understandable as part of the feminine (see Lacey 1997:
150ff.). Psychology professor Nicola Gavey offers another critical per-
spective, namely that the specialist fields that gave rise to the trauma
discourse—psychology and psychoanalysis—can also be seen as exerting
symbolic violence by suggesting that trauma is a given consequence of
rape (Gavey 2011: 451).
64
M. Edgren
Conclusion
The court is a place where, as Kohler Riessman argues, “certain forms
of storytelling are privileged” (2008: 97). Persuasion in one direction
or another depends upon the rhetoric employed. The court is also a
contested space. The logic of the historically situated storytelling,
the cultural understandings of the parties in the case, the witnesses,
the police report, the lawyers, and the judges, is the precondition
for the written judgment, which must be coherent if it is to stand
up on appeal. When considering the requirement for coherence, it is
astounding to note that rape narratives among themselves are anything
but coherent, as Peter Brooks has argued and this article has demon-
strated. What distinguishes the five cases presented here is the shaping
of the victim’s vulnerability as conditional. This occurs repeatedly and
in defiance of the political and legal changes taking place in Sweden
during the same period. Various social positions, especially class,
affected the court narratives. By examining the constructions of female
vulnerability and agency in these written narratives, this study shows
that although lower and appellate courts often delivered different rul-
ings, those rulings always demonstrated that vulnerability is condi-
tional. In general, liberal, or robust agency stands in contrast to the
recognition of vulnerability. A liberal subject is supposed to be deter-
mined and responsible for his or her actions. With just two exceptions,
the court narratives analysed here were narratives of liberal agency that
employed a sexualized and eroticized discourse. The first exception
was in the first case, involving a female prostitute, where the district
court narrative normalized prostitution and recognized the plaintiff as
vulnerable. This exception may be connected to the violent criminal
record of the defendant and perpetrator. In another exceptional case,
liberal agency was attributed to the plaintiff, but not in the context of
an eroticized discourse. This exception may be owing to the fact that
the perpetrator was the plaintiff’s husband, and also a high-ranking
military officer. This narrative actually under-communicated sexuality,
rather than the opposite.
65
The ideal victim, whose vulnerability is recognized, is cast as weak

and acknowledged to be suffering from trauma. Trauma as an expres-
sion of vulnerability makes the victim helpless and reinforces heter-
onormative conceptions of gender. A key concern in relation to the
questions raised in this article is that individualized victimization under-
lines the confusion of agency with power.
I have argued that Sweden, with its international reputation for a
longstanding recognition of gender inequality, is nonetheless charac-
terized by paradoxes when it comes to sexual violence. Describing the
body in binaries—victim/agent—is not in accord with a (gender) egal-
itarian policy such as the Swedish one. Therefore, telling stories about
victimhood in combination with agency is a dangerous tightrope walk
for women who have been raped, since these two conditions are seen as
mutually exclusive, as argued by McKenzie-Mohr (2014) as well as both
Lacey (1997) and Mardorossian (2014).
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Proposition (Parliamentary bill) 2004/2005: 45 En ny sexualbrottslagstiftning
[A new law on sexual offences]. Stockholm.
Stringer, Rebecka. 2014. Vulnerability after wounding: Feminism, rape law
and the difference. SubStance 42 (3): 148–168.
Svanström, Yvonne. 2005. Through the prism of women and sexuality in
Sweden at two fin-de siècle. Nora—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender
Research 13 (1): 48–58.
Wegerstad, Linnea. 2015. Skyddsvärda intressen & Straffvärda kränkningar. Om
sexualbrotten i det straffrättsliga systemet med utgångspunkt i brottet sexuellt
ofredande. Lunds universitet.
Wendt Höijer, Maria. 2010. Våldtäkt som demokratiproblem. Förändring
och stabilitet i politik och debatt. Antologi. Sju perspektiv på våldtäkt. NCK
Nationellt centrum för kvinnofrid, Uppsala universitet.
Wendt Höjer, Maria. 2012. Recreating ignorance: The politicization of femi-
nist research into men’s violence against women. Australian Feminist Studies
27 (71): 93–109.
4
Narratives, Credibility and Adversarial
Justice in English and Welsh Rape Trials
Olivia Smith
Introduction
Sexual violence is at a point of unprecedented visibility in many
countries. For example, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2017 was
awarded to “the silence-breakers,” a term for those who spoke publicly
about being sexually harassed or assaulted. In the UK, there has been
a tsunami of high-profile allegations against men in Government, the
entertainment industry, and business, all leading to public debate about
whether women’s voices can and should be believed. Powell et al. (2017)
have argued that credibility is about perceptions of both the “story”
being told and the “story-teller” themselves. In relation to sexual vio-
lence, the “story” may be dismissed using rape myths that trivialise and
undermine a person’s account (see Smith 2018), but this chapter will
examine how trial narratives about the “story-teller” also enable juries to
dismiss allegations.
O. Smith (*) 
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: olivia.smith@anglia.ac.uk
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O. Smith
To do so, the chapter will argue that lawyers scaffold their critiques
of the witness using master narratives about the perceived credibility of
people from different social categories. Master narratives are defined as
“culturally shared stories that provide frameworks within which individ-
uals can locate and story their own experiences” (Maclean et al. 2017: 3).
Maclean et al. (2017) argued that master narratives act as deeply embed-
ded frameworks through which value is given to a person’s identity,
character, and experiences. For Lafrance and McKenzie-Mohr (2014),
they are a cause and consequence of power structures through shared
linguistic templates that determine what can be said, by whom, and how
willing a listener will be to hear it. These organise and dictate the social
scripts available to actors when negotiating identity and truth claims
(Thommesen 2010).
Notably, while the term “master narrative” is often used interchange-
ably with “dominant discourses,” in this chapter they have been con-
ceptualised as distinct (see also Lafrance and McKenzie-Mohr 2014).
While discursive practices can adopt many structural forms, it is argued
that narratives contain a cumulative element in which layers of infor-
mation are built up to create an overall story. In addition, while domi-
nant discourses are situated within particular domains, master narratives
are ubiquitous. A further conceptualisation of the “master narrative” is
usefully set out by Maclean and Syed (2015), but here it refers to the
way in which lawyers make inferences about a witness by drawing on
dominant cultural representations of gender, ethnicity, disability, and
perceived social class (see Chandler and Munday 2011).
In the existing literature, master narratives tend to be discussed in
relation to autobiographical meaning-making, but they can also take
a social categorical form by which the identities of others are framed
(Hammack and Toolis 2015). This means that drawing on the master
narratives referenced during a trial may enable jurors to make value
judgements about the evidence. This is exemplified in mock jury
research that demonstrates the use of story-telling in deliberations.
For example, Willmott et al. (2018) found that jurors created narra-
tives using the complainant’s and defendant’s evidence, which were
then measured against “certainty principles,” such as coherence and
plausibility.
4 Narratives, Credibility and Adversarial Justice …
73
The chapter will focus on female witnesses, but this does not mean
that men avoid cynicism and simply highlights the particular gendered
narratives used in trials involving women. It is also important to recog-
nise that women’s experiences are different, as trial narratives draw upon
intersecting representations of ethnicity, nationality, disability and social
class. Despite this, the law in England and Wales is presented as neutral,
hiding the ways in which the criminal justice system is a cause and con-
sequence of multiple oppressions (Russell 2017). After briefly outlin-
ing the English and Welsh justice system and the structural inequalities
within it, this chapter therefore unpacks how lawyers create narratives
about victim-survivors1 being non-credible.
The English and Welsh Criminal Justice System

Criminal justice in the UK is separated into three jurisdictions:
Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England and Wales. Each jurisdic-
tion has its own Government department, or departments, and adopts
a different legal code, so it is important to treat them individually. In
England and Wales, the system is made up of 13 agencies under the
remit of the Home Office or Ministry of Justice, including the police,
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), and the courts. Despite 97% of
English and Welsh cases being dealt with in magistrates’ courts, which
address lower-level crime via a district judge or three volunteer magis-
trates, the English and Welsh system is usually depicted in relation to
the Crown Court trial (Davies et al. 2015). The Crown Court is pre-
sided over by a circuit judge who acts as a neutral arbiter to proceed-
ings and directs the jury on legal matters. Trial outcomes are decided
by a randomly selected panel of 12 jurors, after lawyers representing the
CPS and defendant have taken turns to question witnesses and make
speeches about the evidence (Jörg et al. 1995). Rape is always dealt with
by the Crown Court in England and Wales, so any analysis of rape trials
must acknowledge the potential impact of this adversarial setting.
It is simplistic to distinguish too strongly between “adversarial” and
“inquisitorial” jurisdictions because globalisation means that national
policies are frequently developed from best practice in other countries.
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O. Smith
However, adversarial approaches to justice tend to seek truth via two

parties advancing their respective cases in competition, while inquis-
itorialism assumes that truth is best established through collaborative
investigation (Davies et al. 2015). This means that English and Welsh
trials rely on prosecution and defence lawyers to each advance their
case as best they can, with the judge effectively acting as an umpire to
ensure that proceedings are fair (Brants and Field 2016). Judicial inter-
vention is rare, though, because “neutrality” is often equated with pas-
sivity and too much interference by judges can be grounds for appeal
(Ellison 2001).
In adversarial systems such as those in the United States, much
of Scandinavia, and England and Wales, legal commentators have
described trials using war-like terms (Ellison 2001; Taslitz 1999), with
lawyers described as “warriors” who “break” and “butcher” any witnesses
who challenge their argument (Wellman 1997). Although Wellman’s
(1997) manual is now 20 years old, mid-career barristers were edu-
cated using these principles and more recent manuals retain a focus on
manipulating evidence. One of the apparent symptoms of this approach
to justice is that rape victim-survivors in England and Wales report
feeling intimidated and manipulated when questioned by the defence.
Trials have therefore been described as a second rape (Renton 2013)
and fears about giving evidence are the main reason provided when
victim-survivors withdraw their support for prosecution (Stanko and
Williams 2009). Of course, inquisitorial systems have also been criti-
cised for their treatment of victim-survivors and the cynical attitudes
of legal professionals (see Ellison 2001); however, the adversarial focus
on the competitive advancement of cases appears to exacerbate these
problems.
(In)Equality in the English and Welsh Justice System
The adversarial focus on prosecution and defence lawyers advancing

their respective cases assumes that they will be on an equal footing so
that it is the strength of the case, and not the resources of each side,
that determines the outcome. This means that there are several rules
75
in place to ensure the defendant is not disadvantaged by the poten-

tially vast resources of the State (Davies et al. 2015). For example,
the burden of proving allegations is on the prosecution, meaning that
they must convince the jury of the defendant’s guilt beyond a rea-
sonable doubt, while the defence simply needs to create this doubt2
(Rock 1993). However, Taslitz (1999) suggested that it is rare for the
parties in adversarial trials to actually have equal skills, preparation
time or resources. For example, all of the judges in Angilioni’s (2015)
research acknowledged the scarcity of time and resources for the pros-
ecution, meaning that defence parties were much better prepared for
trial. Similarly, the assumption of equality ignores the different roles
played by each lawyer: The prosecution must consider the public
interest, the defendant’s right to a fair trial, and fair presentation of
evidence, while the defence simply prioritises the defendant’s interests
(Davies et al. 2015).
The focus on equality of arms also ignores bias within the English
and Welsh justice system. Deep-rooted societal inequalities affect how
defendants and complainants are perceived, so prosecution and defence
cases can be disadvantaged by negative attitudes towards their key wit-
nesses. A full discussion of the myriad impacts of social inequality is
beyond the remit of this chapter, but there are useful overviews else-
where. For example, Lammy (2017) reviewed the evidence of racial bias
in the English and Welsh justice system, and found even greater dispro-
portionality than the notoriously disparate US system. The review also
highlighted the need for intersectionality, because a general analysis of
jury decisions showed no racial disparities and even suggested that white
defendants were more likely to be convicted for sexual offences. However,
some courts were more likely to convict minority ethnic women, show-
ing that racism impacts upon verdicts in intersectional ways (Lammy
Review 2017). There is also evidence of differential responses to rape; for
instance, Munro and Kelly (2009) found that cases involving black com-
plainants had a conviction rate of 2.4% compared with 7.6% for cases
involving white complainants. Additionally, Swedish research has demon-
strated that racial stereotypes and perceived cultural similarity are closely
linked to rape myth acceptance (Bongiorno et al. 2016), so it is likely
that ethnicity impacts upon the status of key parties in rape trials.
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O. Smith
Phipps (2009) outlined the literature on social class and criminal

justice, and noted that juries use middle-class notions of respectabil-
ity when determining witness credibility. Phipps (2009) also argued
that working-class men are perceived as more likely to commit rape and
working-class women are perceived as being partly culpable for sexual vic-
timisation because of reduced “chastity” and “femininity” (see also Skeggs
1997; Spencer 2016). This “othering” of witnesses from lower socioeco-
nomic groups may in part be linked to the disproportionate numbers of
English and Welsh legal professionals from elite social and educational
backgrounds (Sutton Trust 2016). Equality of arms at trial is therefore
hindered because witnesses are assigned different levels of credibility
depending on their perceived social class (see Yamawaki et al. 2007).
The existing literature also demonstrates poor treatment of disa-
bled people, particularly witnesses with mental health problems and/or
learning disabilities (Equality and Human Rights Commission 2010).
Ellison et al. (2015) provided an excellent overview of how this impacts
upon rape, demonstrating lower conviction rates linked to negative ste-
reotypes about mental health and credibility. Similarly, Beckene et al.
(2017) outlined the traumatic experiences of court for complainants
with learning disabilities, often because difficulty in communicating
can compound feelings of disempowerment. While many lawyers and
judges do now amend their communication style for disabled witnesses
(Macleod et al. 2010), there remain gaps in awareness (Bull 2010) and
some vulnerable complainants are still not offered adequate support
(Beckene et al. 2017).
In rape trials, the most commonly discussed hindrance to equal-
ity of arms is the influence of gender. It has long been recognised that
women are side-lined in criminal justice, with research around the
world demonstrating that systems are rooted in dominant male values
(Hudson 2006; MacKinnon 2005). Criminal justice tends to be built
around Enlightenment ideals that are historically gendered and devalue
women’s voices (Smith 2018; Smith and Skinner 2017), and these same
systems previously viewed women as property (Edwards et al. 2011).
Fear of deceitful women meant that independent corroboration of tes-
timony was previously required in England and Wales (Sheehy 2002),
77
and there were calls for psychiatric examinations of women making rape
allegations in order to root out “vengeful mistresses” (Wigmore 1940).
Despite this, the law is presented as neutral, and parties in adversarial
trials are assumed to have equality of arms without consideration of the
disadvantage faced by some witnesses.
Observing Justice: Rape Trial Research

In light of the unacknowledged social inequality within English and
Welsh trials, this chapter outlines how lawyers draw upon master nar-
ratives to undermine rape complainants’ credibility. The chapter uses
data from a ten-month observation study of 18 English and Welsh rape
and sexual assault trials where the complainant was aged over 16 at the
time of the offence. It also draws on a pilot study that observed a fur-
ther 10 rape trials, including some relating to childhood sexual abuse,
and four interviews with barristers and a judge. Further details of the
methodology are outlined in Smith (2018). Each trial was contempo-
raneously hand-recorded into a transcript and then typed up, produc-
ing 60–100 pages of data, and there were variations in the contexts
involved. For example, three trials involved multiple perpetrators and
one featured multiple complainants, there was a mixture of domestic-
violence contexts and “stranger” assaults, and a range of both immediate
and delayed reporting. In terms of key witness demographics, almost
all trials involved both a complainant and defendant who were white,
and only five trials involved a minority ethnic party. Witnesses tended
to live in deprived local areas with insecure employment, and the com-
plainant’s mental health was discussed in seven trials. Only three trials
involved a party with explicitly referenced disabilities. All of the lawyers
were white, middle class, and presented as able-bodied. These observa-
tions are therefore not representative of the diversity within England
and Wales. A more fully intersectional analysis of English trials is now
being undertaken by Ellen Daly at Anglia Ruskin University, but the
present observations provide an initial exploration from which to
consider trial narratives.
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O. Smith
Trial Narratives and Credibility

In every observed trial, defence lawyers created one of three narratives:
Complainants were depicted as delusional because they were “dam-
aged,” deceitful because they were “scorned women,” or untrustwor-
thy because they were “capricious princesses”. This section will outline
examples of these narratives before asking why they were so prevalent.
These trial narratives were rooted in a master narrative that women
lie because they are emotional while men are honest because they are
rational (see Brescoll 2016). Shields (2002) previously argued that this
is the most strongly held gender belief in Western cultures, despite cog-
nitive neuroscience not supporting distinctions between emotional-
ity and rationality. While other forms of master narrative about social
categories were present, for example relating to rape or respectability in
social class, this gendered master narrative of trustworthiness was the
underlying scaffolding for all of the individual trial narratives created by
the lawyers.
All three of the trial narratives outlined below can be seen as expand-
ing on McKenzie-Mohr’s (2014) master rape narrative of “negate or
blame.” This blame narrative describes how stories of rape are either
negated as “just sex” or blamed on the victim-survivors’ “irresponsible”
actions (McKenzie-Mohr 2014). The portrayal of complainants as delu-
sional “damaged goods” and/or deceitful “scorned women” was used
to negate the rape as a false allegation, while the narrative of untrust-
worthy “capricious princesses” was used to suggest blame. The lawyers’
narratives were therefore deployed in conjunction with the “negate or
blame” master narrative about rape that is ubiquitous in society (see
McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2011).
Narrative 1: Complainants Are Delusional Because

They Are Damaged
In almost all of the full trials, complainants were presented as unable to

accurately understand what had happened to them because they were
“damaged.” This was achieved by asking questions about medical and
79
counselling records, or previous trauma and abuse. For example, the

complainant in T15 was asked why she received counselling:
Defence: “[There are a number of issues you saw a counsellor about. I

won’t go into details.]”
Complainant: “Yes”
Defence: “One issue was the rape.”
Defence: “But, again I don’t need to go into details… one issue was the
relationship with your, sadly now deceased, father”
Defence: “Another was your, for example, fear of flying”
Defence: “[Another was, shall we say, your low self-esteem]”. (T15)
Although the lawyer did not ask for details, in order to protect the com-
plainant’s privacy, he introduced a list of personal difficulties faced by
the complainant without explaining their relevance to his case. The
defence agreed that the complainant had been raped, but argued that
she had mistakenly identified the defendant. However, it is unclear how
a fear of flying was meant to help the jury establish this, except to create
a narrative that she was somehow not credible because she had faced
emotional difficulties.
The “damaged” narrative was further evident in T6, where the com-
plainant was presented as so damaged by past abuse that she could not
recognise reality. This involved portraying her as abnormal because she
did not want intimacy from her partner:
She doesn’t want the affection [given to her by Defendant]… I hope this
is not chauvinistic in any shape or form, but usually the complaint of
men is that they don’t want to cuddle after sex. (Defence, T6)
By suggesting that “normal” women crave intimacy, the lawyer “other-ed”

the complainant and argued that she could not distinguish between
pressure to have sex and a loving relationship. This trivialised her

evidence that the defendant insisted on highly sexual behaviour and

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O. Smith
intercourse in front of their children, which the children were then

imitating. Further questions were asked about the complainant’s men-
tal health and used to imply that she had misinterpreted signs that the
defendant was having sex with her while she slept:
Is this a case where she has assumed the worst? [She can’t be blamed if
so, because] she is a woman who carries a huge amount of baggage. We
all know the dangers of getting in a relationship with someone who has a
huge amount of baggage… . (Defence, T6)
The “misinterpreted” signs included that the complainant woke up to

the defendant penetrating her or having had her clothes removed and
feeling physical signs of penetration. It is therefore unclear just how
delusional she was meant to be, and the prosecution lawyer dismissed
these arguments as a distraction. Despite this, the case ended in a not
guilty verdict, suggesting that the jury found the defence narrative of
delusions because she was “damaged” convincing.
In total, 10 of the 12 full trials featured questions about the com-
plainants’ emotional vulnerability, for example:
Defence: “And that was at a time when you weren’t feeling wanted at
home?”
Defence: “Because you were having problems with your mum?”
Defence: “Because she is a bit of a drinker, isn’t she?”
Complainant: “Yes.” (T12)
These portrayals of emotional “damage” came in the context of intimate

relationships and suggested that complainants were dependent on part-
ners because of their vulnerabilities, meaning that they were especially
angry when the relationships ended. The idea of women as “damaged”
was therefore used to support a “scorned woman” narrative, perhaps
because juries are less willing to believe that “normal” women make
malicious allegations (see Brown et al. 2010 for changing attitudes).
Additionally, seven trials that involved the “damaged” narrative used
mental health diagnoses. Ellison (2009) has previously highlighted the
81
inappropriate inclusion of psychiatric evidence because of a lack of clear

rules guiding its admission, meaning that judges rely on discretion.
These same judges are likely to hold negative stereotypes about men-
tal health and assume that people with psychiatric problems are more
likely to make false allegations (Ellison 2009). For example, complain-
ants were asked:
Defence: “And you were, erm, towards the end of the relationship, you
were taking anti-depressants?”
Complainant: “[Yes]”
Defence: “And that made you paranoid, didn’t it?”
Complainant: “Paranoid?”
Defence: “Paranoid […] you went to the doctor and told him”. (T4)
This quote shows the defence creating a narrative that the complain-
ant was misinterpreting events due to medication-induced paranoia.
These events included a physical attack in front of several witnesses and
another assault resulting in a head injury, yet the defendant’s subsequent
acquittal suggests that the jury found the narrative reasonable. Disabled
women with mental health problems were therefore depicted as particu-
larly “damaged” through ideas about paranoia. It is clear, then, that evi-
dential rules need to catch up with the right to privacy and changing
attitudes about mental health.
Learning disabilities also mediated the “damaged” narrative used by
lawyers. For example, Complainant2 in T1 was described as having “the
learning age of about a 12-year-old” (Prosecution, T1) and presented as
unreliable because of her disability:
She had a very childlike manner… but she didn’t really engage, did she,
when she was asked questions… you have to decide whether she can be a
useful witness. (Defence2, T1)
Similarly, in T17 the complainant was not explicitly acknowledged as

having a learning disability, but all legal professionals talked informally
about her “difficulties.” Once more, this was used to argue that she
could not be trusted:
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O. Smith
How can you feel sufficient confidence about her? She’s just not reliable
enough, is she? (Defence, T17)
Now you know that [Complainant had a disability] and it must have
been obvious… You must assess her, with all her weaknesses… The
fact that she’s vulnerable, the Prosecution says, makes her an easy target
because her ability to resist are severely impaired… [But] it might make
her an inaccurate historian. (Judge, T17)
The judge recognised that the complainant’s disability might increase

her risk of victimisation, but also argued that it made her evidence less
accurate. This ties into ideas that complainants with learning disabil-
ities cannot be trusted because they do not remember details consist-
ently, ignoring the large numbers of people to whom the complainant
reported and the strong consistencies throughout her testimony.
The narrative that women are not credible because they are “dam-
aged” also drew upon master narratives about social class, in which
women of lower socioeconomic status were portrayed as lacking. In
T10, the defence case was that the complainant had consensual sex
with two friends in order to thank them for helping her with childcare.
While neither the prosecution nor defence considered alcohol to be
relevant, they both asked questions related to cheap drinks:
[Both men] were drinking cider and [Complainant] had been drinking a
drink called Lambrini, but there is no suggestion from anyone that any-
one was drunk. (Prosecution, T10)
Defence1: “And you told us that you’d been drinking Lambrini”

Complainant: “Yes I did, yes”
Defence1: “[Did you have anything else first]”?
Complainant: “No”
Defence1: “…and is it right that you were drinking it out of a mug rather
than a glass?”
Complainant: “Yeah”. (T10)
Given that neither party thought anyone involved was intoxicated, it

is unclear why their questions were so specific in relation to the brand
83
of alcohol and the receptacle used. Skeggs (1997) has previously writ-
ten about the portrayal of working-class women as having a “danger-
ous perverse sexuality,” especially in the context of drug and alcohol
consumption. Indeed, the questions about using a mug to drink wine
appear specifically designed to denote a lapse in “civilised” conduct
and therefore to challenge the complainant’s respectability (Phipps
2009; Skeggs 1997). Lees (1997) found that lawyers in the 1990s
used similar narratives, asking working-class women about their alco-
hol intake so as to suggest a propensity to consent that is rooted in
moral panics about overtly sexual and publicly drunk “chavs” (see also
Phipps 2009).
Furthermore, there were peripheral questions about employment and
household responsibilities. For example:
Defence: “I don’t think you were working, were you?”

Complainant: “No”
Defence: “And I don’t think you were involved in caring for your Nan?”
Complainant: “No” (Pilot study, T4).
Defence: “Were you on benefits?”
Complainant: “Yeah I was”
Defence: “And the money that you made as a sex worker, did you spend
that on the drugs you’ve told us you took?”
Complainant: “Yeah” (Pilot study, T3).
Once more, it is unclear what relevance these questions were meant to

have on the jury’s deliberation about consent, unless they were intended
to suggest that the complainants’ voices were less valued because they
deviated from master narratives about respectability and work. Maclean
et al. (2017) noted that a key use of master narratives is to designate
those who deviate as having stories that are less valued and of the story-
teller as being less valuable. When portraying complainants as deviating
from the middle-class master narrative of respectability (see Skeggs
1997), the lawyers were consequently implying that the complainants
were “lesser” and “damaged.”
Lawyers therefore created narratives that presented complainants as
“damaged” because of past abuse, emotional vulnerabilities, perceived
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O. Smith
social class, mental health problems, and/or learning disabilities. In

doing so, they implied that complainants were not credible because
they were delusional and paranoid, enabling the jury to dismiss their
evidence while retaining sympathy for the witness. This approach was
disproportionately used when the complainant was white and/or visi-
bly disabled, possibly because it did not challenge the likeability of the
witness and so allowed the jury to maintain cultural representations of
white and/or disabled women as innocent and in need of protection
(see Ghavami and Peplau 2012).
Narrative 2: Complainants Are Deceitful

Because They Were Scorned
Closely linked with the idea that complainants were “damaged” was the
narrative of women making malicious allegations because they had been
rejected by the defendant. Once more, this relates to a master narrative
that presents women as ruled by their emotions; for example, defence
lawyers twice drew on a William Congreve quote to argue:
‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a
woman scorned’ [and I know it’s not just women] but jealousy is one of
the most powerful emotions… it can cause the desire, the intention to
inflict pain… and [Complainant] had problems with that medication…
causing her to be paranoid… Plenty of time to get the story together.
Plenty of time to plan her revenge. (Defence, T4)
Although the lawyer recognised that jealousy is not exclusive to women,

she played on the assumption that revenge is a common cause of false
allegations. This is alarmingly similar to Wigmore’s (1940) idea of
women as unscrupulous and vengeful, and shows remarkable consist-
ency with trial narratives from the early 1990s, despite two decades of
reform (see Lees 1997). It also links to myths about false allegations
being common, drawing on claims such as Bronson’s (1918: 539, cited
in Jordan 2004: 42) idea that “hysterical and vengeful women” are more
ingenious in false rape allegations than all other areas of creativity.
85
One revealing observation was that the same lawyer who repeatedly
quoted “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” also strongly chal-
lenged the relevance of the scorned woman narrative when in a
prosecution role:
[Defence] wants you to think that after all this time, that [Complainant]
has hankered after a relationship with [Defendant]… But that theory,
Members of the Jury, it doesn’t really hold any weight, does it?
(Prosecution, T9)
Here, the lawyer derided the narrative of scorned women making false
allegations, yet when in a defence role she robustly developed such a
case. It is not possible to know from this data why lawyers used gen-
dered narratives, but this double standard suggests that it is not
exclusively about lawyers’ personal beliefs.
Six other trials featured the “scorned woman” narrative, for example:
This is about that obsession, isn’t it… A handsome young man… Her
infatuation was so strong… Of course, delayed complaint is normal in
some cases… but look at the circumstances, they’re very important, aren’t
they? (Defence, T12)
Here, the lawyer suggested that the complainant’s delayed reporting was
suspicious because of the timing of the eventual report, showing that
rape myths cannot be separated from wider cultural narratives about
women making allegations of rape based on their emotions. While rape
myths may arise from misunderstandings about sexual violence, they
are therefore reinforced by (and reinforce) the cultural master narrative
that women are untrustworthy because they are emotional. This is not
to say that male complainants escape rape myths (see Rumney 2008),
but to highlight the role of gendered narratives in making such myths
believable for juries.
Elsewhere, the argument that women made false allegations because
they were “scorned” was intersected with cultural representations of
ethnicity and religion:
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O. Smith
It wasn’t just coincidence that [Complainant]’s bible was open at [a passage

about vengeance]… . (Defence, T5)
Defence: “[Complainant], you are exaggerating this”

Complainant: “[No, why would I be here]?”
Defence: “[Complainant], it’s because it’s about revenge. It’s about you
making sure that you’re well provided for and that your children can be
brought up in the religion you want.” (T18)
Both T5 and T18 featured the same complainant, as one was a retrial of
the other. These quotes draw on religious connotations to suggest that
women feel justified in making false allegations when they do not get
their own way because religious texts promote revenge. The latter quote
also invokes a sense of exaggeration, linking to cultural representa-
tions of women as overly dramatic (see Keddie 2009). The complain-
ant in these trials was African Asian, so the narratives of her being a
vengeful “drama queen” cannot be separated from master narratives
about minority ethnic women being melodramatic and dangerous (see
Gilmore 2017). For example, after repeatedly highlighting the com-
plainant’s “otherness” by arguing that her marriage to the defendant was
in order to obtain a visa, the defence lawyer stated:
If you combine that passion [for religion] with the passion that a new
parent has for your children [but things aren’t going your way], you
might begin to twist your recollections… all the more possible if you are
inclined to over-exaggeration and over-dramatisation as she is naturally
inclined… . (Defence, T5)
By portraying exaggeration as something to which the complainant

was “naturally inclined,” the lawyer elevated a narrative about her
evidence into an inherent personal characteristic. In doing so, he used
representations of minority ethnic women to reinforce the narrative that
the complainant was an untrustworthy, capricious woman who made
high demands and punished her husband for resisting by making a false
allegation.
87
Narrative 3: Complainants Are Untrustworthy Because

They Are “Childlike Divas” or “Capricious Princesses”
The final narrative presented complainants as untrustworthy because

they were “capricious princesses” or “child-like divas,” which made
them erratic. This was present in eight of the trials; although it was most
prominent in T5 and T18, where the complainant was portrayed as
materialistic, in contrast to the long-suffering, generous defendant:
Defence: “[What I’m saying is that Defendant was generous, although you
always wanted more]”
…Q&A about Defendant suggesting he’d buy Complainant a ring,
but not doing so because the romance was lost due to Complainant’s
expensive taste and pickiness…
…Q&A about Defendant offering to buy Complainant a car, but not
doing so because the romance was lost due to Complainant’s expensive
taste and pickiness… (T18)
[Defendant was besotted. He loved Complainant and was utterly sup-
portive of her]… What tolerance did she show to him?… She doesn’t
tolerate [his religion], she wouldn’t tolerate it. She reacted emotionally,
hysterical… . (Defence, T18)
In creating this narrative over several hours of questioning along simi-

lar lines, the defence implied that the complainant’s likeability was rel-
evant to whether or not she had consented to the alleged rape. Such
arguments create a hierarchy of victimisation, linking back to notions
of “ideal victims” (see Christie 1986) and implying that an “emotional,
hysterical” woman cannot be raped. It seems unnecessary to assert that
even the most unlikeable woman retains the right to bodily integrity, so
it is disappointing that the prosecution lawyers in these trials focused on
challenging the veracity of the criticisms rather than asserting their irrel-
evance. In doing so, they failed to challenge the idea that women should
be likeable in order to be protected by the law.
Narratives about the complainant not being credible because she was
capricious also emerged in T4, where the lawyer presented women as
demanding to a mostly male jury:
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O. Smith
How many of you had a pang of understanding [for Defendant]?… The

problems occur when [Complainant] was annoyed. You see, she was the
one who [got annoyed], she was the one who had been unhappy about
the chocolates… . (Defence, T4)
Has she gone a bit moody about something?… It might be that you live
your life wondering if you’ll ever understand the way the female mind
works… . (Defence, T4)
This female lawyer was not simply arguing that the complainant
was demanding, but that women in general are capricious. By saying
that the complainant was ungrateful about receiving chocolates on
Valentine’s Day, the defence presented her as “moody” without explain-
ing how this was relevant to consent on a different day. It is unclear
how the complainant’s annoyance at a gift was meant to demonstrate
propensity to consent or to make false allegations. Notably, this trial
also drew upon narratives about Eastern European migrants having high
levels of alcoholism:
Defence: “Your moods were made worse because you drank every day,
didn’t you?”
Complainant: “No that’s not true, [Defendant] was the one who drank.”
Defence: “You drank wine every evening, didn’t you? A bottle of wine
every evening”
…
Defence: “You had two bottles of vodka and beers”
Complainant: “[Our guests did, I didn’t]”. (T4)
These questions did not relate to the days of the alleged rapes and so
appeared to be solely about creating a narrative that the complainant
was untrustworthy and erratic because of alcoholism. In England and
Wales, news outlets such as the Daily Mail regularly use narratives about
Eastern European migrants being a drain on societal resources because
they drink alcohol excessively. The questions may therefore have been
about presenting the complainant as undeserving of sympathy, showing
that McKenzie-Mohr’s (2014) “negate or blame” master rape narrative
89
occurs in ways that intersect with immigration status and nationality.

These also relate to Skeggs’ (1997) analysis of the portrayal of working-
class women as unwieldy, often publicly drunk, and unrespectable. In
particular, Skeggs (1997) noted that migrant women were historically
considered signifiers of whether migration was contributing to “civilised”
society, meaning that their behaviour was judged more strongly than
that of others.
Ultimately, then, the observed trials support existing literature in
demonstrating inequalities around gender, ethnicity, perceived social
class, and disability. Lawyers created trial narratives that not only aimed
to reduce the perceived likeability and reliability of complainants, but
also created a cultural scaffolding for rape myths by introducing an air
of suspicion. Powell et al. (2017) have argued that credibility is about
perceptions of both the “story” being told and the “story-teller” them-
selves. In relation to sexual violence, the “story” is dismissed using rape
myths (see Smith 2018), but the trial narratives set out above show that
rape complainants are also dismissed as non-credible “story-tellers.”
While increased public understanding of gender inequality and rape
myths (see Brown et al. 2010) mean that jurors are less likely to simply
dismiss a woman “story-teller” or a “story” that does not fit rape myths,
the combination of these is likely to remain convincing.
Why Use Gendered Narratives in English

and Welsh Trials?
It is difficult to see how the use of these gendered narratives can be
justified within the Code of Conduct for English and Welsh lawyers,
as there is a requirement not to mislead the jury and to remain
focused on relevant issues. The rest of this chapter will therefore
outline how the adversarial imperative to advance their case might
encourage lawyers to use problematic master narratives, and how the
burden of proof places the jury’s attention on the complainant but not
the defendant.
90
O. Smith
The Adversarial Imperative to Win and a Belief

in Rationality
As outlined earlier, adversarial justice is rooted in competition between

the prosecution and defence, with each party expected to advance their
case using whatever evidence and rhetoric is legally permitted (Davies
et al. 2015). Gendered narratives help barristers to win because the
English and Welsh system is rooted in the Rationalist Tradition, which
argues that it is possible to search for an objective truth through reason
and logic (Twining 2006). Such an approach privileges Enlightenment
concepts like objectivity and rationality, in turn creating assumptions
about how “reasonable” people behave (Nicolson 2013). The problem
is that decades of evidence suggest that people actually behave incon-
sistently (Nicolson 2013) and that decision-making is often depend-
ent on context, as well as emotion and intuition (Korobkin and Ulen
2000). For example, the decision not to resist rape is portrayed as irra-
tional, yet it can be considered a logical response to the physiological
effects of trauma, gendered norms about “being nice” and the fact that
victim-survivors cannot know the consequences of their actions ahead
of time (see Lodrick 2007). Most importantly, the idea of rationality
tends to align with the norms and experiences of white, heterosexual,
able-bodied, middle-class men (Smart 1992). By creating trial narratives
that present complainants as unreliable because they are not rational,
lawyers can therefore draw upon master narratives about gender,
ethnicity, perceived social class, and disability to support their case.
The experiences of women have often been excluded from the law,
leading to their portrayal as abnormal or suspicious (Naffine 1990),
although not all women have been equally viewed in this way because
there are intersecting privileges and oppressions that change the per-
ceptions of women’s credibility. Portraying women as suspicious occurs
because language is used in dyads such as true/false, reason/emotion,
and man/woman, which are mapped onto each other such that “man”
is associated with “reason” and “truth” (Olsen 1990). This designation
of women as emotional and untrustworthy is not new or constrained
to the law. Olsen (1990) argued that the use of binaries dates back to
Plato, and they have been used to subordinate one of each dualism ever
91
since. The masculinisation of rationality was present in Greek philos-

ophy, which focused on using reason to overcome the unpredictability
of the “feminine” natural world (Lloyd 1993). While this has been
most commonly discussed in relation to gender, the prioritisation
of rationality has also been used to justify the subordination of those
from minority ethnic communities, lower socio-economic classes, and
people with disabilities. Trial narratives that draw upon these cultural
representations about rationality, or rather irrationality, are therefore
likely to be convincing for juries and to represent an optimal strategy
for lawyers seeking to win.
These narratives may be justified by defence lawyers because adver-
sarial justice suggests that they should push the boundaries of accept-
able rhetoric and that the judge will check them if they go too far, while
the prosecution will highlight alternative perspectives. For example,
when challenged about the relevance of his arguments, one lawyer told
a complainant that “the judge will stop me if I ask a wrong question”
(Defence2, T1). Similarly, previous interviews with lawyers argued that:
That’s how our system works so well, barristers will do everything proper
for their cause, and judges will allow everything proper but stop it when
it goes too far. (Lawyer 4)
However, the prosecution lawyers in my observations failed to challenge

gendered narratives and these narratives were often developed during
the defence closing speech so that the prosecution could not respond.
Furthermore, judges did not intervene when ill-founded narratives were
created and often reminded the jury about them during the summary of
evidence (see Smith 2018).
The Burden of Proof and a Focus on Complainant

Credibility
Prosecution lawyers did create narratives that undermined the defend-

ant’s credibility too. For example, the defendant in T9 was black and
the prosecution lawyer repeatedly asked him about casual sexual
92
O. Smith
relationships, being an absent father, and hyper-aggression, all of which

relate to cultural representations of black working-class men (see
Ghavami and Peplau 2012). For example:
Prosecution: “You can be an intimidating man, can’t you?”

