The Victimised Body: Sexual Violence, Incapacity, and the Materialisation of Unconscious Bodies in Rape Verdicts

Abstract

This article considers the relationship between body and crime, particularly the body of the victim and the crime of sexual violence. Most studies have focused on the relationship between the body of the perpetrator and the crime they have committed, in particular how forensic technologies have contributed to materialise the ‘criminal body’. The body figures in different shapes in the legal system, and the law deploys different knowledges to make sense of it. In this article, I focus on how the victim’s physical body becomes a readable entity that the courts evaluate in legal deliberation regarding incapacitated rape. I show how the courts through commonsensical reasoning add meaning to bodily (in)activity and separate the body from the mind in their interpretation of the victim’s (in)capacity to resist unwanted sexual acts. Incapacity is in this way materialised as a passive and limp body, that is, a dormant or unconscious body.