Speaking of Stigma and the Silence of Shame: Young Men and Sexual Victimization

This study addresses male sexual victimization as that which is both invisible and incomprehensible. Forensic interviews with young men following reports of suspected sexual assault reveal patterns of heteronormative scripts appropriated to make sense of sexual victimization. These scripts show that victimhood is largely incompatible with dominant notions of masculinity. Sexual coercion and assault embodied threat to boys’ (hetero)gendered selves, as they described feelings of shame and embarrassment, disempowerment, and emasculation. These masks of masculinity create barriers to disclosure and help to explain the serious underreporting of male sexual victimization. Questions of coercion and consent are addressed, as it relates to matters of legitimacy, sexuality, and power. With few exceptions, boys’ constructions of sexual violence have received little attention. This study adds the voices of young men to the developing empirical and theoretical research on male victims of sexual assault

Regulating Bodies: Children and Sexual Violence

The interdisciplinary silences on sexual violence and the omission of children and youth from social science research speak volumes of the power of the child as a flexible, cultural signifier. In this article, I argue that dominant frameworks of children and childhood make child sexual assault a discursive impossibility for most young people. The epistemic violence of silencing matters, and it is these erasures that are fundamental to understanding violence and power. I argue it is paramount for feminist researchers to call attention to the undermining qualities of Institutional Review Boards that act as gatekeepers of representation and voice

Gendered Violence and the Ethics of Social Science Research

The issue of ethical conduct in research settings is important and complex. As tenure-track researchers who study gendered violence, we found Clark and Walker’s discussion provocative, thoughtful, and interesting. They urge researchers to attend both to the structural dynamics of research carried out under the pressures of tenure and promotion while advocating an ethical frame that draws attention to the limited definition of risk or harm that animates typical human subjects research. Victims of violence, they argue, should not be subjected to a standardized understanding of risk. A broader framework is needed, one that brings into conversation virtue ethics with consequentialist and ontological frameworks. Given the impossible task of responding to the many points discussed by Clark and Walker, we chose to focus on four areas. In all likelihood, these areas of discussion reflect our own interests rather than Clark and Walker’s, but challenged to think seriously about research ethics in victimization studies, we attend to the following points. First, we seek to put virtue ethics in conversation with care ethics, in part because care ethics formed an important component of feminist discourse during the historical period in which institutional review boards came into being. Although virtue ethics may have lost its masculinist inflection after shedding its etymological roots,1 care ethics was explicitly seen as suited for the feminist subject. Following our discussion of care ethics, we address the question of setting victims of violence apart as a special class of vulnerable human research subjects. We argue that such a designation may yield more problems than it does solutions. Next, we turn to the violence of epistemology as a concern in research ethics. How do we come to an ethical definition of the research object, and to whom are we accountable? Finally, we turn to the relation of care when carrying out ethically and methodologically sound research

Intersectionality and Credibility in Child Sexual Assault Trials

Children remain largely absent from sociolegal scholarship on sexual violence. Taking an intersectional approach to the analysis of attorneys’ strategies during child sexual assault trials, this article argues that legal narratives draw on existing gender, racial, and age stereotypes to present legally compelling evidence of credibility. This work builds on Crenshaw’s focus on women of color, emphasizing the role of structures of power and inequality in constituting the conditions of children’s experiences of adjudication. Using ethnographic observations of courtroom jury trials, transcripts, and court records, three narrative themes of child credibility emerged: invisible wounds, rebellious adolescents, and dysfunctional families. Findings show how attorneys use these themes to emphasize the child’s unmarked body, imperceptible emotional responses, rebellious character, and harmful familial environments. The current study fills a gap in sexual assault research by moving beyond trial outcomes to address cultural narratives within the court that are inextricably embedded in intersectional dimensions of power and the reproduction of social status

Exoffender Accounts of Successful Reentry from Prison

Reentry research often focuses on those who have recidivated, with little work addressing the experiences of those who successfully reintegrate into their communities. This study examines individual accounts of successful transitions from prison to community in the months and years postrelease. Interview data point to three metanarratives used to make sense of reentry: as reverence, as reunification, and as reconstruction. In different ways, each narrative centers on connections to important others through faith, family, or community. We discuss the legitimacy of the self-narratives offered, and add to a growing body of work exploring reentry via the lens of the exoffender

“That\u27s How She Talks”: Animating Text Message Evidence in the Sexual Assault Trial

This ethnographic study of criminal sexual assault adjudication shows how prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses animate text message evidence. In contrast to other forms of courtroom testimony, text messages function as multiauthored representations of recorded correspondence in the past. Attorneys and witnesses animate texts authored by or said to characterize persons represented at trial. By whom and how the texts are animated shapes trial processes. Through a detailed comparative case analysis of two Milwaukee, WI, sexual assault trials, this article attends to the process by which text messages are said to personify or characterize authors’ meaning and intent. This animation of electronically transmitted text speaks to credibility and variably emphasizes a witness\u27s place within gendered and racialized cultural norms. Rather than unsettling the trope of “he said, she said,” text messages become contested evidence animated by court actors within contexts of long‐standing cultural narratives of sexual victimization and offending