Defendant: “Yeah”
Prosecution: “You can get aggressive”
Defendant: “Yes”. (T9)
However these arguments were immediately dismissed as irrelevant by

the defence lawyer:
You won’t find me speaking up for the moral character of [Defendant],

and I suspect you will have decided his behaviour on any view was
deplorable… But this is not a court of morals, it is a court of law…
[Complainant] obviously liked something about him… they were irre-
sponsible about contraception; but that, you may think, is how some
types of people behave… The woman who spent so much time with him
is not, perhaps, a fully-fledged angel… . (Defence, T9)
This quote demonstrates a number of issues, particularly the use of

“some types of people” to “other” both the defendant and the complain-
ant, drawing on class stereotypes and ideas of respectable relationships
(see Skeggs 1997). What is also clear is that moral judgements against
the defendant were portrayed as irrelevant, while the moral judgements
about the complainant were presented as central to jury deliberations.
Therefore, although the prosecution used narratives that were rooted
in classist and racist cultural representations, they were effectively rede-
ployed against the complainant by the defence.
In fact, juries were told in every trial that they must focus on the
complainant and think critically about the Crown’s evidence:
It’s for you to assess [Complainant], er, what sort of person she is. To
assess her and to assess her evidence, because she’s obviously a crucial
person in this case, and do you consider her evidence reliable to the
extent that it would have to be to meet the standard it would have to be
in order to convict? (Judge, T18)
93
There is no forensic evidence, there is no incriminating text message,

there is no supporting witness; so you have to decide based on the
women. (Defence2, T1)
Both of these quotes ignore the fact that the jury could also decide the
verdict based on consideration of the defendant and their evidence, as
well as the wider evidence heard. Instead, complainants were presented
as the sole consideration because the burden of proof was on the prose-
cution and they were the prosecution’s main witness. Defence evidence
was therefore presented as immune to criticism:
If you’re expecting me to refute the labels [given to Defendant2]: ‘per-

vert’, ‘slag’… more sinned against than sinning… that isn’t my role…
Is he a worthy and honest man? No… I tell you quite candidly, quite
simply: that the chance of a wrongful conviction is never so high.
(Defence1, T1)
The defendant is maintaining that [Complainant] is lying… I remind you
that he doesn’t have to prove that. Importantly, he doesn’t have to prove,
or provide an explanation [about why Complainant] is lying. (Judge,
T17)
By repeatedly highlighting that defendants do not have to prove their

case, the lawyers guided the jury’s critical focus towards the prose-
cution evidence and suggested that any unconvincing aspects of the
defence narrative were irrelevant because they did not need to pro-
vide a convincing argument anyway. The judge in T17 also argued
that the defence could criticise the complainant without having to
legitimate their argument, since it was the prosecution’s responsibility
to convince a jury to reject character slurs. This has implications for
jury consideration of problematic master narratives, because it sug-
gests that they do not have to be justified in order to be used as a
reason for acquittal. This seems to contradict the Bar Standards Board
(2017) Code of Conduct requirement for legal professionals not to
knowingly mislead a jury, which criticism based on societal stereo-
types is likely to do.
94
O. Smith
Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates that witnesses are routinely undermined
within trial narratives by drawing on master narratives about gen-
der, ethnicity, perceived social class, and disability. Such narratives are
important because credibility is based on judgements of both the “story”
and the “story-teller,” If a “story-teller” is portrayed as non-credible due
to cultural representations that devalue their voice, then they must tell a
more credible “story” in order to be believed (Powell et al. 2017). This
effectively means that, in terms of perceived credibility, a complainant
can either tell a “story” that fits the real rape template, or be a working
class, minority ethnic woman with disabilities.
The trial narratives outlined in this chapter could be justified by not-
ing that adversarial courts rely on both lawyers to advance their case,
meaning that the defendant is also subject to narratives about being
non-credible. However, the burden of proof is used to dismiss any crit-
icism of the defendant as peripheral and instead means that juries are
explicitly instructed to focus on the complainant and their character.
Relying on the problematic trial narratives outlined here could amount
to misleading the jury and cannot lead to “reasonable” doubt (see Boyle
2009), meaning that it is important to address this issue.
Furthermore, these narratives arise in the context of deep-rooted ine-
qualities in the criminal justice system. Russell (2017) has argued that
pretending the law is neutral will perpetuate unequal outcomes, and the
narratives outlined in this chapter highlights that “historical” oppres-
sions remain relevant in court today because of their place in the master
narratives. Policy interventions to improve rape trials cannot rely solely
on training lawyers about rape myths; there must also be a recognition
that the narratives deployed against complainants are centred on mas-
ter narratives which are both a cause and a consequence of oppression.
Kanyeredzi’s (2018) continuum of oppression highlights that minori-
tised women’s experiences of violence is inseparable from their experi-
ences of wider oppression. It is therefore essential that the English and
Welsh justice system addresses the differential perceptions of credibil-
ity experienced by key witnesses; for example, by ensuring that judges
intervene when problematic master narratives are deployed.
95
Notes
1. The terms “victim” and “survivor” have been critiqued within feminist
research (see Mardorossian 2014). While many now use the term “vic-
tim/survivor”, this implies a binary that oversimplifies a person’s lived
experience after violence. This chapter will therefore adopt the term “vic-
tim-survivor” to acknowledge the sense of continuum outlined by Boyle
(2018). When talking about the victim-survivor within the criminal jus-
tice system, the term “complainant” will be used to reflect their official
designation.
2. Although “evidential presumptions” in s. 75 of the Sexual Offences Act
2003 state that under certain circumstances consent, or reasonable belief
in consent, can be assumed absent unless sufficient evidence is provided
to the contrary by the defence. These presumptions were never invoked
in any of the observed trials, despite being relevant several times.
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5
The Visible Vagina:
Swedish Legal Narratives About Rape
Through the Lens of Gender,
Place and Vulnerability
Ulrika Andersson
Introduction
During the #metoo movement in the autumn of 2017, stories about
sexual assault, including rape, garnered much attention world-
wide. It might seem as if all of these stories came from nowhere.
In fact, during the last decades several rape cases have been high-
lighted and debated in media all over the world. These discussions
in the media and among the general public have led to scrutiny and
a critical review of the applicable law and the legal system. For exam-
ple, the handling of rape in Swedish criminal law has been under cri-
tique for the last two decades, with debate on the topic tracing back
to the 1970s (Wendt Höjer 2002; SOU 1976: 9). This critique con-
cerns, among other things, the definition of rape and treatment
of victims during the criminal legal process, and has come from
multiple directions: the media, legal scholarship, legal practitioners,
U. Andersson (*) 
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
e-mail: ulrika.andersson@jur.lu.se
102
U. Andersson
and the general public (Leijonhufvud 2015; Fatta 2018). The media
play a major role in shaping this contemporary debate on rape
(Andersson and Edgren 2018; cf. Martín Alcoff 2018: 23). In Sweden,
the media have frequently been instrumental in naming and framing
cases of rape based on where the assault took place, thus linking the
deed to place in a broader sense (Nilsson 2019). Besides the media,
Swedish courts also participate in promoting a connection between
rape and place (Andersson and Edgren 2018). Contemporary legal dis-
courses, too, relate rape to place: for example, through the use of such
terms as ‘date rape’, ‘rape on campus’, ‘rape on the internet’ and ‘rape
in war-time’ (e.g. Tuerkheimer 2013; Marvel 2016; Edwards 2010;
McGlynn 2008). There is, indeed, scholarly research that focuses on and
explores the issue of where rape takes place (Bitsch and Klemetsen 2017;
Bumiller 2008; Edgren 2019; Nilsson 2019). But there is still a need for
more explicit inquiry into how place is related to rape in law and legal
practice, one that simultaneously deals with the legal analysis of rape.
This need is confirmed indirectly by legal geographers who suggest that
law is ‘anti-geographic’ and call for the study of ‘law and non-geography’
(Bennett and Layard 2015, see also Johnston 2017; King 2011).
This chapter is a first step toward such an inquiry and analysis. In it,
I explore how bodies are produced as places with meaning in the legal
discourses, discourses apparently objective and common sense-oriented.
I take a closer look at how the act of rape is linked to place in legal prac-
tice, by unmasking legal narratives of rape in which different subject
positions for complainants and defendants may be found. Specifically,
I look at whether and how place is narratively connected to sexual vul-
nerability and agency in two Swedish court cases. A fundamental start-
ing point for this article is thus that place in a broad sense is a crucial,
yet forgotten, dimension in the legal analysis of rape. This is particularly
true in the interpretation of complainant vulnerability (cf. Andersson
and Edgren 2018), which in turn may be connected to defendant cul-
pability (Andersson 2018). I argue that place is highly relevant in an
analysis of rape and should be taken into account both in legislation
and in legal praxis. The main reason for this, as I discuss below, is that
place-related considerations can make aspects of power visible and spur
their inclusion in legal analyses.
5 The Visible Vagina: Swedish Legal Narratives …
103
Below I analyze two Swedish Supreme Court cases that were decided
in 2008. Both involved defining the kind of ‘sexual act’ that constitutes
rape under Swedish criminal law. These cases were the first precedential
cases on this issue after the section on rape in the Swedish Penal Code
was amended in 2005, and this part of the law has not changed substan-
tially since then. The amendment was the result of intense critique and
debate regarding the legal treatment of rape, but the change in the lan-
guage defining the sexual acts that may constitute rape was minor and
related to a change in 1998 (Andersson and Edgren 2018). Overall, how-
ever, the amendment represented the first major change to the Swedish
rape law for two decades. Before these changes in 1998 and 2005, the
definition of the sexual activities that constituted rape had only been
amended once—in 1984, when new language made the definition gen-
der neutral—since the modern penal code was introduced in 1965.
The cases analyzed here did not provoke much media attention, but
have been taken up by some Swedish legal scholars. Petter Asp’s anal-
ysis very much follows the Supreme Court line; Linnéa Wegerstad has
argued that he excludes gender theoretical aspects (Asp 2008; Wegerstad
2012). The judgments from these cases are my primary material.
Judgments are vital to the treatment of rape in criminal law. They show
what information about an event is considered legally relevant. In par-
ticular, I analyze the relevance of place in relation to sexual vulnerability
and agency in these legal narratives, by looking at how the information
about these events is made ‘legal’. What is considered legally relevant
and what is not? My intent is to make visible what information, accord-
ing to the Supreme Court, is considered legal and non-legal in relation
to the sexual aspect of rape, seen through the lens of gender, place and
vulnerability (Smart 1995; Mardorossian 2014).
Many contemporary rape cases from the Swedish Supreme Court
deal with questions of evidence (Andersson 2004). As mentioned above,
I have previously analyzed such cases and how courts participate in
framing rape in relation to place (Andersson and Edgren 2018). But
in the cases I study here, the courts decided upon a substantive mat-
ter of criminal law, namely the meaning of the term ‘sexual act’ which
constitutes one of the elements of the Swedish legal definition of rape
104
U. Andersson
(NJA 2008s. 482 I and II). Although my analysis is limited to two cases,
it is in itself important since these cases deal with a substantive matter.
It is of great interest to explore how the ‘sexual act’ of rape is related to
place. These cases are also suitable for analysis since they were decided
together, and were similar in several key respects: both concerned young
people who were assaulted while they were sleeping. There were also dif-
ferences between them, however, in terms of gender, body and place.
It is also worth mentioning that the outcomes in these two cases were
upheld in a Supreme Court case from 2013 (NJA 2013s. 548). Below,
I elaborate on the workings of Swedish rape law, but first I will address
my theoretical points of departure.
Theoretical and Methodological Approach

Like other areas of law, rape law rests on the liberal assumption of the indi-
vidual’s autonomy and agency, meaning that a legal subject is considered free
and competent to make rational choices. This notion leaves the individual
bounded and separate from various contexts. Thus many aspects surround-
ing the individual are normally not taken into account in law and legal prac-
tice, at least not deliberately. Several scholars have opposed this view, arguing
that the assumption of liberal autonomy conceals a structural power that can
leave subjects vulnerable (e.g. Grear 2010; Niemi 2010; Naffine 2002; Lacey
1997). Accordingly, agency in the traditional legal sense is problematic in
relation to rape. In line with Rebecka Stringer, I argue that it is crucial to
ask how agency is constructed (Stringer 2014). In analyzing legal narratives
of rape, my aim is to focus on agency in relation to gender, place and vul-
nerability. As Linda Martín Alcoff puts it, all narratives are plausible within
certain frames that set out who can be victimized, who can be accused, and
who is intelligible within certain discursive formations (Martín Alcoff 2018:
23, see also Amsterdam and Bruner 2001). Discursive formations on gen-
der, place and vulnerability are my specific objects of study in this article.
Concretely, I look at the narration and classification of crimes of sexual
assault, including the legal labeling and the positioning and portrayal of the
complainant and the defendant. Following Bumiller (2008), I explore how
these connections revolve around gender, place and vulnerability.
105
In relation to place and in the wake of groundbreaking books by

Henri Lefevbre on place and space (1991), Benedict Anderson on
imagined communities (1991) and Nira Yuval Davis on gender and
nation (1993), feminist geographers have written extensively on
how home, the public space, the community and the nation are con-
stituted by gender, sexuality, nationality, race, ability and so forth,
touching on many different themes (e.g. Massey 1994; Johnston and
Valentine 1995; Valentine 1992; Pain 1997; Molina 2007; Johnston
and Longhurst 2009). Writings on the meaning of ‘home’, for instance,
have touched on a multitude of angles (Mallett 2004). The ambivalence
disclosed in the concept of home—which is not only where we dwell,
cook, eat and learn appropriate social roles, but which is also invested
with meanings such as belonging, intimacy, fear and danger related
to violence, to gender and family, to sexuality, to homelessness (e.g.
Valentine 1992; Ahmed 2000; Blunt and Warley 2004; Johnston and
Longhurst 2009; Thörn 2004; Edgren 2016; Tyner 2012)—is useful to
have in mind. What interests me is certain meanings relating to belong-
ing and not belonging; being in the right place or out of place (Moran
and Skeggs 2004).
I ask in what way the sexual act of rape is linked to gender, place and
vulnerability. In relation to how vulnerability and agency are expressed
in court narratives, rape law, as just noted, rests on the assumption of
a liberal subject with individual autonomy. In any individual case, this
assumption may conceal structural power that leaves the subject vul-
nerable (see e.g. Grear 2010; Niemi 2010; Naffine 2002; Lacey 1997;
Naffine and Owens 1997). Taking issue with the liberal subject, Martha
Fineman has argued that vulnerability as a human condition should
instead be seen as the starting point for the legal subject (Fineman 2008,
2010, 2017). This line of thought sees vulnerability as both embodied
(in individual factors such as illness) and embedded (in the organiza-
tion of societal institutions and relationships). Using this approach, I am
able to argue for a notion of vulnerability and agency that is connected,
among other things, to place. For instance, individual autonomy and
trauma may be related to structural factors such as patriarchal notions of
female sexuality, and these in turn may manifest differently in connec-
tion to different places (Andersson 2016; Andersson and Edgren 2018).
106
U. Andersson
Swedish Rape Law

During the period studied, sexual offenses in Swedish law were con-
strued as sexual acts associated with force or exploitation (Andersson
2001, 2004). The crime of rape involves acts that are labeled in the
same sexual terms—for example, ‘sexual intercourse’—as those used to
describe mutual sexual acts. Thus, the language of rape legislation and
practice is blurred and in a way hijacked by the language of a discourse
of erotic sexuality (cf. Wegerstad 2012, 2015).
Further, all sexual acts are gauged against intercourse, which in prac-
tice mostly means some kind of penetration. Essentially, this is based on
a view of heterosexuality that has prevailed since the nineteenth century,
adhered to by men and women and linked to the notion of difference
between male and female sexuality (Bergenheim 2005: 73; Ekström
2001: 153). Sweden only very recently introduced nonvoluntariness as
a basis for the definition of rape (Prop 2017/2018: 177). Until July 1,
2018, the decisive criterion in the provisions on rape was force, whereas,
for example, English law focuses on the victim’s will, or lack of con-
sent (Andersson 2001; Temkin 2002). Thus, the elements of force or
exploitation have set the legal boundaries of these offenses. Definitions
of rape focus on the male perpetrator’s force. Despite this focus on
force and exploitation, in practice consent and will have dominated
(Andersson 2004).
As mentioned, however, the definition of the sexual act of rape has
not been changed to any great extent since 1984. At that time, rape law
was made gender neutral by allowing that rape could be a sexual activ-
ity comparable to heterosexual intercourse—the latter being the earlier
prerequisite (Prop. 1983/1984: 105, 76). Primarily this change referred
to acts of oral or anal penetration. A minor expansion of this notion
was introduced in the amendment from 2005. The precise meaning of
a ‘sexual act comparable to sexual intercourse’ was elaborated by the
Supreme Court in the two cases I analyze below. I will begin by intro-
ducing the case material and then give an account of the court’s nar-
ratives, followed by an interpretation of the cases through the lens of
gender, place and vulnerability.
107
The Cases
As already mentioned, in contrast to many other rape cases from the
Swedish Supreme Court, these two cases deal with substantive issues of
criminal law. The cases were partially decided together and even referred
to by the same number in the law reports, Nytt Juridiskt arkiv, NJA
2008s. 482 I and II. My main material consists of the judgments in
both cases, as presented in the reports. The reports cover the judgments
from three judicial instances in each case. Each judgment is structured
around the decision itself and the court’s grounds for that decision. It
is in these formal justifications that the stories from the parties to the
case are rehearsed, and as part of the assessment of the evidence, the
information from these statements is evaluated for its probative value.
The court mediates the stories from the defendants, the complainants,
the witnesses and the evidence of various types; using these stories, the
court establishes the background to the case. In the process, the court
arranges events by ordering scenes in temporal and spatial sequences,
making truth claims (Andersson and Edgren 2018). I refer to these
narratives as ‘background narratives’. As pointed out elsewhere in this
volume, court narratives rely to a great extent on what La France and
Mckenzie-Mohr and others call master narratives (McKenzie-Mohr
and Lafrance 2014). These two judgments also have sections that go
through the legal issues themselves, such as the legal classification of the
crime, intent and sentencing. The court then arrives at its assessment in
what I call an ‘assessment narratives’. Where there have been claims for
damages, these issues are also discussed in the judgments.
The two cases at hand dealt with the same legal question: the mean-
ing of a ‘sexual act comparable to sexual intercourse’. Some other cir-
cumstances were also similar: both complainants were young and both
were assaulted when asleep. In the first case the defendant and com-
plainant were about the same age, but in the second case the defend-
ant was more than 35 years older than the complainant, and the
complainant’s employer. One significant difference between the two
cases was that the first complainant was a young woman, while the
second was a young man. It should be noted neither the Supreme
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U. Andersson
Court nor subsequent legal scholarship observed this fact particularly

(Asp 2008; cf. Wegerstad 2012). Here, I will deal with the cases in the
same order as the Court. I focus on the language and the structure of
the court narratives, the stories told and the way the courts put forward
their legal reasoning.
In the first case the defendant was accused of rape and sexual assault,
alternatively. According to the prosecution, he had inserted his fingers
into the complainant’s vagina while she was sleeping. In the background
narrative the district court established what had happened in an appar-
ently neutral way, writing in the third person: ‘To begin with the dis-
trict court considers the following to have been shown’ (483). The court
presents a story about how the complainant and her friends were drink-
ing wine in her flat. During the course of the evening another six or
seven people, including the defendant, came to the flat, and later they
all went in separate cars to a city nearby. Some went to a pub and some,
including the complainant, drove around in one of the cars for a couple
of hours. At the pub the defendant met a friend who was very drunk.
They both went back to the complainant’s flat to wait for half an hour
before the complainant arrived. The background narrative also puts for-
ward the different versions of the evening told by the complainant, the
defendant and two witnesses. The way the court reproduces these stories
is, to a great extent, affected by the questions asked by the prosecutor
and the defence. In the judgment, however, these questions are not visi-
ble. The complainant’s story is about what happened during the assault,
her reaction, how she was dressed, her earlier experience from sexual
assault, the fact that she had spent a short period of time in psychiatric
care, her studies and her participation in a television show about sexual
assault against women. This story aligns with a master narrative about
unstable women who dress in certain ways and are made responsible for
their own assault (McKenzie-Mohr 2014; Serisier 2019). On the night
of her assault, the complainant woke up with a sense of unease and feel-
ing pain in her vagina: ‘at first she did not realize what was happening,
but later understood someone was lying next to her and had inserted
several fingers into her vagina’ (484). The defendant’s story is about
what did not happen, according to him: why he left the apartment in
the middle of the night, his activities the next morning and why he
109
texted an apology to the complainant, in spite of not having done any-

thing: ‘Women are more sensitive than men and he usually apologizes
even if nothing has happened’ (485).
In the assessment narratives, the district court first spoke in general
about the existence of evidence in sexual offenses: ‘generally the main
evidence consists of the complainant’s information’ (486). The court
also pointed out the need for the rest of the investigation to ‘support
the [complainant’s] information so it is proved beyond reasonable
doubt that the defendant is guilty of the crime’ (486). The court then
shifted focus, moving to the facts of the case at hand. The forensic med-
ical report is said to be of no relevance; meanwhile the report from the
investigation of the defendant’s mobile phone showed that the defend-
ant texted the complainant the day after the alleged offense, writing,
‘Hello, I’m so sorry about yesterday night! And for what I did! Am so
sorry! Kind regards, x!’ (486). The court found this to support the con-
clusion that the assault took place. So did information from a few wit-
nesses. The court thus found it proven beyond a reasonable doubt that
the defendant inserted his fingers in the complainant’s vagina (487).
Neither the district court nor the appellate court (487–494) found
this act comparable to intercourse, and the defendant was convicted
of the less serious crime of ‘sexual coercion’, rather than ‘rape’. In the
Supreme Court (496–498), the argumentation about the meaning of
the term ‘sexual act’ led to the opposite outcome, and the defendant was
convicted of rape. The core of the argumentation was about penetra-
tion: The complainant was ‘subjected to a penetration of the vagina, not
being insignificant, which has caused a certain pain’ (497). The court
then reasoned about the violation as follows: ‘[t]he violation of being
subjected to such an act must be considered similar to the violation of
being subjected to forcible intercourse’ (498). Obviously the narrative
used in interpreting this prerequisite is phallocentric, in that the court
clearly viewed penetration of the vagina by a penis to be the most seri-
ous form of sexual violation (Wegerstad 2015; Boyle 2019).
In the second case, all of the judicial instances issued very brief
judgments. The prosecution accused the defendant of rape for having
‘masturbated the complainant’ (498–499). In other words, the accusa-
tion is very implicit; above all it employs a vocabulary normally used
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for consensual sexual behavior. This is quite remarkable from at least

two perspectives: first, in a strictly legal sense, since the specification of
the deed is a fundamental procedural requirement, and using the word
‘masturbate’ is not an explicit description of what actually happened;
and second from a critical feminist perspective, as the consensual lan-
guage effectively conceals aspects of power and abuse (cf. Boyle 2019).
Some portions of the grounds for decision are classified and not part of
the judgment, so the background narratives are very short. The assessment
narrative by the appellate court, however, reveals that ‘the complainant
was far from home in an intoxicated state, into which he—in spite of his
youth—was aided by [the defendant], and the complainant should have
been able to feel safe’ (500). Further, the complainant was an employee
of the defendant (undergoing a trial period) and the two were on a busi-
ness trip and staying overnight in a hotel when the assault took place.
The district and appellate court both found the defendant guilty of rape;
accordingly, both courts assessed the sexual act as being comparable to
intercourse. The assessment narratives from these courts contextualized the
sexual act and related the event to the complainant’s age (young), the place
of his assault (‘far from home’), and his position as an employee of the
defendant (500–501). The Court of Appeal, especially, took power rela-
tions implicitly into account in its assessment, claiming that the defend-
ant ‘must be considered as responsible for the complainant’ during the
trip and that ‘the complainant should have been able to feel safe in [the
defendant’s] company’ (500). The Supreme Court, however, in a remark-
ably brief opinion, simply cited preparatory works to the current rape law
and declared that it found no reason to depart from their guidance:
If a perpetrator masturbates another person, this is not, in most cases, to

be considered abuse of such a nature as to constitute a violation compa-
rable to forced intercourse […] No reasons to make any different assess-
ment of the act at issue in this case have emerged. (502)
Based on this reasoning, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court
ruling and convicted the defendant of sexual coercion. The aspects of
power that the Court of Appeal took into account in assessing the sex-
ual act—the complainant’s age and the defendant’s responsibility for the
111
defendant in his role as an employer—were only assessed by the Supreme

Court in relation to the defendant’s recklessness and whether the crime
could be viewed as gross, which the court found it could not (502).
I will now analyze how these two assaults were ‘made legal’ in the
court judgments, and whether and how place is relevant, or could be
relevant, in the legal narratives. In particular I discuss the linguistic
framing, the legal reasoning based on preparatory works and finally the
absence of place in these legal narratives.
Rape, Gender, Place and Vulnerability

Firstly, I would like to draw attention to the linguistic framing of the
events in these cases (Niemi-Kiesiläinen et al. 2007; Ehrlich 2001).
In the first case, the prosecution, in its very description of the assault,
linguistically produced a violation of female sexuality by implying
unwanted peneteration, making the claim that the defendant ‘had
inserted his fingers into the complainant’s vagina’. This formulation
invokes a stereotypical act of abuse much more than the language used
in the second case, where the prosecutor claimed that ‘the defendant
masturbated the complainant’ (Boyle 2019; Estrich 1987). In the lat-
ter instance, rather than abuse, the presumption is almost the reverse: a
mutual sexual encounter. The underlying message is that rape is a crime
committed against women and female sexuality, through penetration,
which appears as the ultimate violation. This is an excellent illustration
of the heteronormative framing of vulnerability and sexuality in relation
to rape (Estrich 1987; cf. Javaid 2018). The first situation is also the one
the Supreme Court ruled to be rape in this precedential case. Thus the
prosecutor here linguistically prepared the way for conviction. In the
second case, the reverse occurred, as the perpetrator’s language prevailed
(Niemi-Kiesiläinen et al. 2007; Ehrlich 2001; Brooks 2002).
Secondly, I would like to stress that the legal assessments of the courts
are primarily based on preparatory works. These have a great impact on
legal interpretation in the Nordic tradition and are an obvious source
material for interpreting the meaning of the law (Korling and Zamboni
2013, Chaps. 1–3). The preparatory works consist of legal documents
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U. Andersson
generated during the legislative process. They include directives for

legislation and reports, which may be written by individual experts or
parliamentary committees, as well the propositions—that is, legislative
proposals and their grounds—authored by the Government. There is a
clear and strong reluctance on the part of the Supreme Court to over-
rule the preparatory works. This means that legal interpretation and
enforcement risk getting caught in circular reasoning. In these cases,
for instance, the preparatory works, bearing obvious legal relevance,
express a phallocentric view of rape. The Supreme Court refers to this
view, does not want to depart from it in applying the law, and the lower
courts later have to follow this view. The Supreme Court establishes law
using obviously relevant legal sources. The legal—the precedential deci-
sions of the Supreme Court—becomes legal by way of the legal—the
preparatory works—and thus detached from arguments outside the tra-
ditional legal source material (Wegerstad 2015; Andersson 2004).
Thirdly, I would like to highlight the (ir)relevance of place in the
legal narratives on sexual vulnerability (and agency) and how this
(ir)relevance prevents aspects of power, here in relation to gender, sex-
uality and age, from being taken into account. Narratives where sexual
agency is related to vulnerability and connected to place are not unu-
sual in rape cases (Andersson and Edgren 2018). For example, if a rape
has been committed in a place unknown to the complainant, s/he may
be regarded as particularly vulnerable (Andersson and Edgren 2018; case
NJA 1997s. 538). On the other hand, if a rape takes place after the victim
invites the perpetrator home, courts are less likely to associate the com-
plainant’s situation with vulnerability (Andersson and Edgren 2018; case
NJA 2004s. 231). In the cases studied in this article, such narratives on
place are less visible: particularly in the reasoning of the Supreme Court,
which, as already noted, establishes the interpretation of law. In the
first case, for example, the Supreme Court makes no remarks about the
complainant’s right to be safe in her own home; in the second, it does
not remark on the complainant’s sexual vulnerability and constrained
agency in a hotel room with an employer many years his elder. In other
words, there is an remarkably obvious lack of reasoning about place in
the Supreme Court’s narratives on sexuality in relation to rape, at least at
first glance. I argue this is due to a lack of awareness of the relevance of
place in relation to rape. It is quite clear that the legal assessments given
113
by the courts in their judgments are completely separated from place-

related aspects. Through this demarcation, place, and in turn the relation
of sexuality to power, gender and age, become irrelevant in the legal inter-
pretations. Conversely, if the question of place were taken into account,
aspects that I believe should be included in the legal reasoning could be
made visible: a party at home or a work trip with a stay overnight in a
hotel are events connected to different places, with various connotations.
Considering the relevance of place in the interpretations would make it
possible to legally interpret sexual offenses in relation to aspects of power
(cf. Andersson and Wegerstad 2016; McGlynn 2008; Smart 1995).
Looking a bit closer, however, place does turn out to be more pres-
ent in the first case than it would first appear. In fact, the place that is
the complainant’s body, the woman’s vagina, is quite central and visi-
ble in the court’s narratives and legal reasoning (cf. Andersson 2019).
The fact that the defendant’s fingers are inside the complainant’s body,
her vagina, is made relevant and completely crucial to the outcome of
the case, which hinges on whether the sexual act that transpired can be
considered comparable to intercourse. In contrast, in the second case,
the male body is obscured, and so is a potential male violation, which
instead is framed as masturbation (cf. Javaid 2018).
Conclusion
To sum up, the phallocentric, heteronormative notion of sexuality, and
in turn the stereotyped notion how female sexuality is violated, allow the
first situation, which involves penetration, to count as rape—but not the
second one, where masturbation is described in mitigating language and
the perspective of the perpetrator prevails. Apart from stressing the place
of the body in the first case, place is absent in the legal narratives in the
Supreme Court. As I have shown, the court did not touch upon the ques-
tion of whether the complainant should be able to feel safe in her own
home and not have to fear violence and abuse. If these aspects had been
included in the assessment, the severity of the crime might have been
judged greater and in turn affected the sentence. Even more importantly
in my view, including place-related aspects might affect the perception
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of violence in intimate relations at a societal level. In the second case, the

appellate court invoked place by implicitly stressing home and belong-
ing when noting that the young man was far from home. An underlying
assumption in this narrative is that the complainant was particularly vul-
nerable since he was far away from home. On the other hand, the ‘place’
of his body was not made relevant. Later, the Supreme Court declared
that sexual vulnerability should not be related to place at all—neither the
place of the assault nor the place of the body—and judged this crime as
less serious than the other. To conclude, the exclusion of the relevance of
place and the phallocentric and heteronormative legal notion of sexual-
ity, together with the framing of the abuse as masturbation, rendered the
Supreme Court unable to consider this a case of rape.
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Proposition 2017/2018:177.
SOU 2016:60.
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6
Narrating the Moral Geography of Rape
in Swedish Newspapers
Gabriella Nilsson
Introduction
This chapter analyses news narratives of two of Sweden’s most
hyper-medialised gang rape cases—the so-called ‘Rissne rape’ in 2000,
and the ‘Stureplan rape’ in 2007. Both labels referred to the locations
where the rapes were carried out—the underprivileged suburb Rissne
just outside Stockholm and the privileged neighbourhood Stureplan in
the central part of the city. The chapter will focus on how these loca-
tions, and the movement within them by the young men and women
involved, were narrated as situated in a moral geography of sexual
violence. It will be investigated how news reports about the two rape
cases evoked a moral geography that marked the spatial dimensions
of power, such as how certain locations were charged with moral
G. Nilsson (*) 
Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences,
e-mail: gabriella.nilsson@kultur.lu.se
120
G. Nilsson
connotations and associated with definitions of belonging as well as

norms for who should be let in and who should not.
To have access to the protection of the law, and in this case the sup-
port of the news media, the individual must be recognised as being
legitimately entitled to this protection and support (cf. Fraser 1995;
Moran and Skeggs 2004: 5). It will be argued that this recognition is
dependent on how the individual fits into the moral geography in terms
of being in or out of place. Thus, the aim is to investigate how the rapes
were situated in space; how news narratives of victims and perpetrators
moving in and out of place came to define what had actually happened
and who was to blame. What spatial categories were employed in the
narratives? How were the different locations delimited and boundaries
drawn? How was it decided who rightfully belonged there and who
were outsiders?
The chapter draws from a larger study of how rape was portrayed in
the Swedish news media from 1990 to 2015. In the data collection for
this study, the Rissne case and the Stureplan case stood out as particu-
larly explicit in the way that location was used in the news reports as a
model of explanation. The chapter is based on an analysis of all news-
paper articles concerning the two selected cases, covering news reports,
editorials and opinion pieces, published in the six largest Swedish news-
papers. Close to 300 articles have been retrieved and closely read.
Narratives are central both in the lives of the individual and in
broader aspects of social, cultural and political life (Woodwiss et al.
2017). A narrative perspective implies an interest in how events are
“selected, organized, connected, and evaluated as meaningful for a par-
ticular audience” (Kohler-Riessman 2008: 3). Extensive research on
news narratives of rape shows that these narratives perpetuate myths
and stereotypes about rape, rapists and rape victims (Burt 1980;
Barnett 2008; Franiuk et al. 2008; Bonnes 2013; Worthington 2013;
Waterhouse-Watson 2016). The most commonly used narrative ele-
ment is the way that victims are described as either deserving or inno-
cent; presented as virgins attacked by monsters, or promiscuous women
who brought the rape upon themselves and could therefore be blamed
(Benedict 1992; Aldridge 1995; Meyer 2010; O’Hara 2012). Leigh
Gilmore describes society’s response to women who report rape in terms
6 Narrating the Moral Geography of Rape in Swedish Newspapers
121
of taintedness, how some women’s testimonies, in particular, become

tainted with doubt and disbelief (Gilmore 2017).
Suzanne McKenzie-Mohr argues that conceptions of innocence
and blame are two central elements in the master narrative of rape
(Mckenzie-Mohr 2014). This is similar to how Niels Christie has
described the construction of the ideal versus the non-ideal victim, and
the ideal versus the non-ideal perpetrator (Christie 1986). In the master
narrative of rape only some men are understood as rapists, while oth-
ers accused of rape tend to be perceived, and produced in the media
narrative, as falsely accused. Perpetrators of sexual violence are regularly
described as “beasts”, “perverts” or in other terms “othered”, and as such
distanced from “ordinary men” (Mason and Monckton-Smith 2008;
Boshoff and Prinsloo 2015). The chapter will contribute to this research
by stressing the spatial dimension of the master narrative of rape
(cf. Durham 2015; Molina 2007).
Analytical Framework
The chapter will analyse how news narratives of rape are situated in a
moral geography of Stockholm, Sweden. The concept moral geogra-
phy is employed as a means to frame the ways in which news narratives
produce maps of power (cf. Durham 2015) in the sense that different
moralities are intertwined with specific geographic spaces (Erol 2018;
Leap 2010; Modan 2007); a way to highlight the intersection of moral
and geographical boundaries, spaces and movements. From a govern-
mental perspective, political scientist Haim Yacobi describes how moral
geography “exploits a set of unspoken, ethical claims that produce,
reproduce, and morally and politically support discourses and actions
of the state” (Yacobi 2016: 3). However, at the same time, queer theo-
rist Ali E. Erol argues, the morality of a geographic space is not a static
construction, but an ongoing contestation between various performa-
tivities that are part of or lay claim to that particular space. Different
groups of people with competing moralities contest how that morality
reflects in space, and through the movement of bodies within that space
(Erol 2018: 432f ).
122
G. Nilsson
As argued by feminist geographer Doreen Massey, space and place

are always constructed out of social relations; that the spatial is social
relations “stretched out”. Moreover, the social relations of space, Massey
points out, “are experienced differently, and variously interpreted, by
those holding different positions as part of it” (Massey 1994: 3). With
the concept of moral geography the intention is to encompass how
these stretched-out social relations of space are structured and delim-
ited by historically and culturally reproduced norms for movement
and standstill, for crossing boundaries, and for taking place. The way
the moral geography is evoked in news narratives of victims and per-
petrators of rape will be discussed in relation to four themes: crossing
boundaries, walking in line, being in place and invading space. Here I
draw variously from the work of philosopher Sara Ahmed and sociolo-
gist Nirmal Puwar.
Sara Ahmed offers a theoretical view on how power structures affect
bodies as they move in the world (2006, 2007). With the concept ori-
entation, Ahmed refers to the starting point and the direction of our
movement through time and space. In order to stress how bodies,
however, do not orient themselves aimlessly, but under the impact of
normative preconditions, Ahmed employs the concept lines, meaning
the basic routes and the well-worn paths with which we recognise the
world. When we orient ourselves in the world, Ahmed argues, we tend
to prefer to be in line rather than out of line, in order for our lived lives
to be understandable and acceptable in the eyes of others. I would argue
that, as such, the lines are drawn on the mental map of the moral geog-
raphy and reproduced, for example, in news narratives. Lines thus work
as things that structure the life of the individual, but only as long as we
continue to move along them. As will be analysed, the two cases involve
narratives of both moving in and out of line, movements that clearly
influenced the matter of guilt and blame.
Ahmed opens to an understanding of the body in space, using
associations to comfort. Being at home, being in place, is simultane-
ously being comfortable. Like sitting in a comfortable chair, being in
the right place means being so “at ease with one’s environment that
it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins”
(Ahmed 2007: 11). Conversely, to not belong, or to be out of place,
123
is a bodily experience of disorientation, of being uncomfortable and

distinctly separated from the world, so that the contours of the body
clearly emerge. These two perspectives are also apparent in the narratives
about perpetrators and victims involved in the two cases; in particular,
when the issue of being out of place is described, at the same time the
narratives include descriptions of boundary crossing.
In her book, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place
(2004), Nirmal Puwar focuses on the implications of political incentives
to include previously excluded bodies in new places. What happens, she
asks, when bodies not expected to occupy certain places do so? When
previously subordinate groups take up privileged positions that were
not reserved for them, what are the terms of coexistence? (Puwar 2004:
1). Puwar’s answer to these questions is a conceptualisation of Masseys
mentioning of “space invaders”, as she describes the simultaneous and
contradictory inside/outside position of outsiders let in. Some bodies,
Puwar writes, “are deemed as having the right to belong, while oth-
ers are marked out as trespassers” and “circumscribed as being ‘out of
place’” (Puwar 2004: 8). In line with this, Ahmed, too, stresses the need
to describe how the promise of inclusion can be a concealment and thus
an extension of exclusion (Ahmed 2012: 182).
The Two Cases

