Hearing All That Is Expressed: A Feminist Listening to the Silencing of Rape Complainants While Giving Evidence
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Authors
Benton-Greig, Paulette
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Item type
Journal Article
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SAGE Publications
Abstract
In this article, I bring a feminist ear to 30 Aotearoa/New Zealand rape trials to explore what they reveal about courtroom listening to adult female complainants. Listening for all complainant expression exposes myriad instantiations of complainants being silenced and misheard, and their words refused, dismissed and reframed. From these, I identify three practices of silencing that demonstrate not only a failure to hear and listen, but also the double abandonment of ‘ethical loneliness’ in which institutions that are meant to hear and care, force speech under the guise of listening, but then fail to respond and to protect. This feminist listening draws attention to the ethical and social dimensions of why many rape complainants experience giving evidence at trial as re-victimising. I argue that it suggests the potential benefits of in-court observation programmes and that the practices of rape trial questioning need close examination and reform.Description
Keywords
1602 Criminology, 1608 Sociology, 1801 Law, Criminology, 4402 Criminology, 4803 International and comparative law, 4804 Law in context
Source
Social & Legal Studies, ISSN: 0964-6639 (Print); 1461-7390 (Online), SAGE Publications. doi: 10.1177/09646639251357420
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© The Author(s) 2025. Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).