Research

In my Ph.D. thesis, I examine how individuals attribute meaning to certain acts as sexually violent and morally transgressive, how individuals engage in symbolic and discursive struggles to negotiate these boundaries, and how all this ultimately affects victims of sexual violence. I adopt a mixed-methods approach, using both multifactorial experimental surveys and qualitative focus group interviews, which enables me to develop innovative ways of analysis that complement the studies that currently dominate the field. 

In examining lay perceptions of the conceptual boundaries of sexual violence, I focus on how individuals draw on legal classifications, logics, and epistemologies. In examining the role of law in criticising and constraining individual and collective practices related to sexual violence victimisation, for example, anti-sexual violence activism associated (or perceived to be associated) with the #MeToo movement as well as individuals publicly disclosing their experiences