Both cases revolved around a situation where a girl or young woman,
intoxicated to varying degrees by alcohol, reported being raped by sev-
eral boys or young men who had used excessive violence and humili-
ating language during the act (cf. Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012;
Andersson and Edgren 2018). Below I will present summaries of the
two cases, reflecting how they were commonly described in the news
reports.
Rissne. In January 2000 the newspapers reported that late on a Friday
night a 14-year-old girl was brutally raped by a gang of eight boys on
the concrete floor in a parking garage in Rissne. The heavily drunk girl,
who was on her way home after a night out with a friend, had already
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G. Nilsson
been molested by the gang on the underground train, and when the two
girls got off at Rissne station, the boys followed them. One of the girls
escaped but the other one was dragged into the parking garage where
she was subjected to torture-like abuse by several of the boys, who also
called her demeaning names and screamed “Wake up, whore!” during
the assault. Afterwards they stole her mobile phone and her shoes and
left her lying on the ground. Almost instantly, it was reported in the
media that the boys had immigrant backgrounds (cf. Aftonbladet 29/1
2000; Expressen 5/2 2000).
Stureplan. In March 2007 a 19-year-old woman was out partying at a

nightclub on Stureplan together with two young men, 19 and 25 years
old, whom she already knew and had had sexual intercourse with on
several occasions. After closing time, the party went to one of the men’s
flats in the vicinity. Initially, the woman consented to sexual intercourse
with the two men, but when one of them wanted to have anal sex, she
refused. The other man then encouraged his companion to rape her,
which he did, the woman reported, threatening to break her nose if she
kept screaming. After that first incident, the two men took turns having
sex with the woman for several hours, in combination with physical vio-
lence. Only when the men fell asleep did she dare to leave the apartment
and call the police (cf. Aftonbladet 5/5 2007; Kvällsposten 21/4 2007).
Although the setting was familiar—in both cases a number of young
men were described as having raped a heavily drunk young woman—in
terms of class and ethnicity the way the news narratives were presented
differed. Commonly, the hyper-medialisation of gang rape draws from
cases involving racialised perpetrators from the underprivileged sub-
urb (Worthington 2013; Durham 2015; Bumiller 2008), consequently
forming what stands out as a specific “genre”—the Suburb Rape
(Nilsson 2018).
The Rissne case seemed to fit this genre—the young men of immi-
grant background who were alleged to have committed the rape were
easily produced as the Other in the “black poetry” (Ristilammi 1994)
of the “Rough Town” (Worthington 2013; cf. Andersson 2003;
Mardorossian 2014). The Stureplan case, however, did not fit this genre.
Instead, the Stureplan case stood out as an exception in the Swedish
125
history of news reports on gang rape, due both to the class identity
and ethnicity of the perpetrators and to the place where the rape was
committed—the privileged neighbourhood Stureplan. However, a strik-
ing commonality in how the two cases were narrated was the dominating
focus on location and the references to certain spatial elements as expla-
nations as to why the rapes had been committed (see Andersson and
Edgren 2018; Edgren 2019). Although the cases were named after actual
places in the news reports, these places were, above all, situated on the
mental map displaying the moral geography of the underprivileged sub-
urb and the privileged inner city (cf. Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012).
In their quest to tell these stories the newspaper journalists, it
seemed, set out to capture the essence of these places, not least the
appearances, habits, opinions and behaviours of those populating them;
the “stretched out” social relations of space (Massey 1994). In both
cases, only a few days after the news about the incidents had first been
revealed, longer articles similar to travel reports from exotic places were
published. With these demarcating reports, a moral geography was
evoked that made it possible to distinguish the victims and perpetrators
who were in place and who were out of place, who were walking in line
and who were crossing boundaries and invading space.
Crossing Boundaries
In the narrative of the Rissne rape, Rissne was not the model for the
underprivileged suburb that constituted the main location of the nar-
rative. Instead, assumptions about the perpetrators’ belongings were the
foundation of the story. Though only vaguely pinned geographically in
the initial news reports about the rape, described as taking place in “the
west of Stockholm” (Expressen 4/2 2000; Aftonbladet 24/3 2000; Svenska
Dagbladet 1/2 2000), this placement allowed the journalists, on their
mental map, to situate the perpetrators in the underprivileged suburb.
As Ahmed mentions, though the racialisation of strangers (and in this
case, rapists) is not immediately apparent due to the strict anonymity of
the stranger who is said to be “anyone”, the concept of “anyone” points
to some bodies more than others (Ahmed 2012: 3; cf. Molina 2007).
126
G. Nilsson
Experts on youth and immigration contributed by describing

boys from the underprivileged suburb in sweeping generalisations.
According to these experts “these type of boys” were often character-
ised by a “gang mentality” (Svenska Dagbladet 28/2 2000; Expressen
9/2 2000) defined by a “lack of respect and empathy” (Expressen 31/1
2000) in combination with “feelings of omnipotence” (TT 4/2 2000).
This mentality was, in turn, the consequence of “belonging to the most
broken group known in Sweden” (Expressen 9/2 2000). With “frag-
mented and marginalised” families (Svenska Dagbladet 28/2 2000) and
parents that were “completely excluded from Swedish society” (Dagens
Nyheter 15/3 2000) “sitting at home watching satellite TV, convinced
that all Swedes are racists” (Svenska Dagbladet 28/2 2000), the boys in
the suburb were “lacking male role models that could lead them back
on track” (Göteborgs-Posten 4/2 2000). Altogether, it was presupposed
that the perpetrators of the rape in Rissne were “these type of boys”
(cf. Bredström 2006).
Thus the journalists went to the underprivileged suburb (seemingly
any suburb was good enough at first, only later was it revealed that the
boys belonged to the neighbouring suburb of Rissne, Rinkeby) in their
search for answers as to why the rape had been committed. There the
journalists posed this direct question to those populating the suburb
and their answers were used as elements in the narration of the moral
geography of the rape (cf. Bredström 2006).
Teenaged girls with traditionally Swedish-sounding names were
made to explain the situation to the readers of Dagens Nyheter: “In
the suburbs where nearly everyone is an immigrant, many boys really
despise Swedish girls”. “Immigrant boys don’t have much respect for
Swedish girls, especially not girls who dress revealingly”. “Worst of all
are the guys from the Middle East” who call “Swedish girls […] cheap
whores just because they are out late or have sex before they marry”
(Dagens Nyheter 18/2 2000). This situation was confirmed in similar
interviews with teenaged boys of immigrant background: “It is far too
easy to get a Swedish whore. […] Only cheap girls have sex before mar-
riage”. “I don’t have much respect for Swedish girls. You can say they are
fucked to pieces” (Dagens Nyheter 11/2 2000). “If I had to rape a girl
I would pick a Swedish girl with a short skirt and high heels. Swedish
127
girls have to learn to protect themselves. They need to understand

how we immigrant guys think. How we view Swedish girls” (Dagens
Nyheter 18/2 2000). In this media-produced encounter between “young
Swedish girls” and “young immigrant boys”, created rhetorically by
the journalist, the explanation of rape as the logical consequence of a
conflict between Swedish femininity and immigrant masculinity was
reinforced (Bredström 2006).
In the words of Bernhardsson and Bogren (2012), “the Immigrant”
was evoked as a troublesome position in the media narrative of the
Rissne rape. In fact, the immigrant population of the suburb was
highly Othered and stood out as disoriented in almost every sense. As
Ahmed describes it, in the politics of stranger making, emotions of fear
and hatred were stuck to their bodies (Ahmed 2012: 2). In a similar
way, Moran and Skeggs write that the figure of the stranger “locates
fear in a character with particular social, cultural, spatial and tempo-
ral dimensions” (Moran and Skeggs 2004: 146). As representatives of
this estranged suburban Other (Molina 2007), the boys accused of
committing the rape were easily produced as ideal perpetrators; guilty,
blameworthy rapists (cf. Christie 1986). However, I would argue that
it was not their position as Others alone that added to their guilt, but
additionally, their movement in space—that they were space invaders
(Puwar 2004).
Moran and Skeggs write that to symbolically occupy a given terri-
tory is a precondition for the visibility of marginalised groups. Yet at the
same time, it is this visibility that invokes disciplinary restrictions and
recognition of marginalised groups as being in or out of place (Moran
and Skeggs 2004: 7; cf. Puwar 2004; Molina 2007). To put it another
way, occupying a certain space could mean that you are delimited to
being placed there. The visualisation of the immigrant Other occupy-
ing the underprivileged suburb in the narrative of the Rissne rape, came
with restrictions of placement, requirements that these Others stayed
in the suburb. Thus, though the immigrant population of the suburb
is rarely produced in the media as belonging (to the Swedish society
etc.), as long as they stay placed in the suburb, they are considered to
be in place. As such, although still Others, they are not necessarily per-
ceived as (dangerous) Strangers. As Ahmed writes, Others only become
128
G. Nilsson
Strangers through coming too close to Our home (Ahmed 2012: 12).
It is the “unknown” who defy conventions and boundaries, Puwar
writes, that “represent the potentially monstrous” (Puwar 2004: 11)
and as such, impersonate the ideal perpetrator, the monster, in the
master narrative of rape (Mason and Monckton-Smith 2008; Boshoff
and Prinsloo 2015). Consequently, it might have been the boys leav-
ing the suburb, crossing the boundary of their placement that activated
the dangerous Stranger and transformed them into ideal perpetrators in
the media narrative.
Moran and Skeggs write that the boundary has a central place in con-
ceptions not only of security and safety but of anxiety, fear and inse-
curity (Moran and Skeggs 2004: 10). With the concept space invaders,
Puwar describes the situation where certain bodies are seen as strangers
invading spaces reserved for others. In the case of the Rissne rape,
known through a limited set of framings, with their bodies locked with
a set of ideas, “marginalised immigrant boys with a gang mentality and
a degrading view of Swedish girls”, these bodies, Puwar writes, destabi-
lised an exclusive sense of place (Puwar 2004: 11).
In order to construct a person as a stranger, or invader, of a certain
space, that space needs to be defined and delimited with distinct bor-
ders. It is only when these borders are crossed that the Stranger emerges
(Puwar 2004). In the news narrative, a boundary was created between
Rissne, the home of the victim where the rape was committed, and
Rinkeby where the boys belonged. To those newsreaders familiar with
the geography of Stockholm, the boundary that the boys had crossed
consisted both of a socio-economic distinction and a physical mani-
festation (although only visible to those commuting by car and not by
underground), namely the 279 main road.
While the less “notorious” district Rissne could be defined in
socio-economic terms as a white working- or middle-class district,
Rinkeby had long been functioning as one of the metaphors for the
societal failure of immigration, invoking the intersection of ethnic-
ity, race and class that conjured images of poverty and violent crime
(cf. Worthington 2013; Nilsson 2018). When the boys crossed the main
road between Rinkeby and Rissne, or more specifically, when they got
off the underground at the station in Rissne instead of Rinkeby, they
129
crossed a geographical border as well as a border defined by class and

ethnicity. They were disoriented (Ahmed 2006). When they made that
crossing, at the same time they moved from being the Other in place
to becoming the Stranger out of place (Puwar 2004; Ahmed 2006). In
fact, boys moving in this direction, crossing this border, were described
as a more general problem: “Guys living in Rinkeby often come to
Rissne to meet Swedish girls, says Leila. In Rinkeby there are not that
many teenage girls allowed to be with boys and have sex before they
marry” (Dagens Nyheter 18/2 2000). “Us girls always go out together.
It has happened before that groups of guys come here to paw at us and
sexually harass us” (Aftonbladet 5/2 2000). These narratives further
strengthened the image of invasion.
Location and territory have long been central features in construct-
ing sexual violence as a phenomenon not taking place within, or as part
of the nation, but as an attack on the nation from outside (Hemmings
2018; Keskinen 2018). Stories of Strangers raping Our women as a way
to both defile the women and to humiliate the men who were supposed
to protect them, and as a metaphor for conquering territory, is a central
element in the master narrative of rape, not least identified by research
about rape in war (Eduards 2007; Enloe 2007; Price 2002). More than
was usually the case in Swedish news reports about rape at the time,
this narrative drew from elements in the master narrative of rape as a
threat from “outside”—as something that was committed against Us
or Our women by representatives of the Other (cf. Bredström 2006;
Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012).
Walking in Line
In comparison to other hyper-medialised gang rape cases, the vic-
tim of rape in Rissne was noticeably absent in the news narrative
(cf. Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012). Apart from her age and gender
her identity was not revealed in any way, nor was her own voice ever
heard. Her whereabouts and behaviour prior to the rape was never ques-
tioned. Though she had clearly been out of place in a moral geography
of gender, being away from home late at night drinking, it was not this
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G. Nilsson
position that came to dominate how she was narrated (cf. Andersson
and Edgren 2018). Extensive research points out that being drunk is
something that reduces the blame on male sexual offenders and shifts
the responsibility to women victims for putting themselves at risk
(Meyer 2010; Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012). This, however, was not
the case here. The girl was not at all tainted with blame (Gilmore 2017).
Instead the blame narrative was surprisingly absent and she could easily
pass as an innocent, ideal victim of “real rape” (McKenzie-Mohr 2014;
Christie 1986; Mardorossian 2014; Estrich 1987).
Moran and Skeggs describe how different locations are organised in a
hierarchy of safety and danger (Moran and Skeggs 2004: 83). That cer-
tain spaces, by definition, are marked by danger and insecurity is well
known. Though feminist researchers on men’s violence against women
have long been problematising the idea of home as a safe place for
women, “the park” and “the dark alley” still belong at the core of what are
counted as places for “real rape”. The repeated placing of the Rissne rape
on “the concrete floor” in “the parking garage” worked as a narrative ele-
ment that evoked the same connotations to darkness, loneliness and vul-
nerability, fundamental elements in the real rape template (Mardorossian
2014; Estrich 1987). In her embodying innocence, the victim became “a
symbol of rape”, as her mother frustratedly described the situation, beg-
ging the various feminist initiatives that wanted to show the girl their
support to leave the family alone to heal (Aftonbladet 3/6 2000).
One explanation for her undoubted status as an ideal victim could be
that she was very young—that her age correlated with conceptions of
innocence (Palmgren 2018). Another explanation is that it was assumed
right from the start that she was “Swedish”; this despite the fact that
this information was not presented explicitly. Instead, this assump-
tion was based on the ethnicity of the perpetrators and the narrative of
them invading the “Swedish” (Bredström 2006). As Baird argues, these
“remarkably respectful” portrayals are only available to women raped by
non-white men (Baird 2009: 383; cf. Meyers 2004). Yet another expla-
nation could be her silence—since it was not the victim who told about
the rape, there was no victim to doubt (cf. Gilmore 2017). Perhaps it
is women’s disclosure of sexual violence that turns them into objects of
suspicion, not accounts of sexual violence per se.
131
From a moral geography perspective, however, I would suggest yet

another plausible reason for why she was not tainted with blame and
doubt, that being the direction in which she was moving. She was on
her way home, she was oriented towards her home, and inasmuch, she
was literally walking in line (cf. Ahmed 2006). In fact, that she was on
her way home was almost the only information available about her and
her actions prior to and during the rape. It was mentioned briefly that
she was drunk, but no description, and certainly no juicy details, of
where she had been and why, were presented (Andersson and Edgren
2018). Though she might have been temporarily out of place (Puwar
2004), in the narrative of the rape she was not deviating from the line
she was following: she was on the right underground line, she got off at
the right station, and she started walking in the right direction, towards
her home (Dagens Nyheter 30/1 2000). In fact, she was already at home
when she was raped, both literally by being in her hometown, and in
place in terms of class and ethnicity. As shown above, she was described
as having been raped by Strangers out of place invading her space.
This image of invasion was strengthened in the narrative with
the words used to describe the ongoing actions she, and at first her
friend, were subjected to while she was moving in line. Persistent
reports described how the boys had already “molested”, “grabbed” and
“attacked” the two girls on the underground. When they got off at
Rissne station the boys continued to “pursue” them and “chase” them
as they were walking home. Finally, “only a few hundred metres from
her home” one of the girls was literally “dragged” out of line and into a
parking garage where she was then “slapped” across her face and repeat-
edly raped in a “torture-like” way. After the rape, she was “robbed” of
her belongings and “left unconscious” on the concrete floor (Svenska
Dagbladet 1/2 2000; Dagens Nyheter 31/1 2000; Tidningarnas tele-
grambyrå 4/2 2000; Expressen 3/2 2000; Göteborgs-Posten 4/2 2000).
The use of lines as a metaphor for how we are supposed to move
through time and space underlines, I think, that a “straightness” in our
movements is enjoined (cf. Halberstam 2011), not least by the gendered
norms that form the moral geography (cf. Erol 2018). The straight line
is a line of zero curvature and as such, the shortest distance between two
points. For women, walking “straight home” after having completed
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G. Nilsson
whatever task was the reason for their movement is a central decree as it
minimises their presence in public space. Skeggs and Moran write that
the public/private binary occupies an exceptional place in how we make
sense of belonging and being in and out of place (Moran and Skeggs
2004: 9). Though the concept of home has been repeatedly problema-
tised as not only representing such aspects as belonging and safety but
fear and danger, in the moral geography defining women’s movement in
public space, home is still synonymous to the “proper” place to be (see
Gilmore 2017; Moran and Skeggs 2004; Andersson and Edgren 2018).
Walking in a straight line, I would argue, could also be counted as a
central constituent of the ideal victim. In the sense of Christie (1986)
the ideal victim is the person carrying out a respectable project at the
right time, in the right place. Considering how tightly women’s respect-
ability is connected to (staying at) home, being on the straight path
home is the second-best situation for being produced as the ideal vic-
tim. In the narrative of the Rissne rape, the victim was time after time
produced as moving straight home, and raped not because she was out
of line, but because she was literally, and forcefully, dragged out of line.
As such, she could not be blamed for the event.
Being in Place
In a similar way to the narrative of Rissne, the journalists set out to
describe Stureplan, “the arena of luxury and the upper class” (Aftonbladet
6/8 2007), as an answer to why the rape had been committed. Though
located in the central part of Stockholm, in the narrative of the rape, the
neighbourhood was treated with the same amount of exoticism as the
underprivileged suburb. Stureplan too, was evoked as a clearly demar-
cated place within national space (cf. Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012;
cf. Molina 2007; Puwar 2004). Only, rather than being defined by a
masculinity formed by gang mentality and marginalisation, Stureplan
was described as a “male environment of power, money, glitter and lux-
ury where the champagne flows” (Svenska Dagbladet 11/10 2007).
Ahmed writes that white bodies do not have to face their white-
ness; they are not orientated “towards” it (Ahmed 2007: 5). While the
133
“suburb masculinity” was above all marked by ethnicity, the “inner

city masculinity” was not explicitly marked by whiteness, but by class.
Those populating Stureplan were not the satellite-TV-watching immi-
grants, but instead the “beautiful people”, the “crème de la crème
of Swedish celebrity elite” (Expressen 5/5 2007); “the highest caste”
(Svenska Dagbladet 11/10 2007). Their appearances were thoroughly
described. “Everyone is dressed up; the girls have sky-high heels, low-
cut short dresses or shorts. The guys with the typical slicked back hair
wear unbuttoned shirts, tight trousers and pointy shoes” (Aftonbladet
23/9 2007; cf. Expressen 5/5 2007).
In a similar way to the suburb, the narrative also revealed the nega-
tive side of the masculinity performed at Stureplan, consisting of a “sys-
tematic abuse” of young women (Kvällsposten 21/4 2007). “A glamorous
and seductive lifestyle […] is highlighted as our new ideal. But beneath
the surface lurks elitism and contempt for women” (Svenska Dagbladet
17/8 2007). “The police investigation reveals another reality than the
glossy image of the Stureplan nightlife. […] For many men the girls at
Stureplan are ‘whores’ to be humiliated and exploited—by, among other
things, giving ‘blow jobs’ in restaurant toilets” (Expressen 5/5 2007).
“On many occasions the evening ends with the good-looking and well-
dressed men requiring sexual services from the young women. ‘This is
especially common in an environment where youth, looks and silicon
are important. Women use their sexiness and men behave like pigs’”
(Expressen 5/5 2007). While the narrative of the perpetrators in Rissne
was constituted by the intersection of gender and ethnicity, narrated
as immigrant boys attacking Swedish girls, the Stureplan narrative was
foremost defined by the intersection of gender and class, as an expres-
sion of the elitism and contempt for women by the male members of
the upper class. Thus the Swedishness of the men was not used as a
narrative element.
Bernhardsson and Bogren write that “troubled positions do not auto-
matically account for the non-powerful and the non-privileged” (2012).
Instead, they argue, the upper-class men at Stureplan, the “Brats”, were
produced as equally troublesome as the “Immigrant”. However, I would
argue that the matter of guilt and blame was treated differently; that
the immigrant and the brat were not produced in the news narrative as
134
G. Nilsson
equally troublesome positions. One obvious reason for this is the fact
that the boys in Rissne could easily fit the genre of the Suburb Rape,
whereas the young men at Stureplan could not (Mason and Monckton-
Smith 2008; Boshoff and Prinsloo 2015; Nilsson 2018). Again, I will
suggest a coherent explanation and elaborate on the potential implica-
tions of being in or out of place when performing rape.
Spaces are not blank and open for anyone to occupy. While, in the-
ory, all people can enter all places, certain types of bodies are designated
as natural occupants (Puwar 2004: 8; Ahmed 2012: 2). With descrip-
tions of those typically populating Stureplan, clear demarcations of
space were achieved that separated those being in place from those out
of place when entering the space. Moran and Skeggs state that the pol-
itics of property is also a politics of gender. The subject of property is
the man and the masculine, whereas the woman and the feminine is
positioned as the object of property and possession (Moran and Skeggs
2004: 72f.). This was apparent in the narratives of Stureplan. As a “male
environment of power, money, glitter and luxury”, even though just as
many women were there, they were not taking place as subjects being in
place defined by belonging, property and entitlement, but instead they
were objects let in, and only on certain conditions. The sheer maleness
of particular public spaces, Puwar writes, will make the women occu-
pying them—however much their numbers rise—stand out as space
invaders, as outsiders on the inside (Puwar 2004: 7).
As described above, in the Rissne case it was the boys committing
the rape that were out of place in the news narrative. Having invaded
the legitimate space and direction of the victim on her way home, the
blame was indisputably on them. They were easily produced as ideal
perpetrators in the form of dangerous Strangers. In the Stureplan case
however, it was the opposite situation. The young men were in place,
both in terms of their belonging to the “upper caste” rightfully populat-
ing the nightclubs of Stureplan, and of literally being at home when the
rape was committed. Although the young men accused of the Stureplan
rape, to some degree were Othered in a similar way to the boys in
Rissne (Bernhardsson and Bogren 2012), they were situated as being in
place during the whole event. They never moved between being in and
out of place, and when they moved at all, they were walking in line.
135
Similar to the narrative of the immigrant, as long as the men at

Stureplan stayed in place, playing by the rules defining this space, they
were not automatically produced as dangerous Strangers. Though their
behaviour was described as reprehensible and detestable, not least from
a gender equality perspective, the individual men were not necessarily
blamed in the newspapers, or, at least, it was a sliding scale between
blaming them and blaming the victim. In some sense, the accused men
being in place made their immoral, or illegal, behaviour “legitimate”.
This was not least visible in their designation, “the Stureplan-
celebrities”, a name not in any way signalling something to dissociate
oneself from. On the contrary, it was their actions and behaviour that
had formed the basis of their celebrity. The image of the Stureplan-
celebrity belonging to the “upper caste” was further strengthened in
the narrative by associating them with “real” celebrities such as the “the
trendy restaurateurs, artists, media people and friends of the royal chil-
dren” (Expressen 5/5 2007). The legitimacy of their behaviour could,
however, not only be explained in relation to how they were situated in
space. Instead, from an intersectional perspective, it is clear that, simul-
taneously, the position of the Stureplan-celebrity was a meeting point in
the sense that different power relations, such as gender, class, ethnicity
and age, met (Ahmed 2012: 14).
The actual location of the rape differed greatly from the Rissne rape,
both literally and in terms of perception. Whereas the Rissne rape took
place on the concrete floor in a parking garage, the Stureplan rape took
place on a bed in an “exclusive penthouse” (Kvällsposten 21/4 2007).
Moran and Skeggs argue that “the discourse of ‘home’ is one of the
most pervasive and well-known elements of spatial practices of belong-
ing” (Moran and Skeggs 2004: 8). Obviously, the symbolic construc-
tion of home as a safe haven for women only goes for the woman’s own
home. For a woman to follow someone else, especially a man she has
just met, to his home, instead forms one of the basic elements in the
blame narrative, if she is later raped. Instead, the “home” of the rape
was a place equally male as the nightclub, constituted by male belong-
ing, property and entitlement (Moran and Skeggs 2004).
This became apparent in the “open letter” by one of the accused men
that was published following their acquittal in the district court: “I can’t
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G. Nilsson
believe O would do something like this to us. She was in on it. […] The
sex we usually had with O was quite rough. With beatings and pulling
the hair and stuff. Rough sex with talking dirty, spanking and anal sex.
O wanted that. She enjoyed it. But then she accused us of rape. She said
we had forced her and that we had used violence and held her arms and
legs. […] I did not do anything wrong. I am not an evil person that
attacks someone. It says in the court document that she had 46 injuries.
That she had cuts and bruises on the stomach, legs, arms, buttocks and
head. Bleeding from the scalp, sores in the vagina and fissures in the rec-
tum. But the district court weren’t fussed about O’s injuries, they could
see that they were part of the sex itself and that we were entitled to play
rough. So we were acquitted. […] So now we expect the court of appeal
to reason the same way. That they too think we are entitled to O’s body.
Regards, J.” (Aftonbladet 24/5 2007).
Invading Space
As opposed to how the suburb was described, as a space populated by
Others, not necessarily dangerous as long as these Others stayed in
place, the inner city nightclubs were narrated as a dangerous place for
those who did not belong there, who did not possess the space and who
were not entitled to its content (cf. Moran and Skeggs 2004; Palmgren
2018). This image was strengthened by descriptions of the space in
terms of “inner circles” and “inner chambers”, characterised foremost
by boundaries demarcated by gender, class and age. Already in the first
descriptions of the victim, it was made clear that she had crossed all
these boundaries (cf. Andersson and Edgren 2018; Edgren 2019): “The
19-year-old nanny was out for a good time in Stocholm’s nightlife as she
met the two Stureplan celebrities” (Kvällsposten 21/4 2007).
Though both men and women took place at Stureplan, the younger
girls, in particular, stood out in the narrative as being out of place, as
being disoriented, as having entered the space as outsiders. “The girls
are young. Younger than most of the guys in the room. At the bar, three
older men are staring unabashedly at girls at least 20 years younger”
(Aftonbladet 23/9 2007). “Drink slut, shot whore and champagne bitch.
137
Those are common epithets about the younger girls in Stockholm’s

celebrity world […] The girls who have been hanging around Stureplan
a little longer scoff at the young chicks drawn to the drinks tables like
flies to dung” (Expressen 25/9 2007). As outsiders, they did not belong
but they had been let in, in Puwar’s terms, the very definition of space
invaders.
Above I have argued that in Rissne it was the boys crossing an actual
border, the main road, that transformed them from being Others
in place to being Strangers out of place, of being space invaders. At
Stureplan too, the crossing of borders played a crucial role in how the
victim was produced in the news narrative. A central feature was the
thorough descriptions of the boundary-crossing taking place when
young girls entered Stureplan. Moran and Skeggs write that bounda-
ry-marking and boundary maintenance involves mechanisms of sur-
veillance and evaluation, such as through the deployment of border
guards (Moran and Skeggs 2004: 67). Here, the border was not merely
the actual door separating outside from inside. Instead, the border was
marked by the long queue, the expensive entrance fee, and the age limit,
with doormen separating outsiders from insiders.
The border practices at Stureplan made it clear that being let in was
being selected. “From inside it is pointed out which people the doormen
should let in. Some just need to say hello, and the door is opened and
they are let in. Others may wait longer, some in vain. […] It is not a nor-
mal queue, you are waiting to be selected” (Aftonbladet 23/9 2007). “To
get in, you need to […] distinguish yourself in the typical Stureplan way,
so that you are picked out of the queue” (Aftonbladet 23/9 2007). The
news narratives described how—for underage girls with no money—a
certain glamorous look could open the door. “Free entrance, free booze
and no queues. Young girls are steered into the nightclubs as ‘trophies’.
But behind the glossy surface, a power game is going on where the girls’
sexuality is a commodity” (Kvällsposten 12/8 2007).
The headlines suggested that, for the girls entering the nightclubs,
some other currency than Swedish Kronor was applied: “Men buy their
way in - women screw their way” (Aftonbladet 6/8 2007); “The price of
the luxury life can be high” (Svenska Dagbladet 12/8 2007); “For sale for
a drink” (Kvällsposten 12/8 2007). A police officer elaborated further on
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G. Nilsson
the implicit rules that follow crossing the border: “One or more guys
pay the girl’s entrance fee and her drinks. Soon she is accepted among
the trendy people in the VIP-rooms. When she has got access to this
attractive and luxurious world the guy requires some kind of payback
as a reward for his efforts. If denied, there may instead be tough action:
spiked drinks and possibly sex with almost unconscious girls” (Svenska
Dagbladet 12/8 2007).
Skelston shows that girls and young women are often described to be
of the wrong age, in the wrong gender and in the wrong place (2000;
Palmgren 2018). Girls often need to claim their rights to be in a cer-
tain place, which often puts them in conflict with existing power struc-
tures (Mitchell and Rentschler 2016; Palmgren 2018; cf. Puwar 2004).
In this way, being obviously out of place in a gendered moral geogra-
phy, the girls ought to have felt disoriented, uncomfortable, uneasy and
unsettled, the media narrative seemed to be suggesting. “How much
humiliation is a free drink really worth?” (Dagens industri 4/10 2007).
However, apparently, they did not necessarily feel disoriented.
Instead, it was described how the girls entered the place freely and will-
ingly, and did so repeatedly, knowing and accepting that this was all
part of the game. “Everyone knows it is all about drinks in exchange
for sex. It is like prostitution” (Aftonbladet 23/9 2007). “A great many
agree to do stuff they do not really want to do to be let in among the
Stureplan crowd” (Aftonbladet 5/5 2007). “Magdalena is 18 years
old and still in school. She goes out about twice a week. Her parents
refuse to support her partying. ‘That doesn’t matter. I get in for free,
and I get my drinks for free’. […] ‘Sometimes I have three drinks at
the same time’, she laughs. […] Magdalena discloses that she on sev-
eral occasions has accompanied men home, men from whom she has
received drinks during the night. For her the sex is not that big of a
deal” (Kvällsposten 12/8 2007). Being let in was something that took
time and effort, and required them to accept the spatial prerequisites.
“Being let into the right circles - being accepted - is desirable, but hard”
(Expressen 5/5 2007). Not being let in anymore, after breaking the
rules by reporting rape, was, in fact, one of the worries of the victim:
“The woman is worried that her police report will have negative conse-
quences, that her life on Stureplan might be over” (Expressen 5/5 2007).
139
Just by entering this dangerous place, by literally invading space by

