Victims and villains: how the judicial discourse represents the participants of a rape crime

Abstract

The way women victim of rape are treated by the legal system is seen by many scholars as harsh and discriminatory, being sometimes compared to a “reproduction of gender violence” (PIMENTEL e PANDJIARJIAN 2000), or to a “double rape” (ADLER 1987). The present article explores a specific dimension of this “double rape”:  the discourse used by appeal decisions on cases of rape. The study aims to investigate how the linguistic and discursive structures present in appeal decisions contribute to the reproduction of gender violence observed in rape trials and legal decisions. The data analysis indicates that appeal decisions on rape cases depict the event and its participants in distinct ways, depending on how the sexual attack is described and categorized by the appeal judges. This classification system reflects and constructs a host of sexual myths and ideological assumptions about how men and women behave and relate to one another, and determines the distribution of guilt, discipline and punishment, and who is cast into the roles of “victim” and “villain”. The results of this investigation are relevant to the broad area of applied linguistics, particularly to the field of legal discourse, an area which is rapidly increasing internationally but which as yet presents few research studies and publications in Brazil.