Risk, propriety, and sexual assault

2009 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Diana Young
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Closed System ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Risk Theory ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Canadian Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Site ◽  
Traditional Norms

- Legal theorists often conceive of the law as a closed system of reasoning, and as the central mechanism through which the uses of power are conferred and circumscribed. However, social theory challenges this conception of law by telling us that a great deal of power is non-juridical in nature, operating through discursive practices that define and normalize conduct. This raises doubts as to whether juridical power can be used to achieve social transformation. Risk theory uncovers discursive practices that operate as non-juridical sites of power, by showing how risk analyses normalize contingent values through the use of value-neutral terms of statistical probabilities. For example, feminist criminologists, drawing on risk theory, have shown us how risk discourses can be used to reinforce traditional norms of femininity, particularly by responsibilizing women for minimizing the risk of sexual assault. Using an example from the Canadian law of sexual assault, this paper considers whether the law inevitably reproduces the very discourses of femininity that many law reformers are trying to disrupt, or whether it might act as a site wherein these discourses may be challenged.

Genital Call and Genitals on Trial: by Giegold & Weiß (nGbK, 2014)

Screen Bodies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-91
Author(s):  
Karen Fiss
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Male Student ◽  
The Other ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The Law ◽  
Affirmative Consent

In California, where I live, an affirmative consent law was recently passed: often referred to as the “yes means yes” standard for sexual assault, it is now required of all colleges receiving state funds. Supporters of the law argue that campus rapists can no longer be exonerated because their victims did not resist or were incapacitated by fear, shame, or intoxication. On the other side of the country, a student at Columbia University became an icon in this ongoing legal struggle by carrying her mattress around with her everywhere, including to her graduation, as a sign of protest against the university’s refusal to expel the male student who raped her.

Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon

differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-160
Author(s):  
Erin A. Spampinato
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Criminal Conduct ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
As If ◽  
Physical Outcomes

This essay identifies what the author terms “adjudicative reading,” a tendency in literary criticism to read novels depicting sexual violence as if in a court of law. Adjudicative reading tracks characters’ motivations and the physical outcomes of their actions as if novels can offer evidence, or lack thereof, of criminal conduct. This legalistic style of criticism not only ignores the fictionality of incidences of rape in novels, but it replicates the prejudices inherent in historical rape law by centering the experiences of the accused character over and against the harm caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than creating a hierarchy of sexual assault, as current legal conceptions tend to do).

scholarly journals Contemporary moral philosophy in the context of the social transformation

2002 ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Dobrijevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Practical Relevance ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Selective Bibliography

The article contains an explanation of the topic to be dealt with by the author within the work on the project 'Applying Modern Philosophical-Political Paradigms on Processes of Social Transformation in Serbia/FRJ'' of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory. In the first part of the paper the basic conception of the work as well as theoretical and practical relevance of the proposed topic are presented. In the second part, author emphasis the weight of the 'two-level theory' of moral thinking, which was elaborated by Richard Mervyn Hare, utilitarian philosopher. In the third part, the plan and the content of the forthcoming work are outlined. Basic and selective bibliography which author will be rely on in the elaboration of the proposed topic is given at the end of this article.

scholarly journals Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: methodological discussions on the role of language in social transformation

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter E Jones ◽  
Maria Cecília C Magalhães
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
A Site ◽  
Transformative Activist Stance

ABSTRACT This paper offers a Marxist grounding for a liberatory, critical-collaboratory dialogic praxis in educational contexts and examines the implications of such praxis for an understanding of the potential role of the school as a site of critical thinking. Aligning with Stetsenko’s ‘Transformative-Activist Stance’, the discussion centres on clarifying the methodological rationale for approaching language as a means of cultural action and social transformation based on Marx’s materialist conception of history and the educationally based dialogical approaches of Vygotsky and Freire.

scholarly journals A Choice among Values: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives on the Defence of Necessity

1969 ◽  
pp. 848 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
A Value ◽  
Canadian Law ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Way

The author explores various theoretical approaches to the defence of necessity, rejecting both excusatory conceptions of the defence and those based on the notion of moral involuntariness. Rather, the author argues that necessity is properly understood as a justificatory defence based on a lack of moral blameworthiness. After extensively surveying the history of the defence in Canadian law, the author critiques the way in which the Supreme Court of Canada has restricted the defence. He contrasts the current Canadian approach with the treatment of the defence in other jurisdictions and concludes that Canadian law would be served best by a robust defence of necessity, which would acknowledge that, in some circumstances, pursuit of a value of greater worth than the value of adherence to the law can be justified.

