Sense and Sensibilities: A Feminist Critique of Legal Interventions against Sexual Violence

Abstract

Feminists have spent decades trying to reform laws and evidential procedures relating to sexual assault. Using the current Scottish context as a case study, I will argue that while efforts to reform the text of the substantive as well as evidential and procedural aspects of the law have been largely successful, in practice the impact of these reforms has not always been felt. Drawing on contemporary examples from Scotland, and setting these within the broader context of similar problems and arguments in other jurisdictions such as England and Wales, Australia and Canada, I will examine the ways in which the ‘laws on the books’ have not always translated smoothly through to ‘law in action’. The aim is to highlight an ongoing failure on the part of those charged with applying the law (judges, legal professionals, juries) to do so appropriately, raising the question of whether it makes sense for feminist scholars to try to engage with what seems like the entrenched ‘sensibilities’ of criminal law. It may well be that the contemporary battle ground is not over legal territory as such, but over whose voices are heard in public debates on sexual violence. Ultimately, I argue that our all too frequent failures to punish sexual violence in a meaningful way suggests that we need to think again about how we deal with issues of sexual violence in contemporary society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.