being underage, jumping the queue and not paying the entrance fee,
and thereby accepting the spatial prerequisites, the girls at Stureplan
were tainted with blame (cf. Gilmore 2017). Space invaders, Puwar
writes, “endure a burden of doubt, a burden of representation, infanti-
lisation and super-surveillance” (Puwar 2004: 11). One explanation for
this deliberate risk-taking on their part, experts explained, was their age.
Rape, they argued, was, in part, a consequence of young women being
particularly vulnerable, both to alcohol and flattery: “We see a peak of
victims at 18 years old, often related to alcohol. You are allowed into the
bar but lack knowledge about how much alcohol the body can tolerate,
and sometimes perhaps are even tricked into drinking more. You are
young and innocent. Those being inexperienced and curious are perhaps
more inclined to take risks” (Svenska Dagbladet 10/8 2007). “Young
girls in particular, are not really mastering their bodies. They say they
don’t want to. But still end up having some form of sex” (Kvällsposten
23/9 2007). From this perspective, entering Stureplan, per definition,
meant taking a risk.
Though the young girls were narrated as vulnerable, in the way
that they took part in the game and entered freely they were—at the
same time—produced as both blameworthy and deserving. “We have
to stop considering girls visiting bars mere victims. ‘These girls are not
exposed to tough guys, they expose themselves to them […] As a girl,
you cannot be naïve’” (Kvällsposten 12/8 2007). “If you present yourself
as the girl who can’t say no, you will be treated accordingly. […] We
all have a responsibility to ourselves to consider, objectively, how people
in our surroundings might view our behaviour. It is all about building
an integrity that other people could ‘sense’. We have to decide that we
have a high intrinsic value—a value that even a guy at Stureplan, full of
degrading jargon, choses to respect” (Expressen 10/8 2007).
While the victim in Rissne was produced as a “symbol of rape” in
terms of innocence, the entire Stureplan rape narrative revolved
around questions of blame and doubt. The narrative element of taint-
ing girls invading space at Stureplan was employed in the narrative of
the victim. Unlike the victim in Rissne, the woman raped at Stureplan
was not walking in line in the sense that she was on her way home.
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G. Nilsson
Instead, it was shown, she had the habit of regularly and deliberately
stepping out of line. It was repeatedly highlighted in the news that she
“followed the man back to his flat of her own free will” (Kvällsposten
11/4 2007; cf. Svenska Dagbladet 7/5 2007) “as on several occasions
before” (Expressen 5/5 2007).
In order to have access to the protection of the law, and in this case
the support of the media, the individual must be recognised as being
legitimately entitled to this protection (cf. Moran and Skeggs 2004: 5).
As argued by Moran and Skeggs, groups that are positioned outside, or
as the contagion within, have to work to generate a sense of belonging
and a belief in one’s possession of rights (cf. Moran and Skeggs 2004:
8; cf. Mardorossian 2014). Though this recognition was easily achieved
in Rissne, the victim at Stureplan had to argue for her right to receive
support. She had to do the “labour of undoing gender perceptions”, as
Puwar describes it (2004: 91). As shown above, in the Rissne narrative
the victim was both invisible and silent. She was not described in any
detail at all, and her voice was never heard. In the Stureplan narrative,
on the contrary, the victim had an active role, in both telling her story
and in the debate about the case, defending her right to both sexual
freedom and integrity (Edgren 2019). In the narrative of Stureplan, the
victim argued strongly and explicitly for her right to step out of line,
both literally by not walking straight home, and in terms of perception,
by breaking the norms for female sexuality, and still have the right to
legal protection. “I’ve been no angel. But that doesn’t mean I deserve to
be raped, does it?” (Aftonbladet 5/5 2007).
Conclusion
The overall objective in this chapter has been to highlight how a moral
geography is evoked in news narratives of rape, more specifically, how
location is used as proxy for the socio-spatial dimensions of power and
morality. In line with the work of Leigh Gilmore and many others, it
is clear that some women’s testimonies of sexual violence become par-
ticularly tainted with doubt and disbelief. Conversely, only some men’s
sexually violent acts are unconditionally marked by guilt and blame.
141
The aim has been to add to this well-studied narrative fact with a per-
spective on how location and movement are central narrative elements
in the master narrative of rape.
I have shown that the actual crossing of boundaries has the narra-
tive function of transforming the individual from vulnerable or margin-
alised to blameworthy—a transformation that becomes vital as to how
an event is understood in moral terms. With the use of Puwar’s con-
cept, I have discussed two examples of space invaders, the Stranger out
of place and the Outsider let in. Both examples have shown that the act
of invading space, whether, in theory, one has the right to be in a cer-
tain place or not, causes a removal, or a reduction, of news media sup-
port. The boys invading Rissne and the woman invading the nightclub
at Stureplan were all, in almost equal terms, produced as blameworthy,
not least through the intersection of ethnicity, class and age.
In contrast, independent of what acts had been committed, being in
place, both in the sense of ownership, belonging and entitlement, and
by moving in the proper direction, by walking in line, in different forms
increased the news media support. The girl on her way straight home
in Rissne became a symbol of rape in terms of innocence despite the
fact that commonly, in news narratives of rape, girls intoxicated by alco-
hol are tainted with blame. The men belonging to Stureplan in terms of
gender and class, were granted news media space to argue for their enti-
tlement to the body of the woman they were accused of having raped.
Altogether, the analysis draws a map of how the moral geography was
evoked in the news narratives; how the stretched-out social relations of
space were structured and delimited by historically and culturally repro-
duced norms for movement and standstill, for crossing boundaries, and
for taking place. In order to be produced as an ideal victim, a woman
needs to stay in the proper place, preferably her own home, or at least
be oriented in that direction. A young woman, who claims the right to
take place elsewhere, needs to do the labour of undoing gender percep-
tions or face the fact of being tainted with doubt and disbelief. A boy of
immigrant background, who does not really belong, should stay where
he has been placed, in the Suburb, or face being transformed into a dan-
gerous Stranger. A man belonging in “the arena of luxury and the upper
class” is entitled to the bodies of the outsider women let into this arena,
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G. Nilsson
and will not have to fear being viewed as an ideal perpetrator (Christie
1986). This moral geography thus reproduces the lines we are all sup-
posed to move along as it maps the spatial dimensions of power formed
by intersections of gender, ethnicity, class and age.
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7
Who Is the “Real” Victim?
Race and Gender in the Trial
of an Elite Australian Footballer
Deb Waterhouse-Watson
You wouldn’t have made a complaint of rape if it had’ve [sic] been Jason
Gram having sex with you, would you?… You see, you didn’t want to
have sex with an Aboriginal man, did you?—David Grace QC, defence
lawyer, trial of Andrew Lovett, July 2011
Why has the race card been played, just to try and garner some sort of
reverse guilt prejudice?—Prosecutor Michael Tovey, trial of Andrew
Lovett, July 2011
As a topic that hits all the news values of “sex”, crime and sport, sex-
ual assault cases involving athletes are almost invariably media events.
When a black (or other “othered”) man is the one accused of sexual
violence, sexist and racist stereotypes collide, and these men are often
demonised in the media because of their racial heritage. When the
accused is an elite Indigenous Australian footballer, negotiating race
and gender becomes particularly complex. The implicit assumption
in critiques of media reporting is that any problems originate with
D. Waterhouse-Watson (*) 
Independent Scholar, Sydney, NSW, Australia
148
D. Waterhouse-Watson
journalists, editors, subeditors and the demands of the 24-hour news

cycle. However, when a criminal matter is before the courts, Australian
journalists are restricted in what they can report. Including anything
that has not been put before the jury attracts sub judice contempt
charges, as happened to online entertainment company Yahoo7 in 2016
(Crothers 2017).
This raises the interrelated questions of how racist and sexist nar-
ratives are produced in court, and how journalists can navigate prob-
lematic narratives fairly, for both complainant and accused. The case of
Andrew Lovett, an Indigenous Australian Rules footballer acquitted of
rape in 2011, provides a rare opportunity to investigate the process of
media reporting on race and sexual violence by comparing court report-
ing with its only source material: the transcripts of the trial.
When Lovett was reported for rape on 24 December 2009, he was
immediately suspended from his club, St Kilda, before he had played
a single game with them. “Lavinia”1 had gone out to a bar with her
friend, “Helen”, where they met Lovett and his teammate Jason Gram.
Lavinia rarely drank, and witnesses agreed that she became highly intox-
icated. Lovett and Gram convinced Helen that they should all go back
to Gram’s apartment together, and once there, they put Lavinia on
Gram’s bed to sober up. Helen was physically unable to move Lavinia
from the bed as she was so intoxicated, and left her there to sleep.
According to Lavinia, “I remember realising that someone was having
sex and I scrambled away and said ‘No,’ grabbed my phone and I tex-
ted for help… When he stopped, I realised what – was going on and
what he possibly could have done and I flipped out”. Lavinia said she
soon recognised the man as Lovett, with whom she had barely spoken.
According to Lovett, they had consensual sex. Lavinia was found shortly
afterwards, huddled by the front door, crying and in the foetal posi-
tion. Police were called. Lovett was charged with two counts of rape in
February 2010; he was committed for trial in August 2010, and acquit-
ted on both counts in July 2011. Lovett never returned to elite foot-
ball, and took St Kilda to the Supreme Court for a financial settlement
(see Waterhouse-Watson 2016a for further details). He was convicted of
assaulting a woman in February 2018, having also been charged with
assaulting his then-girlfriend in 2006 and issued an AVO.
7 Who Is the “Real” Victim? Race and Gender …
149
This chapter focuses on references to race in transcripts of Lovett’s

rape trial, and media reporting about the criminal proceedings. Some of
the most significant arguments in the trial centred on racism, its exist-
ence and its meanings: in particular, an allegation that Lavinia rejected
Lovett because she is racist, and a counter-allegation that Lovett’s
defence team played the “race card” to discredit Lavinia. As I will show,
in neither the prosecution nor the defence narrative is there space for
Lavinia to be both racist and a victim of rape. Race and gender are thus
pitted against one another, rather than considering discrimination on the
basis of race and gender as interrelated. Media reporting, on the other
hand, produced varying narratives that raised questions about what con-
stitutes ethical reporting when material that is potentially prejudicial to
the complainant and/or the defendant is in the public domain.
The Need for Intersectionality

Criminal and legal systems in the USA, UK and Australia have a long
history of discriminating against people of colour, both defendants and
victims, based on constructions of non-white people as animalistic,
untrustworthy and hypersexual (Marcus 1992; Smallacombe 2004;
Kennedy 2005). As bell hooks writes, “the black male body continues
to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon
hypermasculine assertion” (1994: 75). These discourses are, of course,
part of a wider set of discourses that locate criminality in blackness,
and contribute to what Katheryn Russell-Brown terms the myth of the
“criminalblackman ” (2009: 14).
Internationally, media portrayals of high-profile sexual assault cases
also employ gendered myths and stereotypes that blame the victim
and/or deny the claim of rape (Benedict 1992; Cuklanz 1996; Korn
and Efrat 2004; Kitzinger 2009; Garcia 2012; Bonnes 2013). When
athletes are the alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, discourses that
blame the victim are common, with complainants portrayed as “gold
diggers”, “groupies”, “predatory women”, “seductive temptresses” and
“evil manipulators”, and athletes as not responsible for their actions
(Moorti 2002; Philadelphoff-Puren 2004; Toffoletti 2007; Baird 2009;
150
Waterhouse-Watson 2009, 2013). Common myths include “she’s lying”,

“she asked for it”, “she wanted it” and “he’s not the type” (Franiuk et al.
2008a, b). In interracial rape, raced and gendered myths are common;
even when one party or other seemingly avoids race- or sex-based vili-
fication, close analysis of a variety of cases shows that the same white,
patriarchal power structures are still upheld (Lawrence 1999; Moorti
2002; Baird 2009).
An intersectional approach to studying race and gender is essential,
and this is practised by Barbara Baird (2009), and some others (Awkward
1995; Lawrence 1999; Moorti 2002; Markovitz 2006). Baird com-
pares media coverage of three high-profile gang rape cases in Australia,
involving an Indigenous leader, young men identified as Muslim, and
Australian footballers, some of whom were Indigenous. Baird argues that
the “remarkably respectful” portrayals available only to women raped by
(ostensibly) non-white men were expressions of “patriarchal white sov-
ereignty”, under which Indigenous and other non-white men are per-
ceived and constructed as a threat to white nationhood via a sexual threat
to white women. Any “victory” for victims’ voices being heard therefore
“does not necessarily advance the fight for justice for women as women
fighting sexual violence” (383). Baird argues that the absence of racist
constructions of Indigenous footballers alleged to have committed rape
prior to 2009 only means that all footballers “occupy a normatively white
Australian subject position” (377), connecting this to the idea of football-
ers needing to “act like white people”: they can “secure the race-privileged
position that professional football in Australia delivers as long as they
comport themselves as athletes and not, for example, as radical spokesper-
sons for their race”. Thus, Baird concludes that women only gain “access
to a speaking part…when their discourse coincides with that of the State”
(386), highlighting the imperative to find ways for women’s voices to be
heard while rejecting the white patriarchal narrative. Feminist academia
has a history of ignoring the concerns of black women (e.g. Moreton-
Robinson 2000), just as critical race studies has often ignored women’s
concerns (e.g. hooks 1991). This chapter investigates the ways in which
raced and gendered discourses operate simultaneously, seeking, as Baird
suggests, “to refuse the possessive grasp of patriarchal white sovereignty
yet still find the space to tell the story” (2009: 386).
151
Representation and Media Ethics

“Fairness” and “balance” are the cornerstones of court reporting ethics
and, as Peter Gregory writes in Court Reporting in Australia, “Fairness
should mean covering both… sides of a legal dispute in a way that
explains the substance of a case” (2005: 82). While court reporters
cannot incorporate material that has not been set before the jury, nei-
ther can they include everything seen and heard in court. They may
need to condense five hours’ worth of courtroom proceedings into
seven paragraphs of newspaper copy, to build a succinct and compel-
ling narrative. Thus there remains considerable scope for journalists to
select what should go into their copy, as well as how it should be pre-
sented. Specific to reporting on race, the main Australian Press Council
advisory guideline relating to whether or not it should be mentioned
states: “Publications should not place gratuitous emphasis on the race…
nationality, colour [or] country of origin… of an individual or group.
Where it is relevant and in the public interest, publications may report or
express opinions in these areas” (Australian Press Council 2001, italics
added). However, the guideline further states that the Council’s concern
is also about references which “promote negative stereotypes in the com-
munity”, although acknowledging that the issue is not “cut and dried”.
It is the more subtle representations that have the greatest potential to
reinforce or undermine stereotypes. There are no guidelines for report-
ing on sexual violence.
Nevertheless, in media portrayals of sexual assault trials, reinforcing or
challenging myths and stereotypes has the potential to impact upon all
complainants and alleged perpetrators, not just those involved in a par-
ticular case. As I have previously argued (Waterhouse-Watson 2016b),
the genre conventions of news reporting mean that positioning an event
in a headline and/or lead makes it part of a narrative of either guilt or
innocence—for either the defendant or the complainant. This is espe-
cially problematic when stereotypes and/or victim blaming are evoked,
as this has implications for the way in which all complainants and
defendants are perceived. Thus, court reporting ethics needs to avoid rep-
resentational strategies that might cause harm to other complainants and
defendants, even if fairly presenting the events of a specific case.
152
Methods
As part of a larger project, transcripts of Lovett’s committal hearing and
trial were deidentified (in relation to the complainant and her friend, who
cannot be publicly named) and coded for recurring themes using NVivo.
All newspaper articles pertaining to the committal and trial were gathered
using the Australia and New Zealand Newsstream database, and coded
similarly. For this chapter, sections of the transcripts containing codes for
race were extracted and analysed in detail. Articles published in the Age
and Herald Sun newspapers were selected, as these were the only major
dailies to cover the trial, with three articles about the committal and 13
about the trial appearing in each newspaper. Of these, eight articles about
the trial and two about the committal were coded for race/racism. Four
of the trial articles, two from each newspaper, included substantial dis-
cussions of trial events: claims that Lavinia is racist and/or counterclaims
from the prosecution that Lovett’s defence had “played the race card”.
These articles were compared with their source material to show how
media reporting transforms courtroom narratives for a public audience.
Comparing the transcripts and court reports side by side reveals the source
of the sexist or racist stereotypes present in media reporting—whether
directly from the courtroom narratives or evoked through juxtaposition
or other re-presentation of the source material. The process of contrasting
reports by different journalists illustrates some of the variance in approach.
Although close analysis of four articles is, of course, not representative of
all court reporting, a focused study allows for more precise connections to
be made. The wide divergence between the approaches of these particular
reporters indicates the extent to which court reporters may repeat, amplify,
minimise or negate the more problematic aspects of their source material.
A Victim of Rape or a Victim of Racism?

Race and Gender at Odds
Although only three statements mentioning race were made at the
committal and trial, the arguments made about these statements were
repeated and expanded upon in the defence’s trial narrative. Lovett’s
153
lawyer, David Grace, used them to construct two alternative racist

motivations for lying about rape: that Lavinia rejected Lovett because
he is Indigenous, or that she was trying to cover up having sex with
an Indigenous man. Significantly, Grace’s lines of argument invali-
date Lavinia’s right to choose, and position racism as more significant
than gender-based violence. Furthermore, rather than refuting Grace’s
arguments by asserting Lavinia’s right to bodily autonomy, prosecutor
Michael Tovey accused the defence of “playing the race card”, denying
any potential racism on Lavinia’s part. Thus, whether or not Lavinia is
racist became a key question at the trial, and integral to the question of
consent. Race and gender were thus positioned as oppositional.
The focus on race in the trial is highly newsworthy, as the issue of
racism and inclusion in Australian sport is a topical issue (see for exam-
ple Waterhouse-Watson 2015), and the accusation of racism against
a rape complainant is highly unusual. Analysis of media narratives
shows that the allegation of racism and counter-allegation of “play-
ing the race card” dominated the reporting of Lavinia’s testimony and
cross-examination in both newspapers, and the prosecution and defence
closing statements in Melbourne tabloid newspaper the Herald Sun.
Coverage in the Age varied, and in some cases avoided problematic rep-
resentations. This case thus illustrates how race and gender can be oppo-
sitional because, in both prosecution and defence narratives, Lavinia
cannot simultaneously be racist and a victim of rape. In shifting one
of the key questions in the trial to whether or not she was racist rather
than whether or not she was raped, potential racism is elevated above
potential gender-based violence.
All references to race at the trial and committal hung on statements
(or versions of the same statement) attributed to Lavinia, which she
does not remember making due to her severe intoxication:
‘He fucked the shit out of me, I feel like a slut.’ Um. ‘I thought it was
you.’ And I said ‘Who was it?’ and she said, ‘It was the black one.’—
Testimony of Lavinia’s friend “Helen”, committal hearing
‘He fucked me, he fucked the shit out of me.’ I said who, and then she
said, ‘The dark guy.’—Testimony of footballer Jason Gram, trial
154
‘That black bastard fucked the shit out of me. I feel like a slut.
I thought it was you.’—Attributed to Jason Gram, put to Lavinia in
cross-examination, trial
In her critique of media reporting on the case (the only other scholar
to do so thus far), Amanda Kearney (2012) completely decontextual-
ises “the dark guy”, “the Aboriginal guy” and “the black one” extracted
from these quotes, criticising the media for using them all as “inter-
changeable references to deviance and non-white masculinity—
darkness, Aboriginality and blackness” (946). She blames the media
alone for enabling racism, ignoring the fact that all these phrases were
used at the committal hearing and/or trial rather than being media
inventions. Signifiers of race in this case were not simply used as mark-
ers of deviance for an Aboriginal man, but as the foundations of two
fraught and competing narratives, which both reveal racist implications,
but not in the way that Kearney suggests.
The first line of argument related to race in the trial implies that
Lavinia not consenting to sex with Lovett is invalid because she is racist,
and the only reason for not wanting to have sex with him was the fact
that he is Indigenous. If that were the case, it would clearly be racism;
however, legally (and morally) no reason is needed for not engaging in
sex with any person, whether reasonable or not, and thus it is irrelevant
to the question of consent. The main exchange is between Lovett’s law-
yer, David Grace, and Lavinia, in cross-examination:
MR GRACE: You wouldn’t have made a complaint of rape if it had’ve

[sic] been Jason Gram having sex with you, would you?
LAVINIA: Yes, I would have, because no means no.
MR GRACE: You see, you didn’t want to have sex with an Aboriginal
man, did you?
LAVINIA: I didn’t want to have sex with anybody. I’m not racist.
MR GRACE: Well why did you call him a black bastard then?
LAVINIA: Because I was in so much shock and distraught, and I don’t
even swear so for me to say that it just goes to show how much trauma
I was in.
MR GRACE: So that would be another unusual event, you swearing, is
that right?
155
LAVINIA: Yes, it is.

MR GRACE: It would be another unusual event you exhibiting some
form of racism, is that correct?
LAVINIA: Yes, it is.
In asserting that Lavinia only complained of rape because it was Lovett,

Grace implies that she would have consented either way. The asser-
tion that she “didn’t want to have sex with an Aboriginal man” posi-
tions a refusal of Lovett as unreasonable and sex as an entitlement.
He is implicitly a victim of her racist rejection. Grace’s assertion that
Lavinia would have been “happy” to have sex with Gram implies that
consenting to one means consent to others, which resonates with the
rape myth that a woman who has sex with one man she has just met
should be considered “fair game” for other men (Kahlor and Eastin
2011), and potentially the stereotype of the football “groupie”, who is
willing to sleep with any and all footballers (Waterhouse-Watson 2013:
22). In Grace’s narrative, the accusation of racism against Lavinia is
portrayed here as more significant than whether or not she consented
to Lovett (or Gram). By thus asserting that her consent is invalid, as
it is denied on racist grounds, Grace positions racism as “worse” than
rape, thus privileging race-based discrimination over gender-based vio-
lence. The phrasing of the final question effectively forces Lavinia to
admit she “[exhibited] some form of racism”, which either undermines
her credibility by contradicting her claim “I’m not racist”, or confirms
the defence’s line that her behaviour that night was all “unusual”, so her
statements about not intending to have sex with anyone are called into
question. In any case, racism is positioned as central to the question of
consent.
A later exchange takes a slightly different approach, although
retaining the focus on whether Lavinia is racist:
GRACE: When you went to the police station that morning you weren’t
in a position to make a statement, were you, you were too upset you
say, is that right?
LAVINIA: Yes.
GRACE: And too affected by alcohol, is that right?
156
LAVINIA: Yes.
GRACE: You didn’t want people to know at any time that you had sex
with an Aboriginal man, did you?
LAVINIA: It had nothing to do with him being Aboriginal.
Here, the juxtaposition of these statements positions the rape complaint

as a way of “covering up” the fact that she had sex with an Indigenous
man, and the delay in making a statement is cast as a reluctance to allow
anyone to know what happened. Despite the lack of logic here, as pros-
ecutor Tovey points out in closing (see below), the repeated emphasis on
Lavinia’s racist statement maligns her character and positions Lovett as
her victim.
The defence’s assertion that Lavinia would have been happy if Gram
had had sex with her and their focus on her statement “I thought it was
you” is also peculiar, as this line of argument implies that Lovett was in
fact guilty of rape. It implies that she agreed to have sex but was mis-
taken about the identity of the person, which amounts to rape accord-
ing to the Victorian Crimes Act (1958 36.2.i) as consent cannot be
freely given in these circumstances. Thus, one of the defence’s own lines
of argument implies that Lovett was guilty. Nevertheless, as the jury was
not instructed on this aspect of the law, they would be unlikely to rec-
ognise it, and the not guilty verdict suggests that they did not.
Race was first raised in cross-examination of Lavinia at the trial, and
the first articles to mention race are two that emphasise the defence’s
allegations of racism (Anderson 2011a; Lowe 2011a). Although there
is no guarantee that readers of later articles had also read the previous
ones, and subsequent references to race could create the associations
with “deviance and blackness” that Kearney argues, the accusation of
racism could instead inform references in the articles that follow, rein-
forcing the slur against Lavinia’s character and Lovett’s positioning as a
victim of racism.
These two articles reporting Lavinia’s testimony and cross-
examination, one in each newspaper (Anderson 2011a; Lowe 2011a),
both foregrounded a discussion of racism focused on the exchanges
above. Significantly, they reported exclusively on Lavinia’s testimony
and cross-examination (made available to the media in transcript form),
157
thus marginalising speech about rape, which is central to the trial, in

favour of race. Foregrounding the arguments about race elevates Grace’s
focus on racism rather than sexual violence and consent, because the
central question becomes, “is Lavinia racist (and therefore lying )?” rather
than “did Lovett rape her as she slept?”
Both the Herald Sun (Anderson 2011a) and Age (Lowe 2011a) arti-
cles reporting on Lavinia’s testimony directly quote the first six turns of
the exchange between Grace and Lavinia quoted above, in which Grace
implies that the only reason Lavinia made a complaint was because she
was racist and “didn’t want to have sex with an Aboriginal man”, which
arguably allows the reader to judge the validity of the accusation in a
similar way to the jury.2 However, this exchange does not appear until
the eleventh paragraph in each case, and both articles lead with the
racism allegation in a way that highlights Lovett’s potential victimisa-
tion at the expense of Lavinia’s. Leading with a racism allegation either
implies that Lovett is a victim of racism, or that Lavinia is a victim of
“reverse racism”, both of which set race and gender at odds by shifting
the focus away from sexual violence. Australian court reporting regula-
tions, which restrict journalists to what is put before the jury, mean that
nuance is difficult and such highlighting is likely to polarise.
Herald Sun court reporter Paul Anderson’s opening (2011a) fore-
shadows Grace’s argument about unreasonable, racist sexual rejection,
lending it weight. Anderson does not include the grounds for the accu-
sation until the seventh paragraph, instead beginning with: “The model
accusing former AFL star Andrew Lovett of rape has denied she is a
racist”. The photograph of Lovett included with the article provides a
visual reminder of his racial heritage, and as the lead must mean either
guilt or innocence, the implication is that she made the rape com-
plaint because she is racist, which is reinforced in the phrasing of the
third paragraph: “She said when she realised it was Lovett on top of
her, she ‘flipped out’” (my italics). This supports the defence’s asser-
tion that she rejected him because he is Aboriginal, because it asserts
that she only reacted negatively after she realised who he was, imply-
ing that she would have been “happy” had it been Gram, as the defence
suggests. Once Lavinia’s explanations of her statement are included
further down, she has already been portrayed as rejecting Lovett out of
158
racism. However, Anderson’s quote misrepresents Lavinia’s testimony,

in which her reaction was to what the person was doing, not who it
was (or whether he was Indigenous): “I remember realising that some-
one was having sex and I scrambled away and said ‘No,’ grabbed my
phone and I texted for help… When he stopped, I realised what – was
going on and what he possibly could have done and I flipped out”
(transcript—my italics). Thus, the defence’s sexist allegation is privileged
through emphasising racism against Lovett, in a way that misrepresents
Lavinia’s testimony. In addition, defining Lavinia as a “model” in the
lead draws attention to her appearance, portraying her as attractive and
someone who uses her appearance as central to her employment. She is
thus coded as someone who intends to be looked at—a willing target
of sexual objectification and thus less likely to be a victim. As Meagen
Hildebrand and Cynthia J. Najdowski (2015: 1066) argue, “objecti-
fied” women are perceived as “less human” than others, as well as being
attributed less “mind” or moral status, meaning that they are considered
less deserving of moral or fair treatment.
Adrian Lowe’s Age article (2011a) presents a more balanced account;
while the lead focuses on the racism allegation, the headline focuses on
consent: “No Means No – Woman Denies Sex with AFL Player Was
Consensual”. The lead includes the reason why Lavinia was accused of
racism: she “has told a jury she is not racist despite being overheard call-
ing him a ‘black bastard’” (my italics). This elevates the possibility that
Lovett is a victim to a similar status as Lavinia allegedly being a victim
of rape, and the use of “despite” supports the allegation of racism, thus
maligning Lavinia’s character from the outset. The second and third
paragraphs also include Lavinia denying that she would not have made
the rape complaint if it had been Gram, and her denial that she con-
sented or flirted with Lovett. Although less explicitly than in Anderson’s
account, this juxtaposition implies a racist rejection. Nevertheless,
the exchange about racism is preceded by five paragraphs drawn from
Lavinia’s evidence-in-chief, including her becoming “disoriented and
confused” from alcohol, believing she was going to “rest and sober up”
at Gram’s apartment, and two paragraphs describing the alleged rape.
This includes the quote from the transcript that Anderson misrepre-
sented, in which Lavinia said, “Then I remember realising that someone
159
was having sex and I scrambled away and said ‘no’”. Thus, significant
elements of the prosecution case are introduced, which portray Lavinia’s
actions as reasonable and consistent with sexual assault. While, for the
jury, the two accounts were separated by a significant amount of time
and other arguments, the reader sees them juxtaposed directly. Quoting
six turns of the exchange also allows a reader to evaluate the validity
and logic of the defence arguments alongside Lavinia’s responses. The
defence’s implication that Lavinia’s consent is irrelevant is thus not
emphasised, as it is juxtaposed with her explicit statements that she
resisted. Nevertheless, racism is still positioned as central to the question
of guilt.
Anderson’s Herald Sun article (2011a) marginalises Lavinia’s rape
testimony even further, only including a brief mention of her version
of events in the final paragraphs, with the first mention of alcohol
(a key element of the prosecution narrative) only in the penultimate
paragraph. The only context given for why Lavinia went to the football-
ers’ house is her justification for not wanting a one-night stand, which
contains an error (present in the original transcript): “if I was intend-
ing on that, wouldn’t I have worn a G-string instead of a bronze pair of
undies?” Lavinia actually said “a Bonds pair of undies”, with connota-
tions of comfort rather than sex appeal. The misquote makes her state-
ment seem less credible.3 Although no justification is needed, and going
home with someone cannot be assumed to mean willingness to engage
in sex, leaving the context of intoxication and Lavinia thinking she was
going to sleep it off until the end of the article renders these elements
comparatively unimportant. Once again, this denies the validity of her
consent. Indeed, it is a popular myth: Emily Finch and Vanessa Munro
(2006: 318) found that, in establishing whether a defendant’s belief in a
complainant’s consent was “reasonable in all the circumstances”, many
mock jurors inferred a belief in consent from the complainant “going
upstairs” with the defendant, or just being at a party and drinking;
Jennifer Temkin found that many prosecution and defence barristers
also subscribe to this kind of rape myth, with one saying “I mean the
silly woman is prepared to be picked up by a stranger and go back for,
quotes, coffee, you know, what does she expect?” (2000: 225). Thus,
when the racist motive allegation is introduced, it is prefaced largely by
160
statements that undermine Lavinia’s credibility, which lends weight to

the defence’s line of argument, confirming Lovett’s status as a victim of
racism. It further allows the implication that going home with a man
means consent to sex to stand.
This section has shown that both of the newspaper articles report-
ing on Lavinia’s testimony and cross-examination drew points from the
defence narrative that positioned racism as central to the question of
consent. However, through selecting the context and directly juxtapos-
ing elements from the trial that were separated in time, the defence’s
position could be amplified and Lavinia’s testimony undermined with
stereotypes of sexual violence (as in the Herald Sun article [Anderson
2011a]), or balanced somewhat with elements from Lavinia’s testimony
that minimise sexist stereotyping (as in the Age article [Lowe 2011a]).
The following section reveals an even greater divergence between the
two court reporters, in reporting on racial themes in the prosecution’s
closing statement.
Playing the “Race Card”: Race Trumps Gender

Rather than challenging the sexism of the way in which Grace denied
Lavinia’s bodily autonomy in cross-examination, prosecutor Tovey chose
to mirror his focus on her (alleged) racism as central to the question
of consent, tapping into damaging “post-racial” ideas. The Herald Sun
report (Anderson 2011b) amplifies the prosecution’s portrayal of racism,
suggesting that Lavinia being victimised is plausible, but only in racist
terms. By contrast, in the Age, Lowe (2011b) separates racism and sex-
ism, including only one brief mention of racism.
Tovey portrays the defence’s argument as “wildly illogical”; “playing
the ‘race card’”, to use Charles M. Blow’s phrase (2015):
Why has the race card been played, just to try and garner some sort of
reverse guilt prejudice? What is the theory of it, that she is a racist, hated
Aboriginal men, but nevertheless voluntarily and enthusiastically had sex
with one, as Mr Lovett says in his record of interview, and then having
regretted it, decided to publicise the fact by complaining that he’d raped
her? Come on.
161
As Linda Williams argues (2001: 4), “the very accusation of playing the
race card has now become a way of disqualifying the attempt to discuss
past and present racial injury”. Even if the defence’s race-based argu-
ments about Lavinia’s consent are groundless, the phrase “the race card”
brings with it connotations of “cheating”, and frequently the assump-
tion that people of colour “invoke race as a cynical ploy to curry favour,
or sympathy, and to cast aspersions on the character of others” (Blow
2015). Furthermore, although “reverse guilt prejudice” is a somewhat
ambiguous phrase, it effectively combines the loaded phrases “reverse
racism” and “white guilt”, both of which are used to claim that, in a
supposedly “post-racial” era where racism is no longer a real prob-
lem, white people are instead the victims of race-based discrimination
(Norton and Sommers 2011). The addition of “prejudice” anchors the
phrase’s meaning that, by (falsely) claiming racism to gain sympathy,
Lovett’s defence attempts to induce “reverse racist” prejudice against
Lavinia through evoking (white) guilt in the jury. Thus Tovey effectively
ties the act of dismissing the claim that Lavinia rejected Lovett because
she is racist to denying the existence of racism. Rather than affirming
Lavinia’s unqualified right to choose, Tovey also pits race and gender
against one another by denying the significance of racism.
The Herald Sun headline and lead (Anderson 2011b) emphasise the
“race card” allegation, positioning Lavinia as a victim of “reverse rac-
ism” rather than (potentially) of rape: “The prosecutor in charge of the
Andrew Lovett rape case has told the jury the defence team played the
‘race card’ and accused the alleged victim of racism to gain sympathy”.
Tovey’s words are granted additional authority through the use of “in
charge”. Anderson’s phrasing attributes Tovey’s account of the defence
narrative to Grace, rendering it implausible: “He [Tovey] scoffed at the
theory she hated Aboriginal men but voluntarily and enthusiastically
had sex with one”. Following this with a quote repeating the “race card”
allegation and “reverse guilt prejudice” positions these accusations as
valid. Lovett’s defence takes up the final six paragraphs, and makes no
mention of race. Most significantly, the beginning of the article frames
the trial’s central question as whether or not Lavinia was a victim of
“reverse racism” rather than rape. This more sympathetic portrayal of
Lavinia is enabled only in racist terms.
162
Lowe’s Age article (2011b), by contrast, omits Tovey’s “race card”

framing of the issue, instead including his comment that the line of
argument was an act of “desperation” on the defence’s part. Lowe’s lead
instead balances what he identifies as the main arguments on each side:
“ANDREW Lovett is a liar who believed he was entitled to have sex
with a woman when she didn’t want to, but his accuser is an unrelia-
ble witness who was embarrassed about having sex with him”. Thus, the
Age article alludes to the racism claim, but elides the racial aspect, mak-
ing racism not relevant to the question of Lovett’s guilt and Lavinia’s
consent.
It is significant that “the race card” and “reverse guilt prejudice” are
included in the Herald Sun narrative, but not that of the Age, as News
Corp audiences are typically more conservative and therefore more
likely to believe that racism is no longer a problem. Thus, Anderson’s
approach reinforces such beliefs. Tovey’s approach is also something of a
risk in securing a conviction, as it relies on its audience (the jury) being
sympathetic towards a post-racial understanding of society, and not rec-
ognising the implicit assertion that racism is no longer a problem and
becoming alienated. This kind of alienation is more likely in a Fairfax
reader, who is typically more progressive; to a conservative audience,
Tovey’s framing of the argument is more likely to reinforce racial prej-
udice. Lowe’s approach demonstrates how fair reporting of problematic
lines of argument regarding race does not have to reproduce, or amplify,
the racist and/or sexist implications of courtroom narratives.
An “Own Goal”? Racist Stereotypes

from the Defence
Defence barrister Grace’s closing statement demonstrates that even
a defendant’s own lawyer may evoke racist stereotypes, and that
media reporting can avoid repeating certain problematic tropes
altogether. The narrative includes only one direct reference to race, as
part of a “regret sex” narrative, and, although much less directly than
in cross-examination, Grace once again implies that the rape complaint
was a racist attack on Lovett:
163
Could it be that [Lavinia] instantly regretted it, could it be she felt humil-
iated, dirty, maybe felt guilty? These are all inferences or conclusions you
may consider. She felt like a slut – her own words, we know she said.
Whether or not she’s a racist would not be immaterial. The fact is she
called Andrew Lovett black bastard but there’s no memory of saying so.
An unusual thing for her again to say, to abuse someone in racist terms,
she says, an unusual thing for her to do. Was that her venting her spleen
in the rage that Mr Tovey talks about or is it seeking to blame someone,
what to her was her own misdeed in her own eyes or was she doing the
blaming as a result of the effects of alcohol? Has she convinced herself of
a position to take? (my italics)
While the proposition that Lavinia felt “dirty” after consensual sex is
directly linked to feeling like a slut, its close proximity to allegations of
racism against her also evokes the stereotype of Indigenous people as
“dirty” (Hill and Augoustinos 2001: 251). Following this with the prop-
osition that Lavinia was “seeking to blame someone” again positions
Lovett as a victim, implicitly of her racism.
In his rejection of part of Tovey’s narrative, Grace also subtly
evokes stereotypes of Indigenous people as simple and “childlike”
(Hollinsworth 2006: 33), which have long featured in media representa-
tions of Indigenous athletes (Coram 2007). As a former British colony,
Australia has a long history of colonial oppression and mistreatment of
Aboriginal people based on racist, social Darwinist beliefs about their
“primitive” nature and inability to care for themselves (Bielefeld 2012:
528–529). Prosecutor Tovey argues that Lovett changed his story several
times to suit different audiences, labelling these different approaches
“Plan A”, “Plan B”, etc. Grace challenges this by implying that Lovett
could not have undertaken such planning:
Mr Tovey has paid particular attention to that aspect of the matter and
suggested to you that the actions or reactions of Mr Lovett on that night
after the offence was part of some grand plan, some grand sophisticated
plan on his part in his alcohol-affected state requiring great thought and
foresight. (my italics)
164
Grace then labels the idea of Lovett having such a plan “ridiculous. It
defies common sense”, juxtaposing this with repeated references to
“genuine” or “normal” “reactions ”. Thus, the supposedly implausible
idea of Lovett engaging in an intellectual act is contrasted with reac-
tions that happen in the moment and do not require thought. While
race is not mentioned in proximity to this part of the narrative, its fre-
quent references in the trial and Lovett’s presence in the courtroom pro-
vide relevant context. Other interpretations are possible (for example,
that footballers in general are incapable of intellectual acts). However,
compared with non-Indigenous footballers, Indigenous players are typi-
cally considered less intellectually able than their non-Indigenous coun-
terparts, assigned to playing “instinctive” attacking positions which are
considered less intellectually demanding (Coram 2007). Similarly, they
are also typically considered unsuitable for coaching or management
roles (Hallinan and Judd 2009: 1228–1229). Regardless of the mul-
tiplicity of interpretations, each iteration of a stereotype anchors the
floating signifier of race and reinforces prejudice.
Neither Anderson (Herald Sun 2011b) nor Lowe (Age 2011b) men-
tioned a “plan”, despite its potential rhetorical power and newsworthi-
ness, or the association of being “dirty” with aboriginality, avoiding the
racist implications of Grace’s narrative. While it is not clear that this was
a deliberate attempt to avoid racism on the journalists’ part, it further
demonstrates the possibilities when court reporters are conscious of the
racist (or sexist) implications of their source material.
Conclusion: Towards an Intersectional

