Counternarratives in Rape Trials: Reshaping Legal Perspectives on Consent

The ArgLab Open Seminar heartily invites everyone to a talk by Eleonora Vlota (IFILNOVA).

Abstract

The “real rape” narrative — which portrays rape as a violent assault by a stranger, resisted physically and reported immediately — continues to shape legal understandings of sexual violence despite overwhelming empirical evidence that most rapes do not conform to this pattern. As a result, acquaintance rape and other forms of sexual violence that depart from this script are especially vulnerable to misinterpretation and disbelief. Institutional responses have largely relied on procedural reforms, including jury instructions, expert testimony on rape myths, specialized prosecutors, evidentiary rules, and victim-support measures. Yet, as Yvette Russell (2018) argues, while such measures may reduce bias, they leave intact the dominant logos through which rape is understood, and women are still required to articulate the harm of rape within forms of legal reasoning that fail to recognize their subjectivity.

Building on this insight, I argue that the problem is not simply conceptual but perspectival. Legal concepts such as ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’ can be reformulated while continuing to operate within the same interpretive logic, because the force of rape myths lies not only in what they claim but also in the perspectives they prescribe for interpreting facts, agency, and credibility. Reforming legal concepts is therefore insufficient unless the interpretive perspectives through which they acquire meaning are themselves transformed.

I argue that counternarratives provide precisely such alternative perspectives. Understood as narratives that resist socially shared stories legitimizing the oppression of marginalized groups (Lindemann 2020), counternarratives do more than rebut false beliefs: they reshape the standpoint from which legal evidence is interpreted. Accordingly, I treat rape myths not as isolated misconceptions but as oppressive narratives that continue to orient legal reasoning even when explicitly rejected.

I develop this claim through an analysis of the seduction script — a narrative prescribing the interpretation of women’s refusal as inherently ambiguous and male persistence as desirable — and its operation in the cross-examination of acquaintance rape cases before Italian criminal courts. I first show how this script shifts the evidential burden from the absence of consent to the ‘adequacy’ of the complainant’s resistance. I then argue that, by contrast, counternarratives introduced through the complainant’s testimony and her counsel’s questioning foreground sexual autonomy, illuminate evidential blind spots, and reshape the interpretation of consent and sexual violence. In doing so, they promote not only more accurate legal reasoning but also institutional epistemic justice by rendering survivors’ perspectives intelligible.

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