Urban Transformation in Ancient Molise

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Global Movements ◽  
Social War ◽  
A Site ◽  
Cultural Choices

This book uses all the available evidence to create a site biography of Larinum from 400 bce to 100 ce, with a focus on the urban transformation that occurs there during the Roman conquest. Larinum, a pre-Roman town in the modern region of Molise, undergoes a unique transition from independence to municipal status when it receives Roman citizenship in the 80s bce shortly after the Social War. Its trajectory illuminates complex processes of cultural, social, and political change associated with the Roman conquest throughout the Italian peninsula in the first millennium bce. This work highlights the importance of local isolated variability in studies of the Roman conquest and provides a narrative that supplements larger works on this theme. Through a focus on local-level agency, it demonstrates strong local continuity in Larinum and its surrounding territory. This continuity is the key to Larinum’s transition into the Roman state, which is spearheaded by the local elites. They participate in the broader cultural choices of the Hellenistic koiné and strive to be part of a Mediterranean-wide dialog that, over time, will come to be dominated by Rome. The case is made for advancing the field of Roman conquest studies under a new paradigm of social transformation that focuses on a history of gradual change, continuity, connectivity, and local isolated variability that is contingent on highly specific issues rather than global movements.

The Legal Enforcement of Integrity

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Stuart P. Green
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Political System ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Legal Enforcement ◽  
The Law

Talk of “integrity” is ubiquitous in law and legal discourse: Protecting the integrity of our political system has been cited as a basis for anti-corruption laws; preserving the integrity of the legal profession as a principle underlying the rules of lawyer ethics; ensuring integrity in policing and in the wider criminal justice system as a justification for excluding evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution; and protecting bodily integrity as a potential goal for the law of rape and sexual assault. This chapter examines what integrity means in each of these contexts, what these uses have in common, and whether thinking about these various rules and doctrines in terms of integrity rather than other moral concepts leads to any practical difference in outcome. It also asks what the examination of integrity in the law can tell us about the concept of integrity in other contexts.

scholarly journals ‘Endlessly Valuable’ Discursive Work—Intimate Partner Femicide, an English Case Study

Laws ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howe
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Site

Against the trend of roll-backs of pro-feminist initiatives by right-wing governments, feminist-led reforms to the law of murder deserve accolades as hard-fought feminist victories. For three decades, feminist analysts have critiqued the operation of provocation defences in intimate partner femicide cases. Their work has been rewarded with the implementation of reforms in several anglophone jurisdictions that have abolished or curtailed that defence. This article focuses on the revolutionary impact of the reform implemented in England and Wales. It argues for the continuing purchase for feminist legal scholars of a methodology championed by Carol Smart in her seminal 1989 text, Feminism and the Power of Law. She counselled feminist law scholars to read law as a site for contesting law’s truth about gendered relationships. This methodology has not only been critical in exposing the misogyny and injustice embedded in traditional provocation by infidelity defences; it also enables researchers to chart shifts in law’s discursive constitution of truth in the post-reform era.

Colonization through Disclosure: Confidential Records, Sexual Assault Complainants and Canadian Law

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Gotell
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legislative Reform ◽  
Canadian Experience ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Canadian Law ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Relative Status

This article explores the Canadian experience of widened access to sexual assault complainants' private records. It dissects legal developments from the mid-1990s, when the Canadian Supreme Court established a liberalized disclosure regime in the landmark O'Connor decision. A legislative reform passed in 1997 that sought to establish a stricter regime was recently upheld and at the same time weakened by the Supreme Court in Mills. The article contends that access to complainants' records stands as a critical example of how a liberal legalistic discourse of sexual assault is extending its hegemony by colonizing and silencing, in particular, feminist and therapeutic discourses. At issue is the relative status of legal 'Truth' and dissonant and emergent feminist narratives, as well as our ability to understand and speak about sexual violation outside of the narrow confines of law.

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