Approach to Court Reporting
Although the contrast between reporting in the two newspapers is
strong in this case, it would be simplistic and reductive to attribute all
differences to one being a tabloid and the other a broadsheet. As part
of the larger project, I interviewed court reporters and other journalists
from both tabloids and broadsheets, and many of the tabloid journal-
ists were extremely conscious of avoiding stereotypes and victim blam-
ing when reporting on sexual crime. Thus, the key differences are better
165
attributed to the individuals involved and their choices at the time of

writing.
In a rape trial, the defence’s objective is to introduce “reason-
able doubt” into jurors’ minds, and it is therefore common for them
to evoke popular myths about rape and victim blaming stereotypes in
order to do so. With the exception of sexual history evidence, which is
largely prohibited, the defence can employ a range of discursive strate-
gies to tap into these myths. Similarly, racial stereotypes are not prohib-
ited, and thus prosecution and defence can rely on them in an attempt
to convince the jury of a defendant’s guilt or innocence. Repeating or
amplifying any of these myths and stereotypes in the media has the
potential to reinforce these beliefs in the wider community, presenting
barriers to justice for rape victims and people of colour.
While the reporting on this case largely adhered to guidelines for
journalistic ethics, references to race drawn from courtroom arguments
and cross-examination remain fraught. The narratives of race posi-
tioned Lovett as either a victim of racism (the point for the defence
being to portray Lavinia as a malicious, racist liar), or the recipient of
unfair “special treatment” through his lawyer playing the “race card”.
Emphasising either of these narratives in media reporting and thus
using it to mean that Lovett is either guilty or innocent sets race and
gender at odds, rather than recognising both racism and sexism as
interlocking systems of oppression. While court reporters are ethically
obligated to present a balanced account, they are not obligated to fore-
ground problematic strategies on the part of either defence or pros-
ecution, particularly if such foregrounding can have wider, negative
impacts. As the contrast in reporting between Paul Anderson (Herald
Sun ) and Adrian Lowe (Age) shows, the ways in which such courtroom
strategies are introduced has an impact on whether or not problematic
strategies are portrayed as valid. Nevertheless, focusing on these ele-
ments as the most important aspect remains problematic, particularly
when it is at the expense of the complainant’s own testimony.
Making race and racism irrelevant to whether or not the alleged per-
petrator is guilty seems to be the most appropriate in this kind of case,
as Lowe does in his report on closing statements. There is no obligation
to foreground race-based arguments. It should be noted that the choice
166
of lead is not exclusively that of the journalist, and headlines are almost
always written by others. Most of the court reporters and other journal-
ists I interviewed had experienced editors or subeditors changing their
work in problematic ways—particularly those writing for News Corp
publications—and thus it is also important for editors to recognise which
elements should be approached with caution, or kept out of the lead.
Everyone involved in the process of news production needs to have
an intersectional understanding of the harmful stereotypes they might
be navigating, and the potentially equally harmful effects for rape com-
plainants when anti-racism is emphasised at the expense of portraying
a complaint as valid. A specific guideline for media reporting on sexual
violence, which highlights stereotypes to avoid, would be beneficial for
this. Setting race and gender at odds by emphasising an allegation of
racism or of “playing the race card” does nothing to advance conversa-
tions about either racism or gender-based violence. Instead, follow-up
or opinion articles after the trial can address issues in more detail and
introduce expert opinions on the subject, to minimise the risk of per-
petuating problematic understandings of race and sexual violence.
Notes
1. I use pseudonyms for the complainant and her friend as ‘the complain-
ant’ or other descriptors dehumanise them.
2. Although Lavinia’s testimony and cross-examination were heard on the
first day of the jury trial, the newspaper reports were not published until
the fourth day. As is typical in Australian sexual crime cases, the com-
plainant’s testimony was heard in closed court, and major media outlets
were later granted access to transcripts.
3. The error was originally present in the transcript, but corrected the next
day.
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Waterhouse-Watson, Deb. 2015. Why White Australia got so upset about an
imaginary spear. The Allrounder, July 9. http://theallrounder.co/2015/07/09/
why-white-australia-got-so-upset-about-an-imaginary-spear/.
Waterhouse-Watson, Deb. 2016a. It’s more than a job: Discourse and the treat-
ment of elite footballers accused of sexual violence. Media International
Australia 161: 68–76.
Waterhouse-Watson, Deb. 2016b. News media on trial: Towards a feminist
ethics of reporting footballer sexual assault trials. Feminist Media Studies 16
(6): 952–967.
Williams, Linda. 2001. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White
from Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
8
Digitised Narratives of Rape: Disclosing
Sexual Violence Through Pain Memes
Kaitlynn Mendes, Katia Belisário
and Jessica Ringrose
In 2011, American Grace Brown began photographing victims of

sexual violence holding signs on which they repeat what their attackers
said before, during or after the assault. She uploaded these photographs
to her Tumblr blog, Project Unbreakable. Submissions include quotes
from rapists telling their victims to be quiet, complimenting them
on their beauty, swearing at them, or threatening them with violence
if they report their assault. The following year, 16 students at Duke
University launched the campaign Who Needs Feminism? to problem-
atise people’s negative associations with “feminism” and showcase its
continued relevance in society. Like Project Unbreakable, Who Needs
K. Mendes (*) 
School of Media, Communication and Sociology,
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
e-mail: km350@le.ac.uk
K. Belisário 
University of Brasilia, Brasília, Brazil
J. Ringrose 
University College London, London, UK
172
K. Mendes et al.
Feminism? solicited photographs from participants, in this case hold-

ing signs explaining why they needed feminism. Although the cam-
paign focused on a wide range of topics, rape and sexual violence have
remained key issues expressed via their signs (see Mendes et al. 2019).
While many contributors discussed violence against women in gener-
alised terms, others used the campaign to share experiences of sexual
violence directed against themselves, their family members, friends or
partners. As one person shared, “#INEEDFEMINISM Because when I
was 10 and my brother was 16, he sexually violated/assaulted me multi-
ple times.”
Project Unbreakable and Who Needs Feminism? are just two exam-
ples of feminist campaigns that use technology in creative ways to
make visible, challenge, and call out sexual violence in our contempo-
rary “rape culture.” Drawing upon the concept of platform vernacular
(Gibbs et al. 2015), this chapter focuses on narratives of rape via one
such creative practice—what Amy Shield Dobson calls “pain memes”
(2015). Here, painful personal experiences are written as short pas-
sages, communicated through the visceral means of hand-crafted signs.
We argue that digital platforms such as Tumblr and YouTube, which
emphasise materiality, produce new vernacular practices that shape how
“digitised narratives” (Mendes et al. 2018) of sexual violence are not
only disclosed and known, but felt and experienced. These digitised nar-
ratives, we argue, have some potential to contest normative narratives of
rape, and open up space for more nuanced and intersectional narratives
to emerge.
Sexual Scripts and Affective Platform

Vernaculars
For several decades now, feminists have worked hard to highlight the
pervasiveness of rape and other forms of sexual violence in society
(see Brownmiller 1975). Using Liz Kelly’s (1988) continuum model,
we understand sexual violence to comprise a range of practices, from
“low-level” ubiquitous wolf-whistling and street harassment, to more
8 Digitised Narratives of Rape: Disclosing Sexual …
173
“serious” forms of aggravated assault and rape. In studying sexual

violence more generally, but rape specifically, feminists have insisted
on “the importance of naming rape as violence and of collectively
narrating stories of rape” (Marcus 1992: 387). As feminist scholars
began to study sexual violence, they recognised the importance of
language and how it is used to discuss both acts of sexual violence
(Gavey 2005; Marcus 1992) and the accompanying labels for those
who experience it (see Mardorossian 2014; Spry 1995). As a result,
there is a rich body of scholarship focusing on the narrative and dis-
cursive accounts of sexual violence in court cases, the media, autobi-
ographical accounts and interviews (see Doherty and Anderson 1998;
Gunnarsson 2018; Karlsson 2018; Karlsson Chapter 10; Spry 1995;
Wood and Rennie 1994). As Young and McGuire (2003) argue, it is
important to study the way in which people discuss sexually violent
experiences because it can shape how they make sense of their assault.
As Sharon Marcus (1992) argued, “A feminist politics which would
fight rape cannot exist without developing a language about rape”
(p. 387). Indeed, to speak about something, “one must first be able to
name and define it” (Kelly and Radford 1990: 40).
As scholars have noted, many women have been unable to speak
about their experiences of sexual violence and abuse, or have had these
experiences invalidated (Kelly and Radford 1990). This omission of
their voices has been an important rallying point in feminist writing
since the 1970s (Kelly and Radford 1990; Young and McGuire 2003).
Others still debate the language used to describe those who have experi-
enced sexual violence—as either victims or survivors (see Roiphe 1993;
Wolf 1993). Although recognising the limitations of both terms (see
also Spry 1995), following the work of Mardorossian (2014) we use
“victim” in this chapter, not to locate women in positions of “pity and
passivity” (p. 41) but as a term that recognises the “reality of violence in
women’s lives” (Mardorossian 2002: 748). Furthermore, we argue that
digital technologies have opened up new ways of communicating, dis-
closing and narrating experiences of sexual violence which bypass vic-
tims’ inability to speak “unspeakable things” (Keller et al. 2018) and
thus provide them with “narrative agency” (Spry 1995).
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K. Mendes et al.
We are not alone in this view. Scholars from a range of disciplines

have paid close attention to the ways in which stories of violence are
disclosed in digital spaces using digital devices and apps (see Bivens
and Hasinoff 2017; Dodge 2016; Fileborn 2018; Loney-Howes 2015,
2018; Mendes et al. 2018; O’Neil 2018). Bianca Fileborn (2018), for
example, has argued that we must understand the disclosure of sexual
violence as a “curated” process in which victims make careful deci-
sions about whom to trust with their disclosures, which experiences
to share, and how narratives should be shaped. Others have noted
how curated disclosures in digital spaces have the capacity to chal-
lenge narratives of victim-blaming and the shifting of responsibility
onto women, making way for new narratives to emerge (Loney-Howes
2018; Salter 2013). While some have highlighted the ways in which
digital technologies present opportunities to challenge normative sex-
ual scripts around rape (Loney-Howes 2015), others have argued that
victims’ unequal ability to harness social media’s power due to their
various levels of literacy and skill renders these platforms both “prob-
lematic and limited” (Fileborn 2017: 1485; Salter 2013). As such,
while these digitised approaches may amplify the visibility of some
narratives, it ultimately renders others invisible. We consider these
tensions, along with issues of power and privilege as we move through
the chapter.
A subject to which few scholars have paid attention is how or why
digital technologies provide these possibilities (for an exception, see
Mendes et al. 2018, 2019). As a result, paying attention to the platform
design, architecture and affordances, we examine a range of “platform
vernaculars” (Gibbs et al. 2015)—or common conventions through
which (new) narratives of rape are told. These conventions are not
merely restricted to the discursive but include stylistic and visual ele-
ments as well. We argue that in our current era of “communicative cap-
italism” (Dean 2005) which encourages, monetises and profits from a
constant circulation of media content, affective vernacular practices
such as feminist meme cultures (Kanai 2016; Rentschler and Thrift
2015) emerge which shape not only what we know about rape, but
also how we come to know and feel these experiences. Indeed, schol-
ars such as Alexander Cho (2015) and Katie Warfield (2016) address
175
how engagement with visual sites such as Tumblr are highly affective
and constitute an integral part of the experience (see also Ringrose
and Lawrence 2018). Although scholars have argued that sharing these
personal experiences can lead to transformative social and ideological
change (see Mendes et al. 2019), they are entangled within exploita-
tive capitalist systems which extract value through sharing, liking and
commenting on content (see Dean 2005; Fuchs 2009). As a result,
we showcase the ways in which digitised narratives of rape, expressed
through pain memes on commercial sites, seek to create “affective inten-
sities” (Khoja-Moolji 2015; Ringrose and Renold 2014) to encourage
the salience of stories.
This chapter therefore seeks to showcase the ways in which new
media technologies are shaping not only what we know about rape, but
also how we come to know and feel these experiences. We further argue
that, although digital technologies enable the dissemination of norma-
tive sexual scripts and narratives of rape, they simultaneously open up
opportunities for new vernacular practices to emerge. It is within these
new vernacular practices that the potential to disrupt traditional rape
myths and scripts lies, and where new, intersectional understandings of
rape may be found, forged, created, and felt.
Platform Affordance, Architecture

and Vernaculars
Influenced by critical technology studies, we are interested in emerg-
ing vernacular practices and how they have been shaped by plat-
form architecture, affordances and design (see also Harvey 2016;
Star 1999). This concept of a “platform vernacular” (Gibbs et al.
2015) refers to a range of common conventions, including discur-
sive, stylistic, and visual, which develop within specific digital spaces.
Furthermore, the concept allows us to attend to the registers of mean-
ing and affect that are produced within platform-based social networks
(Gibbs et al. 2015). Just as different social media platforms encour-
age different ways of doing activism (Mendes et al. 2019; Rentschler
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K. Mendes et al.
and Thrift 2015), we argue that these platforms, and even discreet
campaigns hosted among them, encourage different ways of disclos-
ing narratives and experiences of rape (Mendes et al. 2018; Rentschler
2014). Central to this chapter is the ways in which many contem-
porary digitised narratives of rape do not merely involve sharing
accounts of the experience, but prioritise a materiality which is used to
forge affective solidarities and make these experiences felt. This is par-
ticularly evident in the wide range of visual-based interventions that
have recently emerged, including pain memes.
Narrating Rape Through “Pain Memes”

In recent years, scholars have discussed the emergence of “pain memes”
(Dobson 2015)—a means of storytelling in which a script is written
as a short passage, conveying painful personal experiences through the
visceral means of hand-crafted signs. Many of these signs are highly
stylised, making use different colours, print sizes, bold, italics and the
underlining of key words to emphasise various aspects of their authors’
experiences. Although Project Unbreakable and Who Needs Feminism?
are still-photograph versions of the pain meme, this popular story-
telling form can be found on various social media platforms, includ-
ing YouTube, where they are often filmed in black and white, and are
backed by soft, melancholic music (Dobson 2015). On YouTube, a
range of naming conventions has emerged in which their experience
is identified as “rape” or “abuse.” Examples include “My rape story”
or “My flashcard story.” Many others additionally indicate that the
story told here is “sad,” such as “Super sad flashcards” or “The saddest
flashcard story ever.”
By making use of pain memes, victims are “curating” (Fileborn
2017) their stories in a way that enables their experiences not only to
be heard and known, but also felt. These “affective intensities” (Ringrose
and Renold 2014) are generated through the materiality of the sign,
the inclusion of ambient music, and the posture and positioning of
the victims within the images. Writing on Who Needs Feminism?, one
contributor stated:
177
I need Feminism because when I was sexually assaulted at a concert

at 16 my dad told me I asked for it because my pants were too tight.
(Underlining in original)
Hiding behind the sign, with her eyes cropped out of the photograph
so only the bottom part of her face is in frame, with hair covering half
of her face, the contributor wrote her sign in a ring-bound notebook,
giving a sense of youthful intervention. With its underlining of key-
words, such as “feminism,” “16” and “tight,” this submission generated
over 1000 “notes” on Tumblr—or interactions including likes, re-blogs
and comments (Renninger 2015), indicating the extent to which it was
not just seen and read, but felt by the public. Influenced by the “affec-
tive turn” (Clough and Halley 2007) in feminist scholarship, which
attends to the importance of emotion and embodiment in shaping our
lives (Ahmed 2017; Stewart 2007), we can see how submissions such as
the one above forge “sticky” and emotional entanglements between con-
tributors and readers (Ahmed 2004), who share, like and comment on
these disclosures.
Indeed, the “stickiness” and “affective intensities” generated by sto-
ries of sexual violence are evident in different ways, depending on the
platform. For example, the affective pull on Tumblr is evident in the
number of “notes” which are displayed for each submission. Although
the public may comment on any particular submission, the plat-
form is designed so that comments are “trackable but deemphasized”
(Renninger 2015: 1523). To see the comments, one must usually go to
the commentator’s own Tumblr site. As scholars have noted, this func-
tion helps to discourage trolling: unsupportive or otherwise abusive
messages (Renninger 2015). Instead, practices such as re-blogging and
liking are integral to the supportive platform culture which is known to
circulate on Tumblr (see Cho 2015; Warfield 2016; Renninger 2015).
YouTube, on the other hand, has a different design, and is not always
identified as an inherently “nice” or “safe” space. Indeed, many have
commented on the hostility and provocation which is known to circu-
late on the platform, in part facilitated by its architecture and design
(McCosker 2014; Thelwall and Pardeep 2011; van Zoonen et al. 2011).
The platform has been defined as an “unstable and dynamic entity
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K. Mendes et al.
evolving constantly through iterations of interface, structures, rules,

norms and cultures of use”—which include trolling and provocation
(McCosker 2014: 203). This of course does not deter the public from
sharing their rape stories on YouTube, and a quick search reveals thou-
sands of videos in which victims disclose painful experiences of sexual
assault and abuse. Unlike Tumblr, on which liking or re-blogging are
more common, commenting is a noticeable vernacular practice on the
site (Thelwall and Pardeep 2011), and many pain-meme rape videos not
only attract hundreds or thousands of views, but comments accompany-
ing them.
One such video, uploaded in 2014, entitled “my story: sexual abuse”
has nearly 700,000 views and 8800 “likes.” Filmed in black and white,
the lined paper on which the pain meme is written is the central focus,
with the victims’ hands being the only body part in view. The story
begins, “Hi, my name is Summer and this is my story. When I was 6yrs
old I woke up to my hands on his penis. I quickly turned away but
again he put it back he touched me and kissed me. I was only 6 :(”
Although the video also garnered 560 “thumbs down,” the majority of
comments are supportive, encouraging Summer for her bravery, pray-
ing for her, and letting her know how the story moved them. As one
commenter posted, “This is not how life for a 6 year old should start…
Prayers for Summer and her bravery…” Another shared:
I am so very sorry this happened to you but I’m glad your [sic] okay now.
MOST people think rape is a joke and always laugh about it but, it’s not
funny when you do get raped…nobody understands.
Despite the overwhelmingly supportive comments, one does not have

to scroll down far to see the emergence of antagonistic comments (see
also McCosker 2014; Thelwall and Pardeep 2011), or what Loney-
Howes (2018) calls “negative witnessing” (p. 28), although few would
be considered “hate speech” (Shepherd et al. 2015) or “e-bile” (Jane
2014). Although Summer’s youthful age grants her sympathy from
many viewers, other antagonistic comments are related to her position
as a working-class girl who lives with her grandparents because her
own parents are drug users. Much of the “acting up” (McCosker 2014)
179
witnessed on this YouTube pain meme ranges from banal comments

about how much paper was wasted in the making of their video (“im
[sic] that only guy who thinks she wasted so much paper”), to those
which ridiculed her for her poor spelling or grammar (“I’m just worried
because he went to prision and not prison”), to those which question
the validity of the experience (“is this even a real story???”).
While antagonistic questions were asked of Summer because of her
literacy level and background, comments on other posts were provoked
by their gender identity. Commenting on the rape story of one trans
woman, one person wrote: “I don’t see how he didn’t know you were
trans. Did you not speak? He didn’t notice the wig? No shade.” When
studying these YouTube comments, it is thus necessary to attend to the
ways in which they are shaped by the contributors’ intersecting identi-
ties and varying levels of privilege (see also Carbado 2013; Pease 2010).
For example, although both the videos above received antagonistic com-
ments, Summer’s account as a cis-gendered woman was seen as more
authentic than that of the trans woman. Although both contributors are
victims of sexual assault, it is clear that certain identities carry privileges
regarding who is likely to be believed or what element of their story will
be critiqued (see Carbado 2013; Spry 1995).
Of further concern is how many comments perpetuate victim-
blaming tropes by questioning why the victim did not report their
assault to the police:
DO NOT let other people touch like that. Stand up and tell the police
cause this a serious action!!!!
Such claims emerge from a relatively privileged position which assumes

that the police will take victims seriously, and ignores the ways in which
certain groups, such as women of colour, sex workers, LGBTQ+ or
those whose migration status is insecure, encounter systematic discrim-
ination and criminalisation at the hands of the police (Black Women’s
Blueprint 2011; Crenshaw 1989). As Pease (2010: 9) writes: “Most
privilege is not recognised as such by those who have it,” as evidenced
by the comment above. As a theory, intersectionality seeks not only to
map which groups suffer the greatest oppression as a result of various
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K. Mendes et al.
identity categories, but also examines those with privileges who sit at
the “top of social hierarchies as well” (Carbado 2013: 814). Because
those with relative privilege determine social norms (Pearce 2010), in
order to combat rape culture and victim-blaming and provide greater
flexibility for victims to tell their stories, rape narratives and responses
to these must be analysed through an intersectional lens.
Dominant Narratives of Rape

When looking across pain memes on Project Unbreakable, Who Needs
Feminism? and YouTube, it becomes clear that, while there is no sin-
gular hegemonic narrative of rape, it is possible to identify broad pat-
terns—or what we might think of as dominant narratives of rape.
These narratives focus on the banality of their experience, their inno-
cence as a victim, the second assault, and transformation from victim
to survivor.
The Banality of Rape
While YouTube pain memes and those found on Who Needs

Feminism? seek to forge affective intensities through privileging the
voices of victims, Project Unbreakable achieves this through high-
lighting the words spoken by rapists. In this unusual narrative con-
vention, affective intensities are generated through several means. In
some cases, it is through reading words of vitriol and violence, shame
and blame. In others, affect is not necessarily generated through the
horror of the rapists’ comments, but rather by their ubiquity and
banality, and the seeming casualness with which statements were
uttered, or experiences dismissed. As one contributor shared: “‘This
is the last time—I promise’—said no fewer than 50 times by my
abuser. It started when I was 4, he was 11.” Indeed, what is particu-
larly troubling about Project Unbreakable is the number of stories
recounting childhood sexual abuse, often by close family members or
friends:
181
‘Oh God you are so TIGHT.’ First time aged 8. ‘Daddy loves his
PRINCESS.’ Ages 6–19.
These casual, seemingly tender and, in a different context, affectionate

remarks are particularly haunting given this contributor’s age at the time
of the first assault (eight), and the fact that they were spoken by her
father. While, on their own, the existence of these types of stories may
seem exceptional or unique, cumulatively, we begin to see a picture of
the pervasiveness of childhood sexual violence.
While the affective intensities generated through pain memes are
curated in part through the chilling narratives and the materiality of
the signs, we argue that these are enhanced by the configuring of bodies
within these photos, which helps to make these photo-sharing projects
so powerful. Indeed, one of the most interesting vernacular practices
to emerge is the changing ways in which the victims are rendered
(in)visible in these images. It is as though these bodies, which have
been subjected to violence, are seeking some sort of protection and ano-
nymity from behind the signs; and yet there is a body visible there—
and the speech act of the sign legitimises speaking back against rape
(Alcoff 2018).
It is in fact the embodiment of victims which is one of most inter-
esting, and malleable vernacular practices across pain-meme sites. At
the inception of both Project Unbreakable and Who Needs Feminism?,
the organisers photographed participants with their faces (and at least
partial bodies) in full view—sometimes smiling at the camera. As time
passed, however, and as these sites became popularised and invited the
public to submit their own images, we witness vernacular practices
shifting. Participants slowly began to “hide” behind their signs to var-
ying degrees. In many cases, only the sign or discreet body parts such
as fingers, hands, feet or eyes are visible. This vernacular practice is
likely to have emerged as a means of preserving anonymity within an
often-hostile digital landscape, in which contributors have been trolled
for their participation (Mendes et al. 2019). This trend can also be
identified on YouTube, even amongst contributors whose identities are
known, and who have their own YouTube channels where they post
other videos with their faces in full view. It is significant here that, even
182
K. Mendes et al.
in cases where the victim’s name and image may be available elsewhere,
hiding behind the sign can make it easier to share one’s story. In cases
when contributors’ faces are visible, they are generally sombre or sad
looking. These expressions are significant in that they provide further
guidance to audiences on how to interpret their sign and demonstrate
the seriousness and urgency of their claims.
Worthy Victims
As feminists continue to draw upon intersectional understandings of

oppression, scholars have argued for the need to interrogate rape narra-
tives through intersectional lenses. This is because, “decisions regarding
what to disclose, in which contexts, to whom, and whose experiences
become visible” are inevitably shaped “by and through the intersec-
tional positions” of contributors (Fileborn 2018: 6, 7). As a result, it
is pertinent to ask how identities such as class, whiteness, sexuality and
gender are related to notions of worthy victims. There is a vast body of
literature on mainstream media representations of rape which demarcate
between worthy and unworthy victims by focusing on their credibility,
motives and various interlocking identities (see Benedict 1992; Franiuk
et al. 2008; Kitzinger 1998; Mardorossian 2014; Soothill and Walby
1991). In these popular constructions, “real” rape is often thought of
as perpetrated by strangers, who use violence, and “worthy” victims
are those who attempt to fight off their attackers (Carter 1998; Gavey
2005; Mardorossian 2014; Soothill and Walby 1991). When examin-
ing the narratives of rape in pain memes, the majority of experiences
directly challenge these myths and showcase the reality that most rape is
enacted by someone the victim knows, in a place where the victims feel
safe, and they do not fight back (Järvinen et al. 2008). In this way, pain
memes help to disrupt dominant narratives, and forge new spaces where
experiences that do not fit this script can be heard, believed and perhaps
used to mobilise broader social, political or legal change.
Yet, although the details of who is raped by whom may vary between
pain memes and mainstream depictions of rape, what they have in com-
mon is the ways in which these narratives are constructed in such a way
183
as to focus on aspects of the story that showcase their worthiness as vic-

tims. Given that there is a common myth that women “cry rape” out
of vindictiveness or revenge (see Burt 1980), a key narrative practice is
for victims to stress their innocence. This might include the fact that,
although friends around them were engaged in forms of “risky” behav-
iour typically linked to rape (staying out late, flirting, drinking alco-
hol), they were not. As one victim-survivor noted, on the day he was
raped, he attended a party, “My friends drank so much alcohol. I didn’t.
I was 14….” Here, the victim stresses his innocence not only through
pointing out his sobriety, but his innocent and vulnerable position as a
minor. Indeed, a common narrative strategy is to mention the age they
were when the abuse began or took place, as well as the age of their
attacker. Sharing her story via Project Unbreakable, one victim’s placard
read:
‘Let’s Play Doctor. Take off your clothes…and don’t tell your mom or
dad.’—My 12 year old babysitter the 1st time. I WAS ONLY 4.
In constructing their narrative accounts, victims frequently not only

list their age, but also stress it through writing in bold, italics or capital
letters how they were only age x when the assault took place. Drawing
from Fileborn (2018), we can understand that disclosures of rape are a
curated process in which the tone and framing of the incident directs
audiences towards “appropriate” responses, such as sympathy, outrage,
and indignation. By guiding audiences towards emotionally charged
responses via the materiality of their sign, and their innocence, victims
are attempting to disrupt dominant rape myths which suggest that they
are somehow responsible for the assault. Through these tactics, they are
also attempting to discursively prevent the second assault.
The Second Assault
For many victims, the post-assault experience can be just as traumatic

as the assault itself. This is due to the strength of rape myths which triv-
ialise the assault, suggest that it did not occur, or could only occur in
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K. Mendes et al.
certain contexts. Franiuk et al. (2008) argue that rape myths are key to
the perpetuation of sexual assault in our culture because they make peo-
ple question the legitimacy of rape cases. Known as the “second assault,”
it is common for victims to be shamed, judged and blamed when dis-
closing their experiences to friends, families or the authorities (Wolbert
Burgess et al. 2009). When looking at the narratives of rape within pain
memes, we can see that many victims experienced this second assault,
which often forms a significant part of their narrative. When thinking
about why this is included in their narrative accounts, we argue that,
in the same way as stressing the innocence and worthiness of victims,
it is part of the curatorial process used to generate affective intensities
amongst audiences. Significantly, although Project Unbreakable invited
the public to share what the perpetrators said to them during or after
the assault, many instead chose to focus solely on how friends, family or
the police responded to their disclosure.
Having stitched her story with black thread onto a cream-coloured
pillow, strategically positioned to hide her face, one contributor holds
up a text that reads: “‘Well, you went back to his room…What did
you think would happen?’—the first person I told about my assault.”
Another image is of a twenty-something woman with a sad expression
who wrote, “‘Apologize to him’ said my Mom after I told her my father
raped me. Daddy, you stole my childhood and my mom. You don’t get
my spirit. I’m still standing.” Indeed, although this last trope of surviv-
ing sexual assault was certainly not a dominant vernacular practice, it
was evident within submissions, particularly within Project Unbreakable
and YouTube pain memes. It is to this narrative practice that we turn to
next.
Becoming a Survivor
As stated earlier in the chapter, one persistent theme within femi-

nist theory and praxis has been the importance of language and the
politics of naming (see Kelly 1988; Kelly and Radford 1990; Marcus
1992). Language can be powerful, and indeed it is common, particu-
larly within Project Unbreakable, but also within YouTube videos, to
185
see contributors disclosing not only their victimisation, but also how
they have transformed into survivors. Taking a cue from the campaign’s
name, many Project Unbreakable messages concluded with statements
such as: “I am unbreakable,” “You did not break me,” “You will not
defeat me,” “I am no longer ashamed,” Similarly, within YouTube, sev-
eral pain-meme videos concluded by communicating messages of hope
and defiance (see also Dobson 2015). This is indeed part of the narra-
tive flow of the video, which starts with a “normal” or “happy” person,
who becomes sad, traumatised or depressed, but concludes by explain-
ing how they have since overcome these experiences and regained some
form of power and agency.
This defiance was visible at times in the posture and positioning of
contributors, who stared boldly into the camera, or who literally stood
with their heads held high. A few contributors notably took photos
of themselves holding up their middle finger to the camera as a signal
of their defiance, their ability to move on and “talk back” to assailants
(hooks 1989). One such example includes a twenty-something white
woman, whose hair is dyed green/blue. In the image, her eyes are par-
tially closed and, with a sly smile, she is looking away from the camera
almost mischievously. Her pierced tongue is sticking out and her middle
finger, decorated in tattoos, rests gently on it. Her sign reads:
You violated me over and over. You told me my body was disgusting.
I used body modification to transform the body you touched into some-
thing pure. No longer am I the monster you desecrated. I’m ethereal. If
you touched me now you would burst into flames.
Here, the contributor is alluding to the ways in which she has used tat-
toos, piercings and hair dye as means to take control over her body, and
imagines herself as strong, powerful and able to repel any assailant. This
sign is just one example of how contributors resist “the reproduction
of sexual suffering” (Loney-Howes 2015: 11). As another contributor
shared:
My negative self-talk will always probably hurt more than what they did
to me. I am a survivor. I am unbreakable.
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K. Mendes et al.
Although it is encouraging to see these counter-narratives, which

enable contributors to become “theorists of their own experiences”
(Loney-Howes 2015: 11), we must also consider how this narrative ties
into the feminine imperative to not create discomfort or unhappiness
(Ahmed 2017), and as a form of labour that survivors must undertake
in order to make their experiences palatable (Alcoff 2018).
Non-dominant Vernaculars
Looking across a range of digital feminist campaigns in which the pub-
lic can disclose narrative accounts of sexual violence, our analysis reveals
a stark lack of diversity in terms of who contributes and their varying
experiences. Within our sample, most participants appear to be young,
white, cis-gendered women, sharing narrative accounts of heterosex-
ual sexual violence (see also Dobson 2015; Mendes et al. 2019). Our
research therefore highlights the scaffolding of experiences, whereby
some groups are afforded more legitimacy and authentic claims of vic-
timisation due to sexual violence than others (see also Fileborn 2017;
Fotopoulou 2016; Harvey 2016). This scaffolding of worthiness is
nothing new, with some groups, such as women of colour, having long
been positioned as unrapeable in relation to genealogies of slavery and
constructions of racial hierarchies of sexual value and worth (Collins
2005; Mardorossian 2014).
Although it is possible to find narrative accounts from LGBTQ+ ,
BAME,1 men, non-binary or other gender-non-conforming groups,
their accounts are few and far between, and constitute non-dominant
vernaculars (Warfield 2016). Furthermore, these narratives are not
evenly distributed, but clustered among certain campaigns. For exam-
ple, although the initial Who Needs Feminism? campaign made a con-
certed effort to attract male participants, as time went on, it became
overwhelmingly populated by women (Mendes et al. 2019). From our
observations, the few men who did contribute were unlikely to share
their own personal experiences of sexual violence, but instead often
shared experiences of violence directed towards girlfriends, friends or
family. As one twenty-something man shared:
187
I NEED FEMINISM BECAUSE my girlfriend was almost raped by

her ex-boyfriend WHILE WE WERE GOING OUT but NOBODY
INCLUDING THE POLICE are doing anything because of how she
‘presents herself ’ (Police saying it ‘is just not worth their time with some-
one who presents herself in a way such as she does).’ (Bold and capital
letters in original)
When looking at YouTube, although the site contains thousands of videos

made by men disclosing their experiences of rape, few have used the pain
meme storytelling form. Without speaking to male victims, it is unclear
why this is the case, but others have confirmed that the convention is
mostly adopted by young, western, girls (Dobson 2015), highlighting
how the ability to curate digitised narratives of rape is shaped by various
factors such as age, geopolitical location and gender (see Pease 2010).
But when men use this convention, what form do these stories take?
Indeed, it appears that their stories follow a similar narrative flow. For
example, many are filmed in black and white, with the victim-survivor’s
face or head either out of the frame or hidden behind the signs.
However, in most of the pain-meme videos we found, men were less
likely to back-drop them with music. Instead, the viewer hears the rus-
tling of the paper as the narrator moves between flashcards. But apart
from that, the narrative flow is very similar, with the men introduc-
ing themselves, stressing their innocence, the second assault, and their
transformation from victim to survivor. Like the narratives told by
women, which often stressed the banality of rape, many sought to draw
attention to the prevalence of sexual violence against men, and deliber-
ately intervened in discourses implying that they can’t be raped. Indeed,
getting the public to “think” about men’s experiences of rape was a key
message in many videos, as seen in the flashcards below.
Hello everyone ☺
I made this video because I want to get people to….
THINK!
All the boys out there.
And all the girls.
Pay attention.
This is my rape story.
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K. Mendes et al.
Project Unbreakable also included men sharing pain memes of sexual

violence. Whereas YouTube videos recounted rape committed by a wide
range of people (including strangers), Project Unbreakable had a notice-
able focus on the abuse that participants experienced as children from
mothers, fathers, relatives or family friends. As one man shared:
‘You’re lucky I love you this much. Not like how my dad raped me.’ My
mum when she would molest me. I don’t feel very lucky or loved.
Contributions such as this are important for shattering two common

myths. First, that women are incapable of committing rape, and second,
that mothers do not assault their own children. Although the above
example was one of only a few narratives about incestuous rape from
a mother, many others sought to challenge the myth that women are
incapable of raping men. Recounted in the form of the second assault
he experienced from the police, one man shared:
‘Real men can’t be raped by women.’ Spokane Washington Police

Department, Feb. ‘99
Although certainly non-dominant, contributions such as this are visi-

ble and provide important interventions into deeply entrenched myths
about who is capable of rape, and who can be a victim of this crime.
Almost completely absent from Who Needs Feminism?, Project
Unbreakable and YouTube are pain memes about rape from trans and inter-
sex communities. One notable exception is found on Project Unbreakable,
where one assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB) contributor shared:
‘You don’t like me touching you?’—my rapist as she left. As an AFAB per-
son who was raped by a straight girl as an ‘experiment’ sometimes I wish
she had been a man. I feel like the world would make more sense if I only
had one gender to be scared of. Queer people can be victims. Anybody
can be an attacker. Queer people deserve space in survivor activism.
Also missing from these sites are the voices of supposedly “non-
worthy” victims, such as sex workers. If we understand narratives of
189
sexual violence as curated processes (Fileborn 2018), by which victims

make careful decisions about where to disclose, which experiences
to share, and how to share these narratives in a way that will generate
maximum support (and shares, likes, comments and re-blogs), it is no
surprise that these communities either do not share their experiences via
pain memes, or do so in a way that edits out potentially “incriminating”
details, such as what a victim was wearing, their sexual history, or other
details that would further support rape myths.
For example, while we know that sex workers experience high rates
of sexual violence, rape myths insist that, as they have sex for a living,
they are “unrapeable.” Yet, when pouring through hundreds of pain
memes and other digitised narratives of rape, we uncovered no disclo-
sures in which sex work was part of the narrative. This is, of course, not
to say that sex workers have not shared their stories in digital spaces,
only that these details are likely to have been omitted in order to mini-
mise victim-blaming or “grey-area” tropes, and maximise the supportive
reception.2 Yet, in order to truly challenge dominant rape myths, it is
crucial that stories from supposedly “unrapeable” or “unworthy” victims
are told. As Michael Salter (2013) highlights, standards of perceived
feminine “respectability” and “credibility” are applied in the online
world, and shape who is discursively recognised as a “deserving” vic-
tim, and these standards are highly racialised and classed (Ringrose and
Walkerdine 2018). Therefore, building on Jill Cermele’s argument that
“The existence of thousands—hundreds of thousands—of victimisation
stories are critical; they underscore the reality of violence against women
and the devastating outcomes of gender inequality and living in a rape
culture” (p. 1164), we argue that it is crucial to hear multiple narratives
from diverse groups in order to fully challenge the veracity of rape myths
in most cultures.
Conclusions
In recent years, there is no doubt that victims have been adopting dig-
ital technologies to share, often for the first time, their experiences of
sexual violence. In this chapter, we have examined hundreds of pain
190
K. Mendes et al.
memes across the Tumblr sites Who Needs Feminism? and Project
Unbreakable, and videos posted on YouTube to flesh out their vernac-
ular practices. In addition to focusing on the narrative constructions
of rape, this chapter has attended to the materiality of pain memes,
arguing that they have opened up new ways of making sexual violence
known, felt and experienced. Understanding pain memes as a curated
process (Fileborn 2018), we argue that victims construct narratives to
build affective connections, solidarities, and intensities (Hemmings
2012; Khoja-Moolji 2015; Mendes et al. 2018; Ringrose and Renold
2014) with the public, making the most of what is technologically avail-
able. In this case, it is the narrative of rape, combined with the material-
ity of the pain meme, its hand-crafted sign, the various embodiments of
the narrator and, at times, melancholic music, which enable their expe-
riences to be not just known, but felt. The “materiality of the design of
digital networks” (Harvey 2016: 11), and their emphasis on the visual,
provides victims with an additional and powerful layer through which
to express their experiences.
Although we argue that pain memes are certainly creating new
means through which sexual assault can become known and felt,
what possibilities do they hold for challenging conventional rape
myths or narratives? Here, we are both cautiously optimistic and
critical. Following on from scholars such as Rachel Loney-Howes
(2015), we argue that digital platforms and storytelling conven-
tions such as pain memes have “expanded the scope for challenging
the deeply entrenched myths and assumptions about rape through
various modes of representation” (p. 2). Indeed, although they
constituted non-dominant vernaculars (Warfield 2016), men and
LGBTQ+ communities were able not only to share their experiences
of rape, but also to challenge entrenched rape myths which deem
them unrapeable, or as unworthy or unlikely victims. On the other
hand, the experiences of some groups who experience disproportion-
ately high levels of violence, such as the disabled, BAME, migrant
women, and sex workers, were either absent, or edited out of the nar-
rative. In this sense, not all rape myths were effectively challenged
through the digital feminist practices we have mapped (see Loney-
Howes 2015).
191
Furthermore, although digital platforms can be spaces within which

victims feel supported and believed, there is no doubt that many con-
tinue to receive, if not abusive messages and comments, then at least
those of provocation or disbelief, which perpetuate victim-blaming
tropes. As scholars, we must be aware of how these messages of disbe-
lief are tied to intersecting identities such as gender, ethnicity, class and
sexuality. For example, many contributors were mocked for including
spelling mistakes in their signs, resulting in numerous comments such
as “your grammar sucks” or “you need to improve your handwriting…
since you went through all that, I guess it was hard keeping up with
your studies.” Additionally, many comments on YouTube pain-meme
videos ask questions such as “why didn’t you go to the police?” which
disregard the complicated reasons why many victims never report their
assault. Despite these limitations, however, while scholars have long
studied the narrative accounts of rape in, for example, court cases, tri-
bunals and semi-structured interviews (see Bletzer and Koss 2004;
Edgren 2017; Karlsson 2018), and have uncovered a range of dif-
ferences in narratives of rape, digital storytelling modes such as pain
memes open up new and important avenues to explore. Indeed, in this
age of communicative capitalism, where media content is traded like a
commodity, pain memes offer a compelling and affective form.
Yet, while the circulation of this content undoubtedly creates value
for commercial platforms such as YouTube and Tumblr, we know
from other research that victims take comfort and solace in having
their experiences shared, listened to, and “liked” (Loney-Howes 2018;
Mendes et al. 2019; O’Neil 2018). This research also reveals how dis-
closing painful personal experiences works as a form of personal heal-
ing. Indeed, the uptake of digital technologies has provided victims
of sexual violence with a way to “tell their stories in their own way,
in a setting of their choice” (Herman 2005: 574), making them feel
heard and supported, and giving them some sense of comfort and jus-
tice, albeit outside of legal frameworks (see also Fileborn 2017; Salter
2013; Powell 2015; Wood et al. 2018). Finally, although it is unlikely
that everyone who shares their experience of rape considers this to be
an activist, or even a feminist, act, making oppression visible has always
been a key tenet of feminism. Thus, drawing on Sara Ahmed (2017),
192
K. Mendes et al.
we may conceptualise this visibility of rape via pain memes as an aspect

of the work of feminist cataloguing that is necessary for demonstrating
“that this incident is not isolated but part of a series of events: a series of
structures” (Ahmed 2017: 30)—in other words, a part of patriarchy.
Note
1. Black and Asian Minority Ethnic.
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9
A New Age of Believing Women? Judging
Rape Narratives Online
Tanya Serisier
In July 2015, New York magazine’s cover story was a profile of 35 of

the then 46 women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault. The story
is as much an account of cultural transformation in American socie-
ty’s response to women’s narratives of rape and sexual violence as it is a
narrative of multiple acts of violence committed by one man. It opens:
“More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape
than in all the decades since the women’s movement began”. It claims
that while “campus movements like Take Back the Night and ‘No
Means No’” raised awareness of acquaintance rape during the 1970s
and 1980s, “the culture of silence and shame lingered, particularly
when the man had any kind of social status”. Now, however, the possi-
bilities of social media to act as a “megaphone” has “radicalised” younger
women so that “there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only
thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more pow-
erful than any other weapon in the fight against rape” (Malone 2015).
T. Serisier (*) 
School of Law, Birkbeck College, London, UK
e-mail: t.serisier@bbk.ac.uk
200
T. Serisier
Even more importantly, the magazine suggests, women’s narratives are

being believed and acted upon as never before. The years following publi-
cation of this article have seen recurring claims of a “revolution” brought
about by the new power of women’s online testimony, particularly follow-
ing the emergence of the “Me Too” movement in 2017. Time magazine,
for example, labelled “Me Too” a “revolution of refusal, gathering strength
by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has
spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have
been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced” (Zacharek et al. 2017).
In this chapter, I revisit, and complicate, these claims, which have
largely risen in response to select high-profile cases such as Cosby
and “Me Too”. In this chapter, I undertake an intersectional fem-
inist analysis of some of these cases from the last few years, asking
what they reveal about practices of judging and doubting women’s
testimony. Drawing on the work of feminist critic Leigh Gilmore
(2017), I argue that the practices of disbelief she identifies con-
tinue to produce women who speak in public as “tainted witnesses”,
with success stories such as Cosby and “Me Too” largely function-
ing through a logic of exceptionalism. Careful reading of specific
cases reveals that women who speak about sexual violence continue
to be subject to differential processes of judgement, based on who is
speaking and on the kind of story that is told. In the first section,
I outline my approach to selecting cases and analysing practices of
judgement. The following sections explore these practices in more
detail, first considering the ways in which selective belief and sup-
port for women’s testimony can obscure the persistence of wider
patterns of doubt and disbelief. I then turn to consider the opera-
tion of more explicitly negative modes of judgement, examining,
firstly, attempts to undermine the factual veracity of women’s testi-
mony and, secondly, the labelling of speech as inappropriate or irre-
sponsible. I conclude by reflecting on connections between these
individual narratives and broader practices of doubt and judge-
ment that divide women into a small number of believable narra-
tives and a far larger number of women tainted by disbelief and
judgement.
9 A New Age of Believing Women? …
201
Reading Encounters of Testimony

and Judgement: Cases and Analysis
In this chapter, I draw on the analytical framework offered by Leigh
Gilmore in her discussion of the ways in which women’s testimony
becomes “tainted” by doubt and disbelief. Her analysis shows that
women are rendered unreliable and the evidentiary value of their speech
degraded through “an encounter between testimony and judgement”
(Gilmore 2017: 10). It is this encounter, and its operation and effects in
the age of social media, that I am concerned with here. Analysing recent
cases in light of Gilmore’s analysis or earlier periods reveals, I argue, ele-
ments of change and continuity in responses to women’s testimony of
sexual violence. While older modes of judgement persist, social media has
provided both new ways for some women’s testimony to compel belief
and new modes of “doubting women in public” (Gilmore 2017: 10).
My analysis proceeds through the examination of several high-profile
cases in the USA during the period 2015–2018. All attracted significant
media attention and the majority involve celebrities. As Lisa Cuklanz
(1996) argues, media coverage of prominent cases of sexual violence can
provide a focal point for understanding broader cultural debates about
gender, (hetero)sexuality and violence. Her analysis builds on Robert
Hariman’s (1993) argument that a selection of thematically linked
high-profile cases can grant significant insight into cultural and social
change. Gilmore (2017: 4) further suggests that critical attention to
specific cases during a period of heightened public attention to sexual
violence may be particularly useful, as it enables us to chart emerging
practices of judgement and shifting social responses to women’s testi-
mony. While these cases are, by their nature, far from representative
examples of women’s experiences, taken together, they can be used to
demonstrate the continuation of long-standing practices of undermin-
ing of women’s testimony, and the emergence of newer modes of doubt.
I have selected cases that involve prominent public “encounters of
judgement”, either positive or negative, between women’s testimony
and those who read and comment on it, and I engage in close textual
analysis of these encounters, the criteria of judgement exercised, and
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T. Serisier
the claims made for the legitimacy of that judgement. Each section
uses different cases to analyse a distinct aspect of these processes. In
the following section, I explore the ways in which the selective belief
and recognition granted to some cases of sexual violence can function,
counter-intuitively, to increase and further processes of doubting and
judging other cases. Susan Estrich (1987) famously described this as a
legal and social tendency to divide sexual assaults into “real” or “sim-
ple” rape. The archetype of the former is a criminal stranger attacking
a woman in public space, and it fosters the idea that, to be “real”, sex-
ual violence should involve physical force or incapacitation, be recog-
nisable to potential or imagined witnesses as violence as opposed to sex,
and not take place within an encounter or relationship that is otherwise
viewed as unexceptional. I argue that this division continues in con-
temporary media reports of women’s testimony. I highlight the implicit
conditionality of seemingly supportive or positive representations
through revisiting significant media accounts of three culturally signif-
icant cases. These include the original reports of the testimony of Emily
Doe and the women who accused Harvey Weinstein and the first major
media story that brought together the accounts of Bill Cosby’s accusers
(Baker 2016; Kantor and Twohey 2017; Malone 2015).
The following sections focus on more explicitly negative judgements
that demonstrate the persistence of what Gilmore suggests are the two
key methods for undermining women’s testimony in public: “deform-
ing it by doubt” and “substituting different terms of value for the
ones offered by the witness herself ”. In the first mode, doubt can be
mobilised through explicit statements of disbelief or through deploy-
ing tropes such as “he said, she said” and “nobody knows what really
happened” that involve the pretence of reserving judgement. It is only,
Gilmore (2017: 7) argues, in cases of sexual violence that “people feel
virtuous, objective and fair when they claim that the conditions that
typically initiate and guide” investigations render them moot from the
outset. The section, “Judging Narratives Online”, considers the con-
temporary operation of this mode of judgement through two examples,
Lena Dunham’s public statement undermining the claims of Aurora
Perrineau, and Woody Allen’s biographer, Robert B. Weide’s series of
refutations of Dylan Farrow’s claims that her father sexually assaulted
203
her as a child. I argue that, rather than rendering investigation moot,

in a social media era, tropes such as “he said, she said” may instead pro-
voke amateur investigations built on the assumption that social media
provides transparent access to facts and evidence and, therefore, that
anyone might come to know what really happened through a process
of independent evidence gathering. What remains the same is that a
process that is presented as “virtuous, objective and fair” works to pre-
clude belief in women’s testimony. The final section explores the second
mode of judgement, which is less concerned with factual veracity than
it is with contesting the interpretation that women give to their narra-
tives, and denying their authority as experts on their own experience.
I explore this through two influential judgements of one of the most
polarised cases of the “Me Too” moment, the story published about the
sexual encounter between the anonymous “Grace” and comedian Aziz
Ansari. I examine the ways in which interventions by Ashleigh Banfield
of CNN (2018) and Caitlin Flanagan (2018) of the Atlantic sought to
rewrite Grace’s accounts as “sex” rather than “violence”, disputing her
interpretation of her own experience. I note that both argue that Grace’s
account is especially irresponsible precisely because of greater tenden-
cies to believe women’s narratives, making feminist advances themselves
a justification for doubt and judgement.
As feminist critics have long shown, the patterns of selective belief and
doubt that greet women’s narratives of sexual violence are determined
not only by the type of stories that are told but also by who tells them.
Understanding these patterns therefore requires examining how “gender,
race and sexuality coincide with the construction of reliability and credibil-
ity” (Gilmore 2017: 13). As Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) famously argued,
only an intersectional analysis that considers gender alongside other vectors
of power such as race and class is capable of analysing the ways in which
public credibility and sympathy is denied to women of colour, working-
class and other marginalised women. Sweeping claims of a new era of
belief for women’s testimony are only tenable, I argue below, in the absence
of an intersectional lens. Societal responses to rape, even, or perhaps espe-
cially, in the current era of widespread attention to sexual violence, are only
comprehensible through analysis of selective and differential responses to
women’s testimony based on who they are and the kinds of stories they tell.
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T. Serisier
Changing Everything? Social Media and the

Persistence of Doubt
The period from 2015 to 2018 has been marked by increased pub-
lic attention to sexual violence, largely driven by several high-profile
cases and their widespread discussion on social media (Alcoff 2018).
Extensive condemnation of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Brock
Turner, the “Stanford swimmer”, has seen social media hailed as a new
and effective avenue for activism which is creating a “revolution” in
social attitudes to rape. This belief is not limited to the media profiles
quoted above, but is echoed in responses by prominent figures, such as
the then US Vice President, Joseph Biden. In 2016, Biden penned an
open letter to Emily Doe, an anonymous woman whose Victim Impact
Statement, released to Buzzfeed news, was viewed over eight million
times in the 24 hours after it was released, largely through sharing on
social media sites. By the time of Biden’s letter, written six days later,
Doe’s words had been read aloud on CNN and in the US Congress
(Baysinger 2016). Biden claimed that Doe represented “every woman”
and that she had “shaken untold thousands out of the torpor and indif-
ference towards sexual violence that allows this problem to continue”
(Namako 2016).
While the response to Doe’s statement was significant, statements
such as Biden’s, like the media sources quoted above, fail to acknowl-
edge the differential patterns of belief and judgement that characterise
responses to women’s testimony. Understanding, and combatting, the
“‘tainting” of women’s testimony requires paying attention, as Doe her-
self does in her statement, to the ways in which her story is not rep-
resentative. As she noted, rather than an “every woman”, she was
constantly told by police and prosecutors that she was a “best-case
scenario”:
I had forensic evidence, sober un-biased witnesses, a slurred voice mail,

police at the scene. I had everything… I thought, if this is what having it
good looks like, what other hells are survivors living? (Doe 2016)
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As the quote demonstrates, a significant part of why Doe was a best-

case scenario was that she had various types of corroborating evidence
which meant that her testimony was not required to stand alone, either
in court or on social media. The Buzzfeed article that presented Doe’s
statement similarly chose to focalise it through the “unbiased witnesses”
rather than Doe, beginning: “One night in January 2015, two Stanford
University graduate students biking across campus spotted a freshman
thrusting his body on top of an unconscious, half-naked woman behind
a dumpster” (Baker 2016).
Barbara Bowman (2014), one of Cosby’s accusers, has drawn atten-
tion to the fact that women’s testimony, on its own, remains insufficient
to compel belief or sympathy, even on social media. In an opinion piece
for the Washington Post, Bowman pointed out that she and others had
been publicly telling their stories of Cosby for years, with little response
beyond scepticism and vilification. Indeed, their testimony was largely
incidental to the eruption of public outrage about Cosby following the
online publication of a video of a male comedian calling Cosby a rapist
(McQuade 2014). Similarly, women’s testimony about Weinstein only
became news when it was presented as part of an exposé in the New
York Times which carefully stated that the claims were not solely taken
from the women interviewed but “documented through interviews
with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well
as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he
has run” (Kantor and Twohey 2017). All of these cases are compatible
with an ongoing logic in which women’s accounts of sexual violence are
only believed when they are validated and supported by more “objec-
tive” voices, particularly those of seemingly disinterested observers.
Ultimately, this fails to challenge the existence of a taken-for-granted
orientation of doubt towards women’s narratives and mobilised against
women who are unable to find public corroboration for their stories.
These cases are similarly compatible with the distinction between
“real” rapes, which are deserving of sympathy, and “simple” rapes,
which are not, even though they may indicate a shift in the boundaries
between these categories (Boux and Daum 2015). Each of these cases
contains elements that might see it fall short of the traditional “real”
rape threshold. Doe was drunk at a party, while the majority of women
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T. Serisier
who have spoken about Cosby and Weinstein were engaged in profes-
sional or social relations with the men, several of which continued after
they were assaulted. However, they also contain elements that shield the
women from the victim-blaming that might be expected in response
to their narratives. The opening of the Buzzfeed article, for example,
quoted above, emphasises that Doe was unconscious, not merely intox-
icated, at the time of her assault. In her statement, she also emphasised
that her level of intoxication resulted from being an infrequent drinker
(Baker 2016). In this, and in other ways, she was able to portray herself
as an innocent, white, middle-class college girl who did not usually go
to parties and get blind drunk, and who was therefore deserving of sym-
pathy rather than judgement. In the case of Cosby, the use of incapaci-
tating drugs played a similar role in exonerating women from blame. As
Joanna Bourke (2007) has noted, however, evidence of incapacitation
has a long history of being used to divert blame from women for sexual
violence, and it does little to challenge victim-blaming in cases where
women are not clearly incapacitated.
The position of an innocent victim of “real rape” is not equally open
to all women. Rather, as Gilmore (2017: 4) writes, “judgement dispro-
portionately affects the vulnerable”. The persistence, for instance, of
racial and pathologising logics in tainting women was evident in Harvey
Weinstein’s selective rebuttals of the allegations against him. While he
did not directly counter any of the initially reported allegations, he
noted that Ashley Judd, one of his most prominent accusers, was “going
through a hard time right now, I read her book, in which she talks
about being the victim of sexual abuse and depression as a child” (Smith
2017). Two weeks after this indirect inference that Judd might not be
reliable, and after more women had come forward, Weinstein publicly
refuted Lupita Nyong’o’s (2017) account of harassment and assault
published in the New York Times (Wang 2017). Nyong’o was both the
first black woman to speak publicly about Weinstein and the first whose
story he directly questioned. In stating that he had a “different recol-
lection” and contesting specific facts, Weinstein attempted to render
Nyong’o’s claim “unknowable” by moving it into the domain of “he
said, she said” (Gilmore 2017: 7). Even though this effort to discredit
Nyong’o was largely unsuccessful, the fact that Weinstein saw her story
207
as the one most vulnerable to being tainted cannot be viewed outside of

a racialised logic where women of colour are granted far less sympathy
and belief than white women (Crenshaw 1991). It also leaves a lingering
question as to what the public response to Nyong’o’s story would have
been if it had not been told as part of a series of multiple allegations
against a man who had already been judged a “real” rapist.
Judging Narratives Online: Investigation and

Doubt
The enhanced vulnerability of women of colour to being “tainted”
with doubt was again demonstrated in November 2017, when Aurora
Perrineau, a biracial actress, made allegations against Murray Miller, a
white writer on the HBO series Girls. In response, the series creators
and celebrity feminists, Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, posted a
statement on Instagram which asserted that they had been “thrilled to
see so many women’s voices heard” through the “Me Too” campaign.
However, they continued: “During every time of change there are
also incidences of the culture, in its enthusiasm and zeal, taking down
the wrong targets”. They argued that, “having insider knowledge of
Murray’s situation … this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault
cases that are misreported every year” (Guardian 2017). Soon after
this statement, Miller’s legal team claimed that Perrineau’s allegation
was part of an attempt by the actress and her family to extort money,
a claim that was subsequently withdrawn as a “good-faith misunder-
standing” (Birnbaum 2017). Like Weinstein, Dunham and Konner’s
intervention provoked a public backlash rather than successfully “taint-
ing” its target. Following criticism of the racial politics of her inter-
vention, Dunham deleted her initial tweet and issued an apology to
women “who had been disappointed by the statement”, declaring that
it had been the “wrong time” to speak. She concluded: “Until we are
all believed, none of us will be believed” (Guardian 2017). Notably,
however, she did not apologise directly to Perrineau or retract her claim
that she was lying. Her closing assertion of a universal gendered logic
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T. Serisier
to belief notwithstanding, Dunham’s intervention demonstrates that

patterns of selective belief in women’s testimony continue, even among
self-identified feminists. Women of colour continue to be vulnerable to
being tainted by these logics, even as criticisms of Dunham and Konner
might be read as evidence of their diminishing power.
While the starting point of Dunham and Konner’s intervention was,
like Weinstein’s rebuttal of Nyong’o, an assertion within a “he said,
she said” framework, they did not imply that the truth was therefore
unknowable. Instead, despite having not witnessed the event in ques-
tion, Dunham and Konner asserted that their “insider knowledge”
meant that they could categorically declare Perrineau’s narrative untrue
and disseminate that declaration online so that it would also become
a form of evidence. This behaviour reflects a wider tendency on social
media to presume that the “truth” of complex situations of interpersonal
harm and violence is knowable through determined amateur investi-
gation, based in part on the production of public statements by those
who claim “insider” status even when they are not directly involved
(Greer and McLaughlin 2012). When applied to sexual violence, these
practices intersect with older forms of judgement and suspicion, and,
through making women’s testimony an appropriate target for public
scrutiny and amateur investigation, normalise the activity of publicly
doubting women. In the remainder of this section, I elaborate upon
the operation of a mode of judgement that takes the “he said, she said”
framework identified by Gilmore as an authorisation to undertake a
sceptical evaluation of women’s testimony, rather than leaving it in the
realm of the unknowable.
A sustained example of this new mode of doubting can be seen in
responses to Dylan Farrow’s (2014) narrative of being sexually assaulted
as a child by Woody Allen. Her account was published as an “open let-
ter” in a New York Times blog in February 2014 in response to Allen
receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes. While the
allegations had been the subject of media attention decades earlier, the
letter was the first time that Farrow had spoken publicly about the inci-
dent. The letter told her story alongside a series of ethical demands for
empathy and response, asking readers to think of their favourite Woody
Allen film and then to imagine their child being led by Allen into an
209
attic and sexually assaulted. It also named actors who had worked with
Allen, asking them to imagine themselves or their children in her place.
Declaring that Allen’s idolisation in popular culture compounds her
injury and suffering, Farrow has subsequently retold her story in several
forums, and, from the end of 2017 onwards, questioned why the emer-
gent “Me Too” movement had up to that point “spared” Woody Allen
(Farrow 2017).
Farrow’s story has produced widely varying responses. She was pub-
licly affirmed online by some Hollywood figures, including Lena
Dunham, and their numbers have increased in the aftermath of “Me
Too” (Cooney 2018). However, many celebrities who worked with
Allen have invoked the “he said, she said” and “nobody really knows”
framings. Kate Winslet, for instance, declared, “I don’t know anything,
really, and whether any of it is true or false”, a reservation that Farrow
pointed out she has not applied to other testimonies offered as part of
“Me Too” (Farrow 2017). Demonstrating the effects of this framing,
Cate Blanchett recast the matter as a private family conflict rather than
a public allegation of violence: “It’s obviously been a long and pain-
ful situation for the family, and I hope they find some resolution and
peace” (Jabour 2014). However, this framing has not rendered inves-
tigation moot. Both supporters and critics of Farrow have engaged in
processes of amateur investigation, evaluation, collection and presenta-
tion of evidence or “facts”. For instance, Maureen Orth (2014), pub-
lished an article on Vanity Fair’s blog, “Ten Undeniable Facts About the
Woody Allen Sexual Abuse Allegations”, which summarised the findings
of Orth’s “two lengthy, heavily researched and thoroughly fact-checked
articles” on the case. A contrasting set of facts has been repeatedly put
forward by Robert B. Weide (2014, 2017), who, like Orth, cites his
“extensive research” into the case and his expertise as Allen’s biogra-
pher to authorise his position. Both invite readers to verify their facts
through hyperlinks to selected primary documentation, such as medical
and court reports, as well as previous media reports.
Weide (2017) particularly is aware that he is “opening myself up to
accusations of ‘blaming the victim’” and is thus careful to assert that it
is “possible to believe Allen without calling Dylan Farrow a liar”. He
consistently projects a veneer of even-handedness which echoes the false
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T. Serisier
fairness of the “he said, she said” trope. For instance, he writes that “we
can each believe what we want”, and that he is merely “presenting facts”
or “floating scenarios” rather than pursuing an agenda. This framing
is continued through phrases such as “not so fast” or “let’s back up a
bit”, or through presenting his articles as a “Q&A” with Farrow, even
though she has no space to respond (Weide 2014, 2017). Tellingly, this
performance of disinterested reasonableness has been highly success-
ful, with Weide frequently cited as an objective expert on the situation
(e.g. Winter 2014). Despite these protestations, Weide employs sev-
eral mechanisms to undermine Farrow’s narrative and assert Allen’s in
its place. The first is a strict hierarchy of credibility of both witnesses
and sources. Much of Weide’s narrative work is deployed in asserting
the reliability of evidence favourable to Allen and “tainting” witnesses
and evidence that support Farrow’s version of events. For instance,
Allen’s unsupported claim in a television interview that Mia Farrow
threatened in a late-night telephone call to “do worse” than shoot him
is taken as factual “evidence”, and verified through a hyperlink, while
Dylan Farrow’s claims that she and her family have been harassed by
Allen’s lawyers and other employees is dismissed as unverified asser-
tion and exaggeration (Weide 2017). Similarly, Weide frequently cites
a Yale psychiatric evaluation that found “no evidence” of child abuse as
authoritative. Orth (2014) dismisses the same report based on expert
criticism, noting that the “inconsistencies” it cites in Farrow’s statements
are frequently found in the testimony of children who have experienced
abuse. On the other hand, he describes a Prosecutorial statement that
the decision not to charge Allen was taken on the basis of Farrow’s men-
tal health rather than a lack of confidence in the evidence as “incred-
ible”, without acknowledging that the reluctance of victims and their
families to go to trial is a common reason for not pursuing prosecutions
in these cases (Madigan and Gamble 1991).
Investigations and judgements are, of course, not produced purely
from facts. As Peter Brooks (2008) argues, what is at stake in most
cases of sexual violence is not so much the “facts” as the “narrative glue”
which turns these facts into a story of sexual abuse or a false allegation.
In Weide’s case, this glue is derived from long-standing tropes used to
discredit women who speak about sexual violence. Although Weide may
211
stop short of calling Farrow a “liar”, he does insist that her account is
unreliable or, perhaps more accurately, “tainted”. For Weide (2014),
Farrow “believes” what she is saying, but only because she has been
manipulated by her mother. Despite an absence of supporting evidence,
Weide (2017) asserts that “there are many, many people who believe
this whole case boils down to Mia Farrow’s (understandable) rage at
Woody Allen for falling in love with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi
Previn”. Weide’s narrative is only “understandable”, however, to the
extent that it accepts the premise that women who speak about rape are
either “mad”, as in the case of Farrow, or “bad”, as in the example of her
mother. It requires the reader to believe that Farrow is so weak-willed as
to have been successfully brainwashed for several decades, and that Mia
Farrow, a “scorned woman”, is so consumed by jealous rage that she has
lied for decades and, in the process, sacrificed her daughter’s well-being.
In his article written in the aftermath of “Me Too”, Weide directly
counters Dylan Farrow’s linking of her testimony to that of women
speaking against men such as Weinstein and Cosby. He asserts that the
allegations against Cosby, Weinstein and others targeted by “Me Too”
are characterised by “strikingly similar” “multiple accusations ” (Weide
2017, emphasis in original). In Allen’s case, in contrast, there only a
“single accusation of a single alleged incident made by one understand-
ably furious ex-lover in the middle of custody negotiations, after warn-
ing him of her intentions”. Here, Weide writes Dylan Farrow out of the
story completely, changing this from a narrative of sexual abuse into a
cynical ploy by a jilted woman while simultaneously suggesting that,
in contrast to the narratives told about Cosby and Weinstein, a single,
uncorroborated story of sexual violence is inherently suspect.
“Appalling” Speech: Narrative Power

and Responsibility
Weide’s insistence that Farrow’s narrative be considered distinct from
the testimony that, collectively, has come under the banner of “Me
Too” reflects a further shift in processes of judgement in the era of social
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T. Serisier
media. As Boux and Daum (2015) argue, the last few years have seen a
wider number of narratives of sexual violence accorded legitimacy and
sympathy, even if these narratives are still constructed as exceptional,
as I argue above. The public perception, however, that women’s narra-
tives are more likely to compel belief and to have consequences for the
men that they speak about has, ironically, itself produced new modes of
judgement. There is a growing tendency to warn against the emergent
power of women’s narratives and their ability to threaten sexual freedom
and due process and, ultimately, to undermine their own credibility
through irresponsible speech. In this mode of judgement, the truth of
a story is less relevant than the effects that it is seen to have, so that
women’s speech about violence is posed as possessing greater potential
harm than the acts that it seeks to describe and expose. For instance,
after the publication of Farrow’s open letter about Woody Allen, Scarlett
Johansson, named in Farrow’s letter, stated that it would be “ridiculous”
for her to make any “assumptions” about the truth of Farrow’s allega-
tions. She did state, however, that it was “irresponsible” of Farrow to
take actors who would have “google alerts” set up and “throw their
name into a situation that none of us could knowingly comment on”
(Cadwalladr 2014). The implication here is that the ethical problem lies
in Farrow’s speech rather than Allen’s alleged actions, with the implicit
judgement that these stories should not be told, or at least not told in
public.
An example of these kinds of judgements can be seen in responses
to the pseudonymous account by the woman known only as “Grace”
of a date with comedian Aziz Ansari, which she described as the “worst
night of her life”. The account, a journalist’s rewrite of Grace’s story,
albeit with extensive quotations, was published on Babe.net, an online
magazine aimed at young women. It describes an eagerly anticipated
evening that ended in a coercive sexual encounter. The article also
documented a subsequent text-message exchange in which Grace told
Ansari via text that “he ignored clear non-verbal cues” and that “noth-
ing changed” even after she asked him to slow down. Ansari replied
that he was “sad” and “truly sorry” and must have “misread things in
the moment”. The narrative concludes with Grace’s reflection that
“It took a really long time for me to validate this as sexual assault”.
213
She agreed to speak to Babe.net after witnessing Ansari receive an award

at the Golden Globes while wearing a “Time’s Up” badge as a gesture of
support for survivors of sexual harassment and assault (Way 2018). There
have been numerous, justified, criticisms of the sensational and flawed
presentation of the story by Babe.net, which combines and even con-
flates commentary on outfit choice and descriptions of boorish behav-
iour around wine selection with its account of Grace’s distress over the
sexual encounter (e.g. Escobedo Shepherd 2018). While acknowledging
problems with the reporting, the opprobrium and judgement directed at
Grace and her decision to tell her story remain worthy of analysis.
The article makes use of social media’s ability to collect and offer
supporting evidence to forestall judgements around veracity, includ-
ing photos taken by Grace of Ansari, screenshots of text messages, and
an assurance that the publication has verified his phone number. This
factual evidence did not, however, prevent Grace and her testimony
from being tainted by judgements of her interpretation of the events
and her right to speak publicly about them. While Grace, like Farrow,
had supporters as well as detractors, what was rarely questioned was
the possibility, and even desirability, of judging her narrative in these
terms. Her understanding of events was debated, with numerous par-
ticipants asserting that, based on the “facts” provided, the events could
and should be rewritten as a romance gone wrong, or a “bad date”,
even as others asserted their support for Grace’s perspective. This pub-
lic debate came in some ways to eclipse the narrative itself. For exam-
ple, six days after publication of the article, the UK’s BBC radio current
affairs programme, “The World at One”, broadcast an episode entitled
“Was it ‘sexual assault’ or just a bad date?”, bringing together a group
of women with no connection to the story to debate its meaning and
correct interpretation (BBC 2018). As Grace remained unheard follow-
ing the immediate story, her authority to interpret what had happened
to her was increasingly challenged, so that what transpired was not so
much a “he said, she said”, as Ansari also remained largely silent, but
more an over-dissection of what “she said”, what she claimed it meant,
and, perhaps most importantly, whether she had the right to speak in
the first place.
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T. Serisier
A prominent example of this process involved Ashleigh Banfield, a

CNN anchor who had previously read Emily Doe’s statement live on
air. Evidencing the selective patterns of judgement and doubt I have
been discussing, Banfield again made a personal intervention, this
time reading an open letter to Grace in which she described her act of
speaking publicly about Ansari as “appalling” (CNN 2018). Banfield
aggressively asserted the “wrongness” of Grace’s interpretation, even as
she accepted its factual veracity, adopting language reminiscent of the
cross-examination of a complainant by a defence lawyer: “By your own
admission, this was a bad date”. The transformation of an account of
violence to one of romance, albeit romance gone wrong, is, as Sue Lees
(1997) argues, a common social response in cases of acquaintance, or
“simple”, rape. Such rewriting normalises and excuses male sexual
aggression even as it acknowledges its reality. As Banfield notes, she has
“had a few” similarly bad dates and “they stink”. Given the presumed
inevitability of men’s aggression, responsibility is placed on women to
act as sexual gatekeepers through a private and individual assertion of
sexual boundaries; or, as Banfield states, a “guy like that deserves a bad
case of blue balls”. The burden of blame shifts from the failure of the
man to gauge his partner’s desire, or even consent, to a female abroga-
tion of responsibility to manage what is deemed to be an unavoidably
risky situation. Or, as Banfield says, “you didn’t leave – that’s on you”.
Finally, such an interpretation reinstates the boundaries between “real”
rape and other forms of sexual violence and coercion, placing the latter
clearly within the realms of normative and private heterosexuality. What
Grace labels an “assault”, Banfield describes as being “overly amorous”.
Perhaps the ultimate renormalisation of the behaviour described in the
account is when she offers Grace the advice that she “not go on a sec-
ond date” with a man like Ansari and she should definitely not “marry
a guy like that”, presuming and asserting an economy of heterosexual
romance where, for women, dating and sex are a necessary evil on the
path to “landing a man”, while for men they resemble something closer
to a game of conquest.
These judgements, like Weide’s, ultimately rely on seemingly
common-sense ideas of gender and heterosexuality to provide their

215
narrative glue. That these interpretations easily slide into narratives that
demonise women who speak about violence is evident in Banfield’s
description of Grace and her speech as “appalling”, and in her impu-
tation that Grace has an ulterior motive for speaking. Banfield accom-
plishes this with her question, “what exactly is your beef?”, as though
Grace’s stated interpretation of the event as sexual violence was not suf-
ficient reason to justify public speech. This construction is made even
more explicit in an article written for The Atlantic by contributing edi-
tor, Caitlin Flanagan (2018). Flanagan also places responsibility for not
“calling a cab” or otherwise putting an end to the situation on Grace
but goes further in her characterisation. Rather than being helpless,
she writes, Grace “wanted something from Ansari” and “she was try-
ing to figure out how to get it”. In Flanagan’s reading, Grace wanted
“affection, kindness, attention” or to “even become the famous man’s
girlfriend”, although this is not mentioned in the original account.
Nevertheless, for Flanagan, Grace is a scorned woman, “rejected yet
another time, by yet another man” and therefore, like Mia Farrow,
above, the author of “revenge porn”, in which the “clinical detail in
which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much
as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari”. Not only is Grace accused of
blaming Ansari for her own failures but she, like Farrow or Perrineau,
becomes the agent of harm, a scorned woman seeking revenge.
The boundaries that are drawn around acceptable speech in cases
like this, are also assertions of the range of acceptable heterosexual
encounters and male sexual practices. Where Grace’s story could be
read as the opening of a dialogue around these questions, the judge-
ments levelled against her preclude the possibility of change in what
is deemed to be the “normal” operations of heterosexuality. The taint-
ing of Grace is a clear insistence that normative heterosexuality is
an inappropriate topic for ethical debate or political change. Grace’s
speech is therefore transformed from public testimony into unseemly
and malicious gossip. As I discuss below, these judgements function
to limit not only when women’s testimony may be considered politi-
cally valuable and necessary but also who is empowered to make that
determination.
216
T. Serisier
Conclusion
The time span discussed here has undeniably been a period of “height-
ened visibility” of sexual violence, driven by an upsurge in women’s
testimony (Alcoff 2018). This has produced repeated commentary
characterising this as a new age of “believing women” when the meg-
aphone of social media has enhanced the political power of women’s
speech. As I have shown, however, while this may be true under specific
circumstances for particular women, judgement and doubt continue
to characterise the responses to many women’s testimony of violence.
Judgements of women’s narratives are based on an interplay between
what they say and who they are. Following Gilmore, I argue that an
overarching framework of suspicion links the narratives discussed here,
including those which have been subject to belief and cultural celebra-
tion, to women’s testimony from earlier eras. This framework, and the
highly selective patterns of belief it engenders, helps to shape cultural
beliefs about the reality of sexual violence and the dangers of women’s
testimony. The “tainting” of individual women can be generalised to
other women, particularly women made vulnerable by racial, class or
other forms of social marginalisation. In concluding, I explore the links
between individual and collective forms of judgement and doubt.
In the context of a more generalised scepticism towards wom-
en’s narratives, even cases where women are believed can function to
authorise and normalise doubt. The examples studied in the first sec-
tion might all be thought of as “best-case scenarios” in the words of
Emily Doe (2016), in large part due to factors of external corrobora-
tion and meeting the criteria for “real” rape. Rather than indicating
a shift towards granting women adequate witness, these cases can be
used to deny accounts without these attributes, such as when Weide
argued that Dylan Farrow’s uncorroborated testimony against Allen
could not be considered in the same category as the multiple allega-
tions against Cosby and Weinstein. A journalist for the UK’s Guardian
newspaper similarly asserted that it was “wrong, lazy and dangerous”
to compare Allen to Cosby or Weinstein for precisely these reasons
(Shoard 2018).
217
The use of the word “dangerous” is instructive, as the danger of grant-

ing too much credence to too many women’s stories recurs in these
judgements. Belief, it seems, must remain selective and exceptional in
order to avoid the dangers of women’s testimony. Variations on this
logic are present in both Flanagan’s and Banfield’s judgements of Grace’s
narrative, discussed in the previous section. For Flanagan (2018),
Grace’s account, targeting a man of colour, indicts the entirety of “Me
Too”, revealing it to be little more than a vindictive “hit squad of privi-
leged young white women”. For Flanagan, Grace’s speech is particularly
appalling because of Ansari’s cultural position, as “the first exposure
many young Americans had to a Muslim man who was aspirational,
funny, immersed in the same culture that they are”, writing that, on the
“basis of intersectionality and all that” she thought that it would have
taken longer for this hit squad to “open fire on brown-skinned men”.
In an example of the logic critiqued by Crenshaw (1991), Flanagan pre-
sumes Grace and all the other women involved in the collective testi-
mony of “Me Too” to be white, erasing the movement’s origins among
women of colour (Santiago and Criss 2017). She also implicitly asserts
that racism is a problem faced solely by men such as Ansari and not
by women like Lupita Nyong’o, Aurora Perrineau or, possibly, Grace
herself. Flanagan invalidates women’s collective testimony at the same
moment as she centres whiteness, erasing the speech of women of col-
our and framing even Ansari’s cultural value solely in terms of his edu-
cative potential for, presumably white, “young Americans”, a category
from which he is implicitly excluded.
The interaction of whiteness and gendered judgements is echoed in
both Lena Dunham’s intervention against Aurora Perrineau’s speech
and Ashleigh Banfield’s critique of Grace. Dunham and Banfield, unlike
Flanagan, accuse Perrineau and Grace of tainting a movement which
they otherwise support. As Banfield says to Grace: “You have chiselled
away at a movement that I, along with all of my sisters in the work-
place, have been dreaming of for decades, a movement that has finally
changed an oversexed professional environment that I, too, have strug-
gled through at times over the last 30 years” (CNN 2018). In this move
of internal boundary-policing, Dunham and Banfield might be seen
as engaging in what bell hooks (1994) describes as a politics of white
218
T. Serisier
feminist entitlement by which privileged white women assert a natu-

ral ownership over feminism, relegating women of colour to a form of
marginal or provisional participation, despite their foundational role in
movements against gendered violence such as “Me Too”. This can result,
as here, in the preemptive judgement and jettisoning of stories told by
marginalised women, deeming them potential or actual risks to the cul-
tural credibility and acceptability of white women’s speech.
Taken together, the cases discussed here demonstrate the ways in
which selective judgements of women’s testimony remain culturally
ingrained, even in an era which has seen unprecedented levels of speech
about sexual violence. An analytical framework that ignores intersec-
tional questions can very easily reproduce long-standing social divisions
between “real” and “simple” rape and between the private harms associ-
ated with normative heterosexuality and the public harms of stereotypi-
cal violence. Such a process is inevitably one which sees more vulnerable
and marginal voices judged or denied, even in the rarefied realm of
high-profile celebrity politics.
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10
Testimonies in Limbo? Swedish News
Media’s Framing of Digital Campaigns
Against Sexual Violence
Lena Karlsson
For the past decade, in Sweden and internationally, a good number of

feminist campaigns have utilised social media to mobilise against sex-
ual violence in various ways: #prataomdet/talkaboutit, #everydaysexism,
#projectunbreakable, #aufschrei, to name but a few (Karlsson 2018a, b;
Mendes et al. 2019a, b; Wånggren 2016). However, the focus of this
chapter is not on the digital campaigns within a digital environment,
but on mainstream news media’s framing of the campaign initiatives
and the witness accounts they contain. In today’s sprawling media ecol-
ogy, it is inevitable that digitally initiated campaigns travel from social
media to other media platforms. To gain further political visibility and
support, the campaigns necessarily seek wide media attention, and some
campaigns attempt to orchestrate this journey to different media plat-
forms. Mainstream news media continue to play an important role in
their construal of social movements, and established mass media can
provide support and legitimacy. Feminist digital campaigns against
L. Karlsson (*) 
Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences,
e-mail: lena.karlsson@genus.lu.se
224
L. Karlsson
sexual violence frequently attempt to establish alternative ways of talk-

ing about it, but they still need established news media to get their mes-
sage across (Guha 2015; Darmon 2014). Yet, what lines of contention
from these campaigns do the mainstream media pick up? Are there
discrepancies between the self-identified goals of the campaigns as for-
mulated online and the ways in which they are presented by the main-
stream media?
The questions that I pose here concern the specific ways in which
three digitally initiated Swedish campaigns against sexual violence
during the years 2010–2013 were received by mainstream print news
media during the early stages of the campaigns.1 How are the stories
and voices accounting for sexual violence rendered legitimate and
important? When and how are the initiatives framed as reasonable and
worthy of support? Who is presented as speaking in the campaign, on
behalf of whom and for what change? How is the speaking subject con-
strued, as victim and/or agent for social change, or as “spectacle of suf-
fering”, which has been one of the most prominent media tropes in rape
representation in the mainstream media (Alcoff and Gray 1993)?
Tracing the situated variations in how the testimonies about sex-
ual violence and campaigns against it are represented by mainstream
media is of crucial importance, because testimonies necessarily start
out in limbo, in search of a listener and a context capable of hearing
the story that is being told. We need to better understand the variety of
ways in which narratives and victims of sexual violence are framed by
the mainstream media. As autobiography scholar Leigh Gilmore writes:
“Testimony moves […] in search of an adequate witness. An adequate
witness is one who will receive testimony without deforming it by
doubts, and without substituting different terms of value for the ones
offered by the witness herself ” (Gilmore 2017: 5).
Furthermore, as feminists we need to be wary of how sexual violence
is employed to define the boundaries of the nation, and close analyti-
cal attention must be paid to whose story is being validated and how
in the struggle against sexual violence. What kinds of femininities
and masculinities emerge in the representations of these campaigns?
10 Testimonies in Limbo? Swedish News Media’s Framing …
225
I adhere to Kathy Davis’ advice to feminist scholars in her reading of

the media coverage of the rape allegations against the IMF leader
Dominque Strauss Kahn:
The DSK affair show how issues are framed as ‘feminist’ in ways that con-
strain what gets talked about and what does not. It demonstrates how
feminist critique is embedded in national contexts, which may generate
in their turn a host of problematic assumptions requiring deconstruction.
For European feminists, this means that we need to be wary of mobilizing
discourses of cultural superiority when we examine issues around sexual
violence or gender justice. We need to explore the multiple mediations of
gender, class and ethnicity that occur in the ways issues are constructed
within and across national borders. (Davis 2012: 5)
My aim here is to investigate the ways in which news media frame the
campaigns and campaign testimonies in order understand how they
and their spokespeople gain political purchase, and who is presented as
affected by them.
The Campaigns
As online campaigns against sexual violence vary immensely in poli-
tics and tactics, I will begin by delineating the various campaigns and
the ways in which the spokespeople themselves represent them before
turning to analysing news media’s portrayal. The campaigns in focus
are #prataomdet/talkaboutit (initiated in December 2010), #fatta/getit
(initiated in May 2013) and #mörkertalet/theunreported (initiated in
December 2013). The campaigns share some commonalities, but vary
significantly in their politics, tactics and longevity.
Let me begin by accounting for some of the campaign commonali-
ties. In various ways, the campaigns speak back to mainstream media’s
routine depictions of rape. Several studies have identified how main-
stream news media perpetuate master narratives of rape. In their rape
coverage, news media tend to focus on: (1) the extraordinary rather
than the ordinary, i.e. attacks and gang rapes rather than acquaintance
226
L. Karlsson
rape, even though the latter is by far the most statistically prevalent;
(2) individual events, specific cases and the law rather than overarching
structures; (3) gender stereotypical portrayals of victims and perpetra-
tors that blame the victim and minimise the crime of the perpetrator
(Easteal et al. 2015; Nilsson 2019; Worthington 2008). In different
ways, all three campaigns speak back to these dominant master narra-
tives and create new modes of speaking about sexual violence (Karlsson
2018a, b). Furthermore, the motivating incidents behind all three cam-
paigns involve reactions against high-profile rape cases that did not lead
to conviction and the media’s representation of the cases. Concerning
#talkaboutit, the rape and sexual assault case in question were the accu-
sations, widely covered in the media, of the new media activist Julian
Assange in Stockholm, Sweden in August 2010. The two Swedish
women accusing Assange of coercion and rape were vilified in the media
in general and social media in particular. In various comments sections
online, the women were portrayed as unreliable, sexually willing, star-
struck groupies whose initial sexual consent rendered their reports of
subsequent coercion and rape unbelievable. In addition, the fact that
the reporting occurred several days after the assault added to the per-
ceived unreliability of the women filing complaints. Following the logic
of reverse victimology, the accused offender was portrayed as the vic-
tim (Harrington 2018). The #talkaboutit campaign initiator, the well-
known Swedish journalist Johanna Koljonen, published her first tweet
on the topic partly in solidarity with the women accusing Assange and
partly, spurred by the Assange case debates, as she sought to under-
stand her own experience of initial sexual consent turning into coercion.
By narrating her own grey-zone story online and in newspapers, she
encourages others to explore experiences of negative sex in the grey area
between consent and coercion (Koljonen 2010).
#getit was initiated as an immediate reaction to a verdict of acquittal
in the lower district court of an alleged gang-rape case that was dubbed
by the media the “bottle rape” because a wine bottle had been inserted
into the woman’s vagina. The #getit initiators, who belonged to differ-
ent feminist activist organisations, joined forces in reaction to both the
acquittal and the way it was represented. In interviews, one of the ini-
tiators, Nathalie Missaoui, relates that she was so strongly affected and
227
angered by the ways in which the local newspaper reported the case that
she felt she needed to act. On the same page as the rape coverage, the
local newspaper featured an ad for wine with a large picture and a cap-
tion speaking of “meaty aromas” (Wesslén 2013). #theunreported was
more loosely connected to a series of widely reported rape cases and
acquittals in 2013, most prominently the Tensta case, yet another gang
rape that garnered a lot of media attention and did not lead to a convic-
tion (Nilsson 2019).
The goals of these campaigns diverge. #talkaboutit strives to develop
discursive ground for the exploration of the grey areas between consent
and coercion. Although the starting point of the campaign is connected
to the Assange case, the sought-after changes relate to language, gender
and culture, the legal arena is not in focus. #getit, the most long-lived of
the campaigns (2013–present), has consistently summed up the goal of
the campaign as two-pronged: partly cultural, partly legal. At present,
in the autumn of 2018, the organisation is celebrating the enactment of
a consent-based law and presents the pursuit of consent, culturally and
legally, as its long-standing mission (Fatta 2018). The initiator of #the-
unreported also positions legal change at the heart of the campaign, yet
alongside this goal, as the campaign’s name itself signals, is the politics
of making visible the many unreported rape cases and providing sup-
port and companionship for survivors.
All three campaigns mobilise public opinion against sexual violence
through autobiographical personal accounts of experiences of non-
consensual sex. These accounts materialise as foundational for the cam-
paigns because they offer “life-story based evidence” that is important
for further political influence (Jolly and Jensen 2014: 11). However, the
campaigns diverge in how they solicit and disseminate autobiographical
accounts of sexual violence. The #talkaboutit campaign encourages oth-
ers to write about the grey zones they have experienced between consent
and coercion via tweets, blogs and longer pieces published in newspa-
pers and journals (Karlsson 2018a). A book collection of #talkaboutit
narratives was published in 2012 (Almestad and Beijbom 2012), and
narratives from the campaign have been used in public readings from
theatre stages across the nation. The first stories published by the ini-
tiator, Johanna Koljonen, encircle the area of concern and breathe life
228
L. Karlsson
into stories with similar lines of contention (see Karlsson 2018b). At

the very beginning of the #getit campaign, during the spring and sum-
mer of 2013, social media platforms were used to collect narratives of
non-consensual sex. This summoning of witness accounts about sex
that had not been on the narrator’s own terms contained no “exam-
ple narratives” from the initiators. The 150 witness accounts form the
basis for the rap song “fatta” released in September 2013. The organ-
isation has further used select narratives in manifestation read-alouds,
and a collection of the 150 witness accounts was handed to politicians
at the inauguration of the campaign. Thus, the call for witness accounts
within #getit was very broad, yet the representation and usage of these
narratives has been heavily orchestrated by the campaign organis-
ers. The autobiographical accounts are not publicly available, yet have
been much employed by #fatta spokespeople to mobilise against sexual
violence. In terms of media use and duration, #theunreported is the
most limited campaign. After an intense two weeks on #theunreported
Twitter stream, the campaign’s intensity gradually faded out. The initi-
ator, Martina Sundman, and several other #theunreported stream con-
tributors were interviewed by the mainstream media in late December
2013 and early January 2014, yet the narratives did not migrate to
other media to the extent of #talkaboutit or #getit.
The transmedia migration of the campaigns and witness accounts
rely greatly upon the structural positions of the initiators and their web
of connections, and thus upon cultural and social capital. With #getit,
two established feminist organisations joined forces, Femtastic and
Crossing Borders. The initiators tend to tone down the orchestrated
appearance of the campaign in interviews. One of the initiators, Ida
Östensson, states about the campaign’s media tactics in an interview:
“I’ve worked with agencies on other projects, but it wasn’t needed here.
This is bloody well as much grassroots work as possible. We don’t need
any experts; our own outstanding social media knowledge is enough for
traditional media to latch on” (Thomsen 2013). The two main initiators
behind #talkaboutit, Johanna Koljonen and Sofia Mirjamsdotter, are
both journalists. Their initial plan was for the campaign to largely con-
sist of longer autobiographical pieces published in journals and news-
papers, yet as soon as the hashtag was established, the Twitter stream
229
exploded with autobiographical narratives, support tweets and tweets

that discussed sexual violence in general. Thus, unexpectedly, the online
campaign preceded the print media campaign. A few days after the
establishment of the hashtag, longer autobiographical accounts were
published in more than twenty major Swedish newspapers and journals,
including Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Aftonbladet,
Etc., Bang, Amelia. In late autumn of 2011, the initiators were awarded
the Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism as innovators of the year.
Methodological Concerns
It is evident that, to gain political influence, these campaigns and their
witness accounts need to travel to established media outlets. Basic social
media coverage generates replicability, changeability and instant dis-
semination. Yet, both online and offline, genre shapes and bounds the
speech act. Genre shapes readers’ and writers’ expectations of how the
text should be approached, interpreted and evaluated. When I have
previously explored these digital campaigns (Karlsson 2018a, b), I have
drawn on Gibbs’ concept of “platform vernacular”. This concept high-
lights how specific hashtags, moving between different digital platforms,
produce certain narratives and suggests ways in which these should be
affectively approached, much like the concept of genre (see Gibbs et al.
2014 and also Mendes et al., 2019a). Platform vernaculars signal what
is sayable and hearable in a specific context and how the audience of
a speech act is to be imagined. The audience for these digitally initi-
ated campaigns is potentially unbounded. However, I agree with Rachel
Loney-Howes, who argues that digital spaces for feminist campaigns
generally foster the capacity and nurture the idea of “peer to peer wit-
nessing”, even though the online audience is potentially unbounded
(Loney-Howes 2018: 28). When the campaigns and their witness narra-
tives move from the digital arena to mainstream news media, the inter-
pretive frame of the platform vernacular meets the interpretive frames of
news media. In the move from the digital arena to news media, the nar-
ratives become uncoupled from their initial interpretive environment
and exposed to news media logic.
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L. Karlsson
In my previous research on #talkaboutit in particular, I have focused

on how new lines of contention around sexual violence were staked
out in the campaigns’ opening phase (Karlsson 2018a, b). Similarly,
I am interested here in the news media framing of the first weeks of
campaigning. Few campaigns succeed in garnering mainstream media
news attention after an initial phase of social media intensity. I have
employed the Swedish media archive search engine Retriever and
gathered the first month of all the print news articles, both local and
national, that mention the hashtags #talkaboutit, #theunreported
and #getit, starting with the first day of the campaign. The initial auto-
matic search had to be complemented by a manual close reading to
discard irrelevant articles because “fatta” (get it) and “mörkertalet” (the
unreported, the Swedish term for unreported crime in general) are com-
mon Swedish words. With #getit, I extended the search period because
the campaign first began to be established in late May 2013 but was
only officially launched in September 2013, with the release of the
#fatta song based on the witness narratives gathered during the summer
of 2013 and the publication of a debate article on 9 September (Fatta
2013). There was a subsequent manifestation outside the Riksdag,
where the collected witness narratives in booklet format were delivered
to political representatives. #talkaboutit was by far the most widely dis-
cussed campaign in print news media, followed by #getit, with #the-
unreported being the least-discussed campaign in news media. The
data set comprises some 50 articles pertaining to #getit, and slightly
fewer pertaining to #theunreported, while the data set concerning
#talkaboutit comprises approximately 400 articles. As the data set con-
cerning #talkaboutit is so extensive, I decided to focus on the headlines,
and the first days of reporting.
I exclusively focus on written material; the visual material is plenti-
ful and interesting but not within the bounds of this chapter. The data
has been manually coded for prominent themes. My analytical focus
has been on how the initiative is framed, focusing specifically on how
the agents behind the initiative and contributors to the campaigns are
presented, how quotes from the campaign’s digital witness material are
used, and who is presented as implicated by the campaign. I am guided
231
by frame analysis, which allows an investigation into the organisation

of the “patterns of selection, emphasis, interpretation, and exclusion”
(Caragee and Roefs 2004: 216) that are employed in representing the
campaign initiatives. News, as pointed out by Harrington, “largely
consists of reporting other people’s words” (Harrington 2018: 89). How
is this done? My analytical interest very much resides in the citational
politics that surface in print news media’s reporting of the campaigns.
As the campaigns are built around autobiographical accounts in r elation
to the campaign hashtags, I am very much interested in how the auto-
biographical stories are framed in the news reports. What accounts
are quoted? How do they get quoted, contextualised and authorised?
How are they paraphrased? When and how are other sources, such as
supporters, experts or statistics, represented?
What’s It About? Events of Speaking Out

The newsworthiness of the campaigns, particularly as framed by head-
lines, largely depends upon the numbers of people contributing online,
or the representation of the campaign initiators as agents for change,
rather than the problem of sexual violence in general, the shortcom-
ings of the law, or the specific ways in which the campaign highlights
the issue of sexual violence. The first reporting of #theunreported and
#talkaoboutit highlighted numbers, along with the digital platform for
speaking out.
Sexual assault or badgered sex? Thousands of stories are currently being

spread on Twitter through the #prataomdet hashtag. (Johansson 2010: n.p.)
On Twitter We Dare to Speak About It. (Wieselgren 2010: n.p.)
Hundreds speak of unreported rape. (Oldenburg 2013: n.p.)
Rape victims speak out on Twitter. (Sydsvenskan 2013: n.p.)
Hundreds bear witness to unreported rape – Martina started a revolt on
Twitter, spoke of assault. (Högström 2013: n.p)
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L. Karlsson
Twitter is most often mentioned in the headlines. At the time, it was

a rather new and much-lauded instrument for political mobilisation.
With #getit, witness accounts are not available to the public, either
online or in print format. Instead, the initiators as agents for change are
the centre of attention, as for instance, in the following headline: “Cleo
raises her voice for victims of rape – Campaign wants to change the law
with music” (Fredriksson 2013: n.p.).
Wary of news media logic, several campaign spokespeople routinely
include statements beginning with “this is not about” in media inter-
views. In particular, #talkaboutit spokespeople, in their desire to explore
the grey zones between consent and coercion, frequently state in media
interviews that the campaign is not about attack rapes, it is not about
attributing guilt, it is not about the victim, but about the categories of
both victim and perpetrator. Sofia Mirjamsdotter, one of the initiators
of #talkaboutit, declares in an interview just one day after the estab-
lishment of the hashtag: “I would like to make it clear that our con-
cern is not only about obvious assaults and rape. What we would like
to debate is rather badgered sex and all the situations when the sex has
not felt good” (Johansson 2010: n.p.). This mode of opening, beginning
with the negation of a routine framing of sexual violence, is frequently
used in the many opinion pieces and editorials about #talkaboutit; for
instance, “This is not a men-are-pigs callout” (Erlandson 2010: n.p.).
When it comes to #talkaboutit, the campaign that, of these three,
receives by far the most media attention, the news media genres in
which it is discussed are diverse: opinion pieces, editorials, news pieces,
feature articles. #getit and #theunreported are mostly discussed in news
pieces.
What’s the Source? The Politics of Citation

and Authorisation
In their key 1993 article, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray highlight the
many actors involved in any speech act, as well as the difficulties of get-
ting a proper hearing. Writing in the early 1990s, during the heyday
of therapeutically themed talk shows (for example; Geraldo, Sally Jessy
233
Raphael, The Oprah Winfrey Show ), Alcoff and Grey emphasise the dan-
gers involved when survivor stories are mediated before they reach the
public. One such tendency is to present survivor stories as “raw data” to
be handled by expert mediators, stripping “the survivor of her author-
ity and agency” (Alcoff and Gray 1993: 280). Furthermore, presenting
experiences as raw and real material reinforces their “shock value”. As
Alcoff and Gray write, “the media often use the presence of survivors
for shock value and to pander to a sadistic voyeurism” (1993: 262).
According to a still-dominant news media logic, sexual violence makes
“good copy” (Harrington 2018; Nilsson 2019).
Invariably, during the first few days of news media reporting of the
campaigns, when witness accounts containing elements of graphic sex-
ual violence are available from Twitter hashtag streams, these narra-
tives tend to be selected for quotation. The general gist of #talkaboutit
is to explore the grey zones between consent and coercion and also to
question absolute boundaries between victim and offender. However,
when news reports of the campaign first emerge, the victim experiences
quoted from the #talkaboutit Twitter stream contain few grey zones,
but only clear offenders and clear victims. On the eve of 16 December
2010, the same day as the #talkaboutit hashtag was established, a paper
reports that “if the hashtag was a competition for who has experienced
the worst sexual assaults, it would be impossible to award a winner”
(Hidden 2010: n.p.). The first written #talkaboutit report by SVT,
a Swedish television station, also published late on the first day of the
establishment of the hashtag, opens its news piece with the following
quote from the Twitter stream: “Once I was tied up and whipped with
a leather belt even when I cried and asked him to stop” (Modin 2010:
n.p.). Beginning with the newspaper publication of the initiator’s longer
autobiographical story of her own experiences of the grey zone two days
after the establishment of the hashtag (Koljonen 2010), with several
other longer pieces being published in other papers over the following
days, the news media practice of quoting experiences of graphic sexual
violence wanes. The longer autobiographical witness accounts offer less
clarity, fewer graphic details of the acts and more exploratory attempts
to make sense of negative sexual situations. Yet, for the two days during
which the campaign was at the height of its newsworthiness, the tweets
234
L. Karlsson
selected for newspaper publication tended to contain vivid descriptions

of violence.
The quoting of accounts of graphic sexual violence is even more prev-
alent in the news media coverage of #theunreported. In the Twitter
stream, the initiator solicits other survivors (the initiator’s preferred
term) with the following wording: “RT!! Survivors of #rape would you
like to show how great the number of unreported rape cases is RT!!”
(#theunreported Twitter stream 29 December 2010). A good number
of hashtag stream contributors follow that example, and simply write
that they have been raped but did not report it. As with other digital
campaigns against sexual violence (see Mendes et al. 2019a), the stream
comprises a wide variety of tweets: autobiographical accounts, emo-
tional support tweets, tweets from victim support organisations and
political commentary, along with tweets from trolls either trying to
diminish the witness narratives or attempting to give the accounts a rac-
ist slant by calling for the protection of “our women”. The Twitter for-
mat of 140 characters clearly limits what can be said. Yet, from the very
early life of #theunreported hashtag, survivors with no Twitter accounts
were invited to send their stories to the handle Godzilla Hårddiskzon’s
Ask Fm page. Ask Fm is a social network service mainly designed to
provide a platform for presenting yourself and asking questions of other
users. The handle Godzilla would use her Ask Fm page to enable sur-
vivors to post longer stories and would in turn publish screenshots of
these stories as images on Twitter. These stories tend to be descriptive
narratives of experienced assault situations. They are well represented in
the news reports. A news report in SVT Nyheter opens with images of
screen dumps from Ask Fm, along with the following witness account:
“The first time, I was eleven and playing in the yard at my aunt’s. He
was a friend of hers. The second time I was fifteen. He was my boy-
friend’s friend #theunreported” (Holmin 2013: n.p.).
As is evident, in particular during the early days of #theunreported
and #talkaboutit reporting, news media tends to select the occasional
autobiographical account with some dimension of shock value to exem-
plify the campaign. As the #getit narratives were collected online, but
never publicly disseminated, this news media practice is not possible in
the reporting of the #getit campaign. On the whole, #getit comes across
235
as a heavily orchestrated campaign. The initiators do not allow the wit-

ness accounts to become unmoored from the spokespeople’s framing.
The initiators speak of the difficulties involved in adequately represent-
ing the 150 stories as the #getit song takes form, but they know very
clearly what they want the song to accomplish:
The song should make people think of their own boundaries. In part we
want all people to get what consensual, mutual sex is; I know of lots of
people who have had sex that has not been ok. In part, we want poli-
ticians to make decisions leading to better rape legislation. (Granberg
2013: n.p.)
The lack of public witness material un-orchestrated by the organisers

has enabled the campaign to be extraordinarily consistent in its for-
mulation of what the campaign is about, and enables them to narrate
a five-steps-towards-success story in reaching the goal of consent-based
legislation in July 2018 (Fatta 2018).
#theunreported, the least orchestrated and shortest-lived of these
campaigns, stands out in yet another respect. The news reports about it
draw upon multiple sources, whereas the sources used to represent the
other campaigns are very few. The first short news article (198 words)
in the major Swedish evening tabloid Aftonbladet about #theunre-
ported refers to three sources (Aftonbladet 2013). One of them is the
initiator, Martina Sundman, who is granted one comment. The other
sources are statistics about non-reported rapes from BRÅ, The Swedish
National Council for Crime Prevention. However, the majority of the
article’s space goes to the expert commentator, professor of criminal law,
Madeleine Leijonhufvud, who gets to explain why the victims of rape
do not report it, and what is needed for the situation to change. It is
evident that the voice of #theunreported initiator Martina Sundman,
previously unknown to the general public, is considered to be in need of
support from other sources in order to constitute news. In contrast, in
the first report about the campaign #getit in the same evening tabloid,
Aftonbladet (436 words), the only source besides the campaign initiators
is a box of facts giving sex-crime statistics from The Swedish National
Council for Crime Prevention (Remius 2013). In this article, the
236
L. Karlsson
initiators explain the background of the initiative, the campaign’s efforts

and what changes they are pursuing. In the first Aftonbladet news arti-
cle about #talkaboutit (348 words), the initiator, Sofia Mirjamsdotter,
is interviewed and constitutes the sole source for the news article
(Utter 2010). When it comes to #talkaboutit, the launching of the dis-
cussion about grey zones constitutes the piece of news, and the initiators
are deemed sufficient sources.
In the next section, with careful consideration of intersectionality, I
will further analyse the ways in which speaking subjects are presented
as either marked or unmarked, as well as discussing how the newspapers
map the contours of concern for the initiatives. Who is implicated by
the initiative: I, you, we, them? Are the initiatives presented as majority
or minority concerns?
Generalisability and Specificity
Place is pivotal to narrative. “Stories usually begin by establishing a
setting, a time and place where events will unfold: ‘once upon a time,
in a land far way’”, as Francesca Polletta, scholar of narrative sociol-
ogy, states in her It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics
(2006: 9). Place has also been central in mass media reporting of sexual
violence. For at least the last two decades in Sweden, the mass media
has employed place names (suburbs, in particular) to signal the race
and class of victims and perpetrators (Nilsson this volume, see also
Andersson and Edgren 2018). Place has been central in construing sex-
ual violence as not really part of the nation, but stemming from else-
where and attacking the nation, through the naming of high-profile
rapes after the suburb in which they took place (e.g. Tensta, Rissne).
Following the reports of sexual assaults perpetrated by racialised Others
in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016, similar reports using a lan-
guage of racialised Others attacking the nation through the female
body have become a staple in contemporary Europe (Hemmings
2018; Keskinen 2018). Strikingly, place is seldom a feature of the
237
autobiographical accounts that form part of these campaigns, and,

I argue, it is further downplayed in the news media’s reporting of the
campaigns. It is only in the presentations of #theunreported’s initiator
and #theunreported campaign contributors that the place in which the
interviewee resides is even mentioned. In relation to #theunreported
mass media coverage, the place of the speaker is routinely coupled with
their age:
26-year-old Martina Sundman from Solna created the hashtag #theunre-

ported this Sunday. (Sydvik 2013: n.p.)
Camilla in Falkenberg is one of those who decided to write. (Buhren
2014: n.p.)
Eija Tuominen from Linköping is one of all the women who has chosen
to tweet about the sexual assault of which she was a victim as a young
woman. (Rehn 2014: n.p.)
In part, this presentation of age and place in relation to #theunreported

can be linked to the fact that neither the initiator nor the other contrib-
utors were previously known to the general public. Also, place is most
frequently mentioned in the more regional and local press in order to
present how the campaigns are relevant locally. For example, “Here in
Värmland, too, more people are pointing out that this [the severe under-
reporting of rape] is wrong” (Värmlands Folkblad 2014). In relation to
#getit, which saw its beginning in reaction to the “bottle rape” in Umeå,
and with two of the initiators residing in Umeå at the time, the first
news coverage of the #getit campaign appears in the local press, but the
campaign soon garners national coverage. In relation to #getit, the initi-
ators’ ages are almost never mentioned, and very rarely where they come
from, or any other characteristics to illustrate their structural location,
apart from their professional occupation as rap artist, etc. The initia-
tors, as activists and rap artists, are known in some circles, yet could not
be said to be of national renown. Nevertheless, their ages and locations
are rarely reported. In the coverage of #talkaboutit, location, age and
other social positions are foregrounded to an even lesser extent. With
#talkaboutit, one of the initiators, Johanna Koljonen, is a nationally
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L. Karlsson
known journalist and for most people requires no further presentation.

Yet, it is not only in relation to Koljonen that the presentation of the
campaign is ostensibly placeless, ageless and raceless, yet certainly not
genderless. “An assembly of women with Johanna Koljonen leading the
way are instigators of #talkaboutit – the Twitter hashtag that has taken
on enormous proportions” (Hidden 2010: n.p.). Gender surfaces as the
only category used to present campaign participants. Occasionally, the
news texts point out that not only women, but men as well, and in fact
both victims and perpetrators, are trying to make sense of the grey zone
in between consent and coercion under the umbrella #talkaboutit. “First
out was a journalist who earlier this week started to write about her own
experiences. Since then, it has grown to a network of almost 20 people,
mostly women, but also men” (Metro 2010). How can we understand
mainstream media’s representation of sexual violence as attached to oth-
erwise unmarked, binary female and male bodies?
It is evident that specifics beyond gender are not considered neces-
sary when presenting the #talkaboutit spokespeople. In her recent
article on the way in which #metoo grapples with the temporal in con-
nection with the nation, gender, race and sexuality, Clare Hemmings
draws upon Reina Lewis and states, “the racialised and colonized
woman can never represent gender, only in its modification, excess or
failure” (2018: 6). In contrast, the #talkaboutit spokespeople hail from
the privileged position of being plain men and women (read white,
middle-class professionals, mostly in their 30s) seeking change, and
are almost immediately presented as authoritative. Few expert voices
are invited into discuss the campaign and as such their concerns are
not presented as specific but generalisable and immediately worthy of
support. The #talkaboutit call for narratives is ostensibly very open:
anyone, victim/survivor or perpetrator, is invited to reflect upon the
boundaries between consent and coercion, even though most speak
from the victim end of the spectrum, and most speakers announce that
they are female. #talkaboutit gathered by far the most outspoken sup-
port from the newspapers early on and the distance created between
campaign spokespeople, the journalists reporting and readers is very
small. On 16 December 2010, the day of the establishment of the
hashtag, Nyheter 24 writes:
239
We support the project whole-heartedly and as readers you are more

than welcome to take part in the development here at Nyheter 24 and, of
course, also on Twitter. (Hidden)
The next day, 17 December 2010, Etc. publishes a column featuring the
following demonstrative support:
Spontaneously, so bloody hell, great.

And difficult. To break the silence. To tell of experiences that have
been pushed way down. Yet many are telling. Mostly women. But
also men.
Everyone ought to read.
And then start to talk, begin to reflect.
I am convinced it is needed.
As is clear in the quote above, the assimilation from “them” to “every-

one” and “I” is almost instantaneous in this early editorial piece. In par-
ticular, the headlines used to present the campaign announce that the
issue is important and that the campaign concerns everyone:
We need to speak of personal experiences. (SVT Nyheter 2010: n.p.)

On Twitter we dare to speak about it. (Wieselgren 2010: n.p.)
We have to talk about it. (Wahrén 2010: n.p.)
In part, the support given to #talkaboutit can be linked to the journalistic

network available to the initiators. But it also speaks of the almost instant
validation of some voices as knowledge makers and subjects who are
unmarked apart from gender. #talkaboutit is presented as a knowledge-
making campaign needing no experts, and neither are statistics employed
to ground the problem as presented by the spokespeople. The “raw mate-
rial”, the autobiographical narratives of grey zones, is seldom further cor-
roborated by voices outside the movement. Even though the initiators are
generally well-known, they are not presented as heroic doers in the same
240
L. Karlsson
way as the #getit spokespeople, but their concern is quickly established

as being everyone’s concern in a distinctive manner. In my material, this
dominant presentation of the campaign’s concern as relevant to everyone
is unique to #talkaboutit. #theunreported spokespeople are presented as
age- and location-specific unquestionable victims of sexual violence and,
through the citation politics employed to further corroborate the auto-
biographical material, their accounts are presented as needing to be fur-
ther framed and supported by experts and statistics, and the violence is
depicted as exceptionally stark in a manner that clearly rehearses some of
the established conventions of mass media reporting about rape and rape
victims (Worthington 2008; Alcoff and Gray 1993).
Concluding Discussion
The digitally initiated campaigns discussed here actively seek to dis-
seminate their message via different media platforms. In a shifting
media ecology, mainstream news media remains an important plat-
form for movements against sexual violence, being used to disseminate
and validate their message. Much is at stake when feminist initiatives
against sexual violence are reported in the mainstream media. Firstly,
a central tendency in contemporary Europe is for feminist politics to
be frequently co-opted by nationalist agendas. Secondly, campaigns
about sexual violence, both those discussed specifically here and gener-
ally, draw heavily on witness narratives in order to mobilise and pro-
vide evidence. The ways in which autobiographical narratives of sexual
violence are handled by the news media carry heavy implications for
whose reports of sexual violence are seen as valid and grounds for polit-
ical action and for mapping the breadth of the constituency of concern.
Speaking out, as Mardorossian argues, can be important in and of itself
as the “act of narrativizing itself … where victims feel empowered by
their vocalization of a narrative they know to be fluctuating and con-
fusing” (Mardorossian 2014: 65). Nevertheless, all speech acts takes
place in limbo, awaiting a receiver, and when the witness accounts of
241
the campaigns move away from their initial context of enunciation to

the news media context, they become unmoored and re-animated for a
new audience.
This chapter has traced the framing by print news media of three
Swedish campaigns against sexual violence between 2010 and 2013.
One of the campaigns, #getit, encourages and collects witness narratives
to form the basis for its politics, yet these narratives are not available
to the public. #getit stands out in the way in which the spokespeople
orchestrate the narrative; in the news articles, the spokespeople urging
others to get it are in focus as agents of change. Yet, the media’s focus
on the #getit campaign initiators suggests that the campaign’s concern is
not a majority concern but rather a project for the politically initiated.
By not allowing the media to re-frame or cite the collected witness nar-
ratives, the campaign prevents them from resorting to well-established
media tropes of innocent and deserving victims in their framing of
sexual assault (Nilsson 2019; Worthington 2008). I show how the news
media, mostly through their selection of narratives to quote, opts to cite
witness accounts involving spectacular violence, rather than the every-
day violence within relationships which all three campaigns are seeking
to showcase. Hence, even in their reporting of campaigns against sexual
violence, news media rely heavily on stereotypical portrayals of female
victims of sexual violence. In stark contrast, #talkaboutit soon becomes
established as a majority concern, partly due to its inclusive take on
exploring grey zones and the initiators’ established media contacts, but
also due to the ways in which the organisers are instantly rendered as
valid spokespeople for everyday sexual violence within the nation.
Note
1. All translations from Swedish to English have been made by chapter
author. As with all translations, this is not a straightforward activity as
some expressions are rather specific to the Swedish context while others
ring very similar to their English equivalents.
242
L. Karlsson
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Holmin, Maria. 2013. Hundratals vittnar om okända våldtäkter [Hundreds
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11
The Persistence of a Masculine Point
of View in Public Narratives About Rape
Nicola Gavey
At this time of unprecedented attention to sexual violence, a book on

the contemporary conditions for ‘telling and hearing’ (Andersson et al.,
Chapter 1) public narratives about rape could not be more timely.
While catalysed by ‘the MeToo moment’ over the past year, this time of
reckoning for sexual violence has been quietly brewing for decades, and
visibly fermenting in multiple sites over the past decade, particularly
since 2013. There is no question that what we are seeing represented
by MeToo is profound. The question is, whether the activism and chal-
lenges it poses can shift the obstinate conditions of possibility for sexual
harassment and violence. As Linda Martín Alcoff (2018) reminds us,
visibility in and of itself is not inherently and inevitably progressive. It is
complex, with ‘contradictory political repercussions’ (p. 26).
With chapters reporting from cultural and legal sites across Sweden,
Finland, the UK, Australia, and digital media sites that travel beyond
national borders, this collection offers a valuable record of rape’s highly
N. Gavey (*) 
School of Psychology, University of Auckland,
Auckland, New Zealand
e-mail: n.gavey@auckland.ac.nz
248
N. Gavey
contested place at this unique ‘historical juncture’ (Andersson et al.,

Chapter 1). In scratching beneath the surface of how our various societies
treat rape, the observations and analyses shared in this book reveal a deep-
seated cultural ambivalence. Law reforms to redress rape, policies to prevent
it, and grassroots activism to fight and refuse it, coexist with entrenched yet
not always visible psychosociocultural conditions that secure its place as a
practice that remains imaginable and do-able ‘in our modern world’.
For over thirty years I have been studying rape, yet I still get that raw,
sick, kicked-in-the-stomach feeling when I read or listen to people’s sto-
ries about their experiences of sexual violence and—especially, I think—
when I hear men’s (usually men’s) stories of justification for sexual
violence. What these feelings focus my attention on are the clear ways
in which rape is entangled with wider patterns of inequality and injus-
tice. Across the analyses discussed in this book, I noticed how frequently
public narratives about rape are still animated by a taken-for-granted
‘masculine point of view’1 that sets limits around what can be spoken
about rape, by whom, and how it will be heard. Relatedly, many of the
chapters highlight how rape—both as a physical act and as an imagined
threat—gets used to keep women in their place at the same time as it
gets used to protect racialized, classed, and other hierarchies among
men. The way that public narratives about rape so often privilege a mas-
culine point of view, and the way that rape is ‘mobilized’ (Pascoe and
Hollander 2016) to enforce gender and ethnic/racial hierarchies and
national borders are key pillars of rape culture that are exposed in this
book.
Narratives About Rape Through the Lens

of a ‘Masculine Point of View’
It is true that not all men rape, and it is also true that men are them-
selves subject to rape. At the same time, it is difficult to immerse oneself
in observing and thinking about the problem of rape without noticing
the signs of what Jan Jordan (2017) calls a ‘patriarchal footprint’—in
part, the legacy of the once explicit cultural belief that men are superior
11 The Persistence of a Masculine Point of View in Public …
249
to women. Reading this book over two straight days amplified the
cumulative impact of this footprint. I was struck by the repetitious-
ness of how rape narratives are refracted through the lens of a putative
masculine point of view. This is not a new insight. Women’s narratives
about rape have long been treated with suspicion and disbelief, and
overridden by men’s counter claims and cultural reflexes that privilege
their point of view. Yet it is nevertheless confronting to see this deep
epistemic bias still shaping what can be said about sexual violence and
how it can be said, as well as what counts as sexual violence and what it
means. Even though times have changed, with the voices of survivors,
activists, and women in general, all now prominent within public dis-
cussions of sexual violence, a masculine point of view still undergirds
prevailing narratives—even in cultural contexts that pride themselves on
a commitment to gender equality. This is something I think we know,
and yet still underplay.
In one particularly jarring example, Nilsson quotes an open letter from
one of a pair of Swedish ‘celebrities’ (p. 136) charged with gang raping
a woman in one of their homes in a privileged Stockholm neighbour-
hood. In this letter, published in a mainstream newspaper, he justifies
‘rough sex’ including ‘beatings and pulling the hair and stuff’, claiming
the woman who called this rape ‘enjoyed it’. In his defence he asserted:
I did not do anything wrong. I am not an evil person that attacks some-
one. It says in the court document that she had 46 injuries. That she had
cuts and bruises on the stomach, legs, arms, buttocks and head. Bleeding
from the scalp, sores in the vagina and fissures in the rectum. But the
district court weren’t fussed about O’s injuries, they could see that they
were part of the sex itself and that we were entitled to play rough. So we
were acquitted. […] So now we expect the court of appeal to reason the
same way. That they too think we are entitled to O’s body. Regards, J.
(Aftonbladet 24/5 2007). (Quoted in Nilsson, Chapter 6, p. 136)
Although, of course, there were critics of this trumpeting mascu-

line (hetero)sexual entitlement—his and his accomplice’s behaviour
were portrayed in the media as ‘reprehensible and detested’ (Nilsson,
Chapter 6)—this man’s overt defence of a masculine point of view was
250
N. Gavey
nevertheless reinforced through the courtroom verdict which at least

implicitly supported his version of events. It was also to some extent
normalized through its publication in mainstream media.
You don’t have to be a feminist to recognize the blatant misogyny
and mundane sexism in examples like this. But I was also struck by how
a masculine point of view is more subtly privileged in other contexts
where it is often almost invisible as it is woven into working notions of
reason, objectivity, neutrality, and so on. We know that justice through
the courts is unlikely for women who have been raped and sexually
abused. Edgren’s (Chapters 1 and 3) analysis of written court narratives
from Swedish rape trials highlights how subtle this undoing of wom-
en’s epistemic authority can be. She identifies the way courts tend to
treat women’s agency and vulnerability as opposing and incompatible
states (see also Lamb 1999). So, if a woman showed any sign of agency
around the time of the rape, such as consent to prior sexual activity,
she would likely not be seen as vulnerable enough to have been raped.
Smith (Chapter 4) discusses similar issues in English and Welsh rape tri-
als. However, at the same time she and Edgren both show how court-
room recognition of a woman’s vulnerability (prior to or as a result of
rape) is sometimes used against her to undermine the credibility of her
narrative (see also Gavey and Farley 2018).
Smith describes the case of a woman who was portrayed as delusional
because she was ‘damaged’. She had given evidence that her partner had
‘insisted on … sexual intercourse in front of their children’ (p. 80), and
that she had woken to find him penetrating her. The defence lawyer,
however, suggested to the jury that she was misinterpreting what was
going on:
Is this a case where she has assumed the worst? [She can’t be blamed if
so, because] she is a woman who carries a huge amount of baggage. We
all know the dangers of getting in a relationship with someone who has a
huge amount of baggage… (Quoted in Smith, Chapter 4, p. 80)
So clearly narrated from a masculine point of view, this lawyer’s patron-

izing, minimizing portrayal apparently persuaded the jury, who reached
a not guilty verdict. To underscore just how embedded, naturalized, and
251
therefore powerful, such a point of view is, Smith observed from her
study of 18 trials that prosecution lawyers failed to challenge gendered
narratives. Cases therefore can end up being fought on terms that are
stacked against believing the woman (see also Jordan 2004). While it
is difficult to know how widely this occurs, Smith found that although
racist and classist stereotypes were used to attempt to undermine
defendants’ credibility, they were challenged by defence lawyers in a way
that sexist stereotypes to undermine the credibility of a complainant’s
narrative were not (by other actors in the courtroom). Indeed, Smith
argued that ‘moral judgements against the defendant were portrayed
as irrelevant, while moral judgements about the complainant were pre-
sented as central to jury deliberations’ (p. 92). Relatedly, Waterhouse-
Watson (this volume) discusses the way a charge of racism was used
against a woman (whose ethnicity was unspecified) by a defence lawyer
in a high profile Australian rape trial, as the only plausible reason why a
woman would not consent to sex with an indigenous football player. In
these kinds of ways two elements of a masculine point of view shape the
triumphant narrative—an embedded sense of the naturalness of mascu-
line sexual entitlement as well as the implicit assumption that a woman
could extricate herself from an attempted rape (or ‘forceful sex’) if she
really wanted to. This is perhaps because most men imagining them-
selves in that situation would expect that is what they would be able to
do (even when in practice that is not always the case, Douglas 2016). As
such, a masculine point of view is inattentive to the force of gendered
power dynamics and gendered economies of fear and capacity.
In her intersectional feminist analysis of high profile celebrity cases
to examine the cultural politics of sexual violence, Serisier (this vol-
ume) reveals that optimistic claims that we are in ‘a new era’ of recep-
tivity towards women’s testimonies of sexual violence are premature.
Ironically, she argues, responses to the idea that this has been achieved
spark new forms of judgement against women telling their stories: ‘so
that women’s speech about violence is posed as possessing greater poten-
tial harm than the acts that it seeks to describe and expose’ (p. 212).
This is a familiar narrative, evocative of traditional warnings about the
dangers—from a masculine point of view—of false rape allegations,
dating back at least to seventeenth-century English Chief Justice, Sir
252
N. Gavey
Mathew Hale. No woman is immune to this suspicion, and the kind of

epistemic injustice it allows, but as Serisier and others show, it is applied
more fulsomely against women marginalized through racism, as well as
class-based, and other kinds of devaluation and discrimination.
Even in activist spaces, the narratives that women can tell about sex-
ual violence are to some extent shaped by narrow constructions of the
‘ideal victim’ as seen from a masculine point of view. In their analysis of
‘pain memes’ as one form of first-person narratives about rape shared on
online activist platforms, Mendes et al. (Chapter 8) noticed the absence
of details likely to invite victim-blaming (see also Salter 2013; Sills et al.
2016). For instance, in the hundreds of digital narratives of rape they
looked through none disclosed sexual violence in the context of sex
work.
Mobilizing Rape for Other Political Agendas

As well as the ongoing influence of a masculine point of view, several
chapters in this book highlight its connection to racialized, classed,
and other, prejudicial patterns of recognition and support for victims
of rape (as noted above). And, moreover, how rape—as a practice, as a
claim, and as a social problem—gets used in the service of other agen-
das (Karlsson, this volume). As a located phenomenon, this has long
been recognized. Black feminists in the United States, for instance, have
emphasized the history of racist patterns of response to rape, whereby
a dominant-cultural blind eye was turned to white men’s routine sex-
ual violation of black women at the same time as black men were
being lynched for raping white women—and even, in some cases,
for consensual sexual relations with white women (e.g., Davis 1978,
1990; Giddings 1985). In a stark demonstration of the fusing of white
supremacy (Freedman 2013) and patriarchy, the figure of the ‘black
rapist’ was mobilized by white Americans as a justification for ongo-
ing oppression of African Americans in the United States post-slavery.
Scholars and activists have also long observed how men’s systematic rape
of women during war and conflict functions as a tool to further nation-
alist and ethnic political agendas (e.g., Bergoffen 2012).
253
This kind of strategic mobilization of the issue of sexual violence

still happens in peacetime democratic societies, as illustrated within
several chapters in this book (see also Grewal 2017). For instance, in
a gang rape case in an underprivileged suburb outside of Stockholm,
news media stories were underwritten with portrayals of out-of-place
strangers—young men of immigrant descent—‘raping “our women”’
(Nilsson, Chapters 1 and 6). In Finland, publicity around new legis-
lation was intertwined with racialized portrayals of sexual harassment
(Niemi, this volume). After reports of sexual harassment during New
Year celebrations, attention was drawn to it ‘as a violation by immigrant
men against Finnish women in public places’ (p. 30)—circumstances
that led police to proactively encourage women to report. In such
cases, specificities of racial and cultural difference are identified as help-
ing make rape possible, with the effect of shoring up racial and cultural
hierarchies. While, at the same time, the gendered norms that provide a
cultural scaffolding for rape within dominant European (or ‘white’) cul-
tures have until very recently remained relatively invisible and immune
to critique.
Conclusion
Public narratives about rape are in motion in more ways than we
could have imagined, even two years ago. One of the threads running
through this book is the tension between optimism for where these
changes might lead, measured against caution given how partial and
selective they have been so far. Alcoff (2018) argues that beyond ‘get-
ting the word out’ about rape and sexual violence, we need to focus on
‘reforming and transforming the conditions of reception in the public
domains in which our words emerge’ (p. 24). This book illuminates
what some of these conditions currently are. We also need to trans-
form the conditions of possibility for sexual violence itself. This must
include recognizing the role of the patriarchal footprint (Jordan 2017),
and the persistent taken-for-grantedness of a masculine point of view
in legitimizing some narratives about rape while delegitimizing others—
notably those of women, children, and others who have been raped.
254
N. Gavey
As this book emphasizes, our critical lens must also recognize the racist
and other exclusions that shape whose stories about rape can be told,
heard, and believed. It must also be attentive to the synergies between
the patriarchal drivers of sexual violence and racist and other agendas in
the battles between men. My emphasis on the gendered underpinnings
of rape sits awkwardly with contemporary moves toward greater recog-
nition of men as victims of sexual violence. However, as I argue else-
where (Gavey 2019), a gender-neutral response to sexual violence that is
blind to its gendered scaffolding is not only insufficient for rising to this
challenge, but it obscures the underlying cultural conditions of possibil-
ity for rape against all people.
Note
1. By a masculine point of view, I mean the default way of understanding
a gendered interaction that arises from the normative vantage point of a
straight, able-bodied, cisgender man. It is a point of view that is shaped
by masculine capital (Gavey 2019)—with all the opportunities and
restrictions that provides—which such men carry around with them (in
different forms, and to different degrees) by default. It is important to
distinguish this cultural-level concept from the psychology of individual
men, who may or may not adopt a masculine point of view (and some
men obviously actively distance themselves from it). As a cultural con-
struct that shapes common sense notions of rationality, objectivity, law,
and so on, it provides a perspective that everyone, including women, are
encouraged to adopt.
References
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Index
A Allen, Woody 208–212, 216

abuse of power 9 Andersson, Ulrika 3, 10, 19,
adversarialism 73–75, 77, 89–91, 94 20, 37, 46, 51, 53, 55,
affect 6, 11, 54, 60, 75, 113, 122, 57, 58, 61, 102, 103, 105–
175, 180, 206 107, 112, 113, 123–125,
affective turn 177 130–132, 136, 236, 247,
age 6, 9, 11, 12, 18, 22, 25, 30, 31, 248
34, 36, 81, 107, 110, 112, Ansari, Azis 203, 212–215, 217
113, 129, 130, 135–139, 141, appeal court 25
142, 152, 153, 157, 158, 160, Arthur, Frank 6
162, 164, 165, 178, 181, 183, Australia 11, 147–153, 157, 163,
187, 191, 216, 237, 240 247, 251
agency 3, 7, 9, 12, 43–48, 50, 51, Australian Press Council 151
53–55, 58–65, 102–105, 112, authority 161, 184, 203, 210, 213,
173, 185, 233, 250 233, 238, 250
Ahmed, Sara 105, 122, 123, 125, autobiographical 8, 72, 173, 224,
127–129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 227–229, 231, 233, 234, 237,
177, 186, 191, 192 239, 240
Alcoff, Linda Martín 2, 5, 7, 102, autonomy 3, 46, 104, 105, 153,
104, 181, 186, 216, 224, 232, 160
233, 240, 247, 253
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 257

in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13852-3
258
Index
B coercion 2, 25–27, 33–35, 37, 59,

Baird, Barbara 130, 149, 150 109, 110, 214, 226, 227, 232,
Bar Code of Conduct 93 233, 238
Bar Standards Board 93 commodity 137, 191
belonging 27, 105, 114, 120, 122, consent 2, 3, 33, 35, 50, 53, 54, 59,
123, 125–127, 130–132, 61–63, 83, 87, 88, 95, 106,
134–137, 140, 141 153–162, 214, 226, 227, 232,
bitter woman 54, 58 233, 235, 238, 250, 251
blame 8, 9, 11, 48, 54, 60, 78, 88, continuum model 172
120–122, 130, 131, 133–135, Cosby, Bill 199, 202, 204–206, 211,
139–141, 149, 154, 163, 180, 216
206, 214, 226 court 1, 6–11, 22, 25, 26, 28,
body 11, 29, 33, 34, 37, 46, 49–51, 30–32, 34–37, 44–46, 48–61,
65, 102, 104, 113, 114, 63, 64, 73, 75, 76, 92, 94,
121–123, 125, 127, 128, 132, 102–114, 136, 148, 151, 152,
134, 136, 139, 141, 149, 173, 157, 160, 164–166, 173, 191,
178, 181, 182, 185, 205, 236, 205, 209, 226, 249, 250
238, 249 court reporting ethics 151
boundaries 3, 11, 48, 56, 60, 91, credibility 50, 56, 60, 71, 72, 76–78,
106, 120–123, 125, 128, 136, 89–91, 94, 155, 160, 182, 189,
137, 141, 205, 214, 215, 224, 203, 210, 212, 218, 250, 251
233, 235, 238 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 179, 203, 207,
Brooks, Peter 6, 45, 51, 61, 64, 111, 217
210 Criminal Law 10, 19–24, 27, 35, 37,
Brown, Grace 80, 89, 171 101, 103, 107, 235
cultural representation 72, 84–86,
91, 92, 94
C curation 7, 174, 176, 181, 183, 184,
celebrity 4, 133, 135–137, 207, 209, 189, 190
218, 249, 251
Christie, Niels 8, 87, 121, 127, 130,
132, 142 D
class 3, 5, 6, 10–12, 34, 48, 55, 57, Davis, Kathy 225, 252
58, 60, 64, 72, 73, 76–78, 82, disability 10, 18, 72, 73, 76, 77, 81,
84, 90–92, 94, 124, 125, 128, 82, 84, 89–91, 94
129, 131–133, 135, 136, 141, discourse 9, 20, 21, 24, 35, 36, 51,
142, 182, 191, 203, 216, 225, 52, 54, 58–64, 72, 102, 106,
236 121, 135, 149, 150, 187, 225
Index
259
discrimination 9, 18, 19, 21, 23, 28, force 2, 3, 5, 26, 30, 33, 35, 36, 46,
36, 149, 155, 161, 179, 252 49, 51, 62, 106, 155, 202,
disorientation 123 226, 251
District Court 21, 25, 30–34, 36, framing 43, 46, 61, 102, 103, 111,
48–51, 54, 60, 63, 64, 108, 114, 128, 162, 183, 209, 210,
109, 135, 136, 226, 249 217, 223, 230, 232, 235, 241
E G
Edgren, Monika 9, 10, 51, 53, 57, Gavey, Nicola 7, 9, 13, 54, 61, 63,
58, 60, 61, 102, 103, 105, 173, 182, 250, 254
107, 112, 123, 125, 130–132, gender equality 18, 22, 23, 28, 35,
136, 140, 191, 236, 250 44, 45, 53, 54, 135, 249
Ellison, Louise 74, 76, 80, 81 genre 2, 6, 7, 11, 124, 134, 151,
epistemic authority 250 229, 232
Estrich, Susan 8, 111, 130, 202 Gibbs, Martin 7, 172, 174, 175, 229
ethics 151, 165 Gilmore, Leigh 6, 8, 12, 56, 57, 60,
ethnicity 10, 11, 19, 30, 31, 36, 72, 63, 86, 120, 121, 130, 139,
73, 75, 85, 89, 90, 94, 124, 140, 200–203, 206, 208, 216,
125, 128–131, 133, 135, 141, 224
142, 191, 225, 251 Gilson, Erinne 46, 47, 51
European Convention of Human gray zone 56, 226, 227, 232, 233,
Rights 76 236, 238, 239, 241
F H
Farrow, Dylan 202, 208–211, 216 hashtag 4, 6, 228–234, 237, 238
#fatta/get it 215, 225, 228, 230, 241 helpless state 34, 35, 51, 53, 54, 60
femininity 9, 47, 52, 60, 76, 127, Hemmings, Clare 5, 129, 190, 236,
224 238
feminist ”he said, she said” 202, 203, 206,
activism 175, 204, 247, 248 208–210, 213
campaigns 172, 186, 223, 224, heteronormative/ivity 9, 10, 45, 51,
228, 229, 240 65, 111, 113, 114
movements 121, 223, 240 high-profile 12, 71, 149, 150, 200,
Finland 20, 21, 28, 31, 37, 247, 253 201, 204, 218, 226, 236
footballer 11, 147, 148, 150, 153, home 30, 52, 57, 73, 80, 105, 110,
155, 159, 164 112–114, 122, 123, 126,
260
Index
128–132, 134, 135, 138, 140, L

141, 159, 160, 249 Lacey, Nicola 3, 20, 46, 47, 63, 65,
hooks, bell 149, 150, 185, 217 104
hyper-medialised 119, 129 La France, Michelle 107
Lewis, Reina 238
liberal subject 64, 105
I lines 51, 57, 59, 65, 87, 103–105,
image 44, 51–53, 128, 129, 131, 122, 123, 131, 132, 140, 142,
133, 135, 136, 176, 181, 182, 153–156, 160, 162, 178, 224,
184, 185, 234 228, 230
Indigenous 11, 147, 148, 150, 153, in line 6, 122, 125, 129, 131,
154, 156, 158, 163, 164, 251 134, 139, 141
innocence 121, 130, 139, 141, 151, straight line 131, 132
157, 165, 180, 183, 184, 187 location 6, 7, 11, 31, 36, 60, 119,
inquisitorialism 73, 74 120, 125, 129, 130, 135, 140,
intersectionality 9, 11–13, 18, 28, 141, 187, 237
34–36, 45, 48, 55, 57, 58, 60, Loney-Howes, Rachel 4, 174, 178,
75, 77, 121, 128, 133, 135, 185, 186, 190, 191, 229
141, 142, 149, 150, 164, 166, Lovett, Andrew 147, 148, 157,
172, 175, 179, 180, 182, 200, 161–163
203, 217, 218, 236, 251 Lovett, Joanne 4, 44, 56
J M
Judd, Ashley 164, 206, 226 Marcus, Sharon 149, 173, 184
justice 2, 5, 10, 11, 73, 74, 90, 91, Mardorossian, Carine 4, 8, 9, 43, 44,
95, 150, 165, 191, 225, 250 46, 47, 60, 61, 65, 95, 103,
124, 130, 140, 173, 182, 186,
240
K masculine point of view 13, 248–253
Karlsson, Lena 12, 13, 56, 173, 191, masculinity 47, 51, 55, 59, 127, 132,
223, 226–230, 252 133, 154
Kelly, Liz 4, 21, 44, 56, 75, 172, Massey, Doreen 105, 122, 123, 125
173, 184 materiality 11, 172, 176, 181, 183,
Kohler-Riessman, Catherine 6, 48, 190
120 McKenzie-Mohr, Suzanne 5, 6, 8, 9,
Koljonen, Johanna 226–228, 233, 47, 54, 61, 62, 65, 72, 78, 88,
237, 238 107, 121, 130
Index
261
media N
digital media 247 narrative
mainstream media 12, 13, 182, agency 7, 12, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51,
224, 225, 228, 230, 238, 240, 53, 54, 58–64, 102–104, 112,
250 173, 185, 250
news media 11, 120, 141, criminology 2, 7
223–225, 229–234, 237, 240, digitised 172, 174–176, 187, 189
241, 253 framework 6, 7, 72, 121, 208,
print news media 224, 230, 231, 216
241 glue 6, 45, 46, 63, 210, 215
social media 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, master 7–12, 54, 72, 77, 78,
174–176, 199, 201, 203–205, 82–86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 107,
208, 212, 213, 216, 223, 226, 108, 121, 128, 129, 141, 225,
228–230 226
transmedia 228 negate/blame 8, 78, 88
Mendes, Kaitlynn 11, 172, 174, 175, normative 122, 150, 172, 174,
181, 186, 190, 191, 223, 229, 175, 214
234, 252 strategy 8, 54, 56–60, 62, 63, 91,
MeToo 4, 17, 18, 37, 101, 238, 247 151, 165, 183
minority ethnic 31, 75, 77, 86, 91, trauma 6, 9, 54, 60–62
94 nation 105, 129, 224, 227, 236,
Mirjamsdotter, Sofia 228, 232, 236 238, 241
Missaoui, Nathalie 226 Nilsson, Gabriella 11, 46, 54, 56,
moral geography 11, 119–122, 125, 102, 124, 128, 134, 226, 227,
126, 129, 131, 132, 138, 236, 241, 249, 253
140–142 No Means No 60, 154, 158, 199
Moran, Leslie 57, 105, 120, 127, non-ideal perpetrator 121
128, 130, 132, 134–137, 140 non-ideal victim 121
#mörkertalet/the unreported 12,
225, 227, 228, 230–232, 234,
235, 237, 240 O
movement 2, 4, 11, 44, 101, 119, offender 2, 6, 130, 226, 233
121, 122, 127, 131, 132, 141, orientation 18, 28, 122, 205
199, 209, 217, 218, 239 Östensson, Ida 228
myths 8, 10, 71, 85, 89, 120, the other 2, 10, 18, 36, 47, 52, 57, 86,
149–151, 165, 175, 182–184, 112, 114, 124, 129, 149, 164,
188–190 177, 190, 210, 217, 235, 237
262
Index
othering 76 post-racial era 160–162

outsider 120, 123, 134, 136, 137, 141 power 8–11, 17–22, 27–29, 31, 32,
34–37, 44, 46, 51, 52, 56, 60,
65, 72, 84, 102, 104, 105,
P 110, 112, 113, 119, 121, 122,
pain meme 11, 12, 172, 175, 176, 132–135, 137, 138, 140, 142,
178–182, 184, 187–192, 252 150, 164, 174, 181, 184, 185,
peer to peer witnessing 229 190, 199, 200, 203, 208, 211,
people of colour 11, 149, 161, 165 212, 216, 251
perpetrator 7–10, 25, 27, 30, 31, #prataomdet/talkaboutit 12, 223,
33–36, 44, 53–55, 64, 77, 225–228, 230–234, 236–241
106, 110–113, 120–128, 130, privilege 7, 90, 174, 179, 180, 248,
133, 134, 142, 149, 151, 165, 249
184, 226, 232, 236, 238 Project Unbreakable 12, 171, 172,
phallocentric 10, 109, 112–114 176, 180, 181, 183–185, 188,
Phipps, Alison 76, 83 190
place 8, 10, 12, 13, 18, 20–22, Puwar, Nirmal 122, 123, 127–129,
26–28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 45, 131, 132, 134, 137–141
47, 49, 52–55, 57, 58, 64, 74,
89, 94, 102–106, 109–114,
120, 122, 123, 125, 127–132, R
134–139, 141, 151, 182, 183, racism
202, 209, 210, 213, 215, 236, race 147–149, 152–154, 156,
237, 240, 248, 253 157, 160–162, 164–166
in place 28, 75, 122, 127, 129, race card 147, 149, 152, 153,
131, 132, 134–137, 141 160–162, 165, 166
out of place 105, 120, 122, 123, racist stereotypes 147, 152, 162
127, 129, 131, 132, 134, reverse racism 157, 161
136–138, 141 rape
platform 6, 7, 11, 12, 172, 174–177, cases 10, 11, 33, 35, 37, 44, 54,
190, 191, 223, 228, 229, 231, 57, 58, 61, 101–103, 107,
234, 240, 252 108, 111, 112, 114, 119, 129,
affordance 2, 174, 175 134, 150, 161, 184, 191, 211,
vernacular 7, 11, 172, 174, 175, 226, 227, 234, 253
178, 181, 184, 190, 229 culture 172, 180, 189, 248
Plummer, Ken 6, 54 gang rape 54, 119, 124, 125, 129,
Polletta, Francesca 236 150, 225–227, 253
Index
263
legislation 2, 10, 44, 102, 106, integrity 3, 46, 51, 56, 60, 140
235 sexuality 5, 10, 12, 46, 51, 52,
myth 8, 10, 71, 75, 85, 89, 94, 58, 61, 64, 83, 105, 106,
155, 159, 189 111–114, 137, 140, 182, 191,
narratives 1, 2, 6–13, 45, 46, 53, 203, 238
58, 64, 77, 78, 88, 102, 104, violence 1–8, 10–13, 18, 19,
105, 112, 120, 121, 128, 129, 22, 33, 37, 45, 48, 52, 55,
132, 139–141, 172, 174–176, 58, 65, 71, 85, 89, 119, 121,
180, 182, 184, 187, 189–191, 129, 130, 140, 147, 148, 150,
199, 225, 247–249, 252, 253 151, 157, 160, 166, 172–174,
real rape 8, 9, 12, 94, 130, 182, 177, 181, 186–191, 199–206,
202, 205, 206, 214, 216, 218 208, 210–212, 214–216, 218,
representation 6, 85, 94, 127, 223–234, 236, 238, 240, 241,
129, 182, 190, 224, 226 247–249, 251–254
simple rape 8, 12, 202, 218 Shields, Stephanie 78
trial 10, 73, 75–77, 94, 149, 165, Skeggs, Beverly 57, 76, 83, 89, 92,
250, 251 120, 127, 128, 130, 132,
rationality 3, 46, 78, 90, 91, 104 134–137, 140
Rationalist Tradition 90 Smith, Olivia 5, 6, 10, 71, 76, 77,
Ringrose, Jessica 11, 175, 176, 189, 89, 91, 120, 206, 250, 251
223 social class 10, 55, 58, 60, 72, 73,
robust agency 46, 51, 53, 54, 58, 64 76, 78, 82, 83, 89, 90, 94
Russell-Brown, Katheryn 149 social norms 3, 180
socio-narratology 6
space 7–11, 22, 45, 51, 60, 64, 105,
S 120–123, 125, 127, 128,
Serisier, Tanya 12, 108, 251, 252 130–132, 134–137, 139, 141,
sexism 147, 148, 152, 158, 160, 149, 150, 172, 174, 175, 177,
162, 164, 165, 250, 251 182, 188, 189, 191, 202, 210,
sexist stereotypes 147, 152, 160, 229, 235, 252
251 space invader 123, 127, 128, 134,
sexual 137, 139, 141
assault 21, 25–27, 30, 77, 101, spatial dimension 11
104, 108, 147, 149, 151, 159, speaking out 2, 231, 240
178, 179, 184, 190, 199, 202, speech act 181, 229, 232, 240
212, 213, 226, 231, 233, 236, the Stanford swimmer 204
237, 241 stereotype/s 11, 75, 76, 81, 92, 93,
harassment 4, 9, 17–25, 27–30, 120, 147, 149, 151, 152, 155,
34–37, 213, 247, 253 160, 162–166, 251
264
Index
the stranger 125, 127–129, 141 U

structural condition 43 United Kingdom 4, 71, 73, 149,
sub judice 148 213, 216, 247
suburb 51, 119, 124–128, 132–134, United States of America 4, 18, 74,
136, 141, 236, 253 149, 201, 252
Sundman, Martina 228, 235, 237 UN Special Rapporteur 44, 55
Supreme Court 10, 11, 25, 26, 48,
51, 53, 54, 103, 104, 106,
107, 109–112, 114, 148 V
survivor 95, 180, 184–188, 204, victim
213, 227, 233, 234, 249 ideal 8, 9, 65, 87, 130, 132, 141,
Sweden 2, 4, 10, 19, 44–48, 53–56, 252
64, 65, 102, 106, 119, 121, reverse victim 157, 226
126, 223, 226, 236, 247 victim/perpetrator 7, 10, 30, 31,
The Swedish National Council for 33, 34, 36, 120, 122, 149,
Crime Prevention (BRÅ) 55, 226, 236, 238
235 victim blaming 8, 11, 135, 151,
164, 165, 174, 179, 180, 189,
191, 206, 209
T victimisation 8, 9, 65, 87, 157
taintedness 121 worthy 9, 182, 238
tainted witness 8, 12, 56, 200 vulnerability 3, 7, 10, 43–56, 58–61,
Take back the night 199 63–65, 80, 102–106, 111,
technological affordance 2 112, 114, 130, 207, 250
testimony 31, 32, 49, 52, 56, 59, 60,
62, 63, 76, 82, 153, 156–160,
165, 200–205, 208, 210, 211, W
213, 215–218, 224 Wales 4, 10, 44, 73, 74, 76, 77, 88
trauma 60, 63, 65, 76, 79, 90, 105, Waterhouse-Watson, Deb 120, 148,
154, 183 150, 151, 153, 155, 251
trauma repertoire 63 Weinstein, Harvey 202, 204–208,
trope 162, 179, 184, 189, 191, 202, 211, 216
203, 210, 224, 241 white guilt 161
Turner, Brock 204 Who needs feminism 12, 171, 172,
Twitter 4, 228, 231–234, 238, 239 176, 180, 181, 186, 188, 190
Index
265
Wigmore, John 77, 84 Women of colour 179, 186, 203,

Witness/ing 5, 6, 8, 12, 45, 48, 52, 207, 217, 218
56, 57, 60, 62, 64, 72–77, 81,
84, 93, 94, 107–109, 148,
162, 178, 181, 200, 202, 204, Y
205, 210, 213, 216, 223, 224, YouTube 172, 176–181, 184, 185,
228–235, 240, 241 187, 188, 190, 191

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

More information about this series at

Lena Karlsson Gabriella Nilsson

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932125

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Cover illustration: GettyImages-915937214

1 Introductory Chapter: Rape Narratives in Motion 1

2 Excluding Power from a Narrative: Sexual Harassment

3 Conditional Vulnerability: Rape Narratives in Swedish

4 Narratives, Credibility and Adversarial Justice

5 The Visible Vagina: Swedish Legal Narratives About

6 Narrating the Moral Geography of Rape in Swedish

7 Who Is the “Real” Victim? Race and Gender

8 Digitised Narratives of Rape: Disclosing Sexual

9 A New Age of Believing Women? Judging Rape

10 Testimonies in Limbo? Swedish News Media’s Framing

11 The Persistence of a Masculine Point of View in Public

Ulrika Andersson is an Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the

Nicola Gavey is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University

sexualized media cultures, and activating gender and sexual equity in

This book investigates the contemporary processes involved in the telling

Thus, the present is characterised in many ways by the increased vis-

A Narrative Approach to Sexual Violence

Narratives and storytelling play a prominent role both in the lives of

victim’s vulnerability, privileges an individualising view of sexual vio-

can be viewed as both the cause and consequence of power structures

Chapter Overviews—From the Legal Realm

Monika Edgren argues that Sweden, with its international reputa-

through pain memes circulating through the campaigns “Who Needs

Karlsson thus provides an intersectional analysis of mainstream media’s

Bumiller, Kristin. 2008. In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated

McLean, Kate C., Jennifer P. Lilgendahl, Chelsea Fordham, Elizabeth Alpert,

ethnicity (Dir 2000/43/EU) is defined as discrimination. However, the

unwarranted optimism in the possibilities of criminal law (Smart 1995;

Theory, Method and Data

As a counter-argument to introducing sexual harassment into crim-

for this analysis. By November 2017, there was a total of 65 verdicts.

The Legislative Process

The idea of introducing the criminal offence of sexual harassment was

problem that should be counteracted, nor was any statistical informa-

In this Act sexual harassment means verbal, nonverbal or physical

In a criminalisation like this, the formulation of the legal provision pre-

…the forms of harassment that do not violate sexual self-determination

Somewhat paradoxically in the light of the legality and ultima ratio

This legal reasoning is problematic at best, and I would argue that it

In discussing verbal harassment, the Bill lined up a whole set of

…because of the internal coherence of the criminal justice system. It

The Bill found that there is a lack of protection concerning occasional

possibility of gendered power relations is downplayed by the gender-

It can be estimated that the accentuating of the integrity and self-

Intersectionality is not mentioned in the Bill; thus, the phrase “other

The Parliamentary Committees

The Constitutional Committee of Parliament plays a predominant

Committee discusses the constitutional principles that may limit the

Concluding on the Legislative Process

The legislative work includes several paradoxes. They underline the

…the deeds should have a certain intensity. It would be stroking,

A Narrative Approach to Sexual Violence

Theory, Method and Data

Concluding on the Legislative Process

Rape, Vulnerability, and Agency:

Case Selection and the Narrative Approach

Narratives of Female Vulnerability

From Weak Victim to Robust Agency and Back Again

From Robust Agency to Vulnerable Victim

Notions of Mutuality Construct Liberal Agency

The English and Welsh Criminal Justice System

(In)Equality in the English and Welsh Justice System

Trial Narratives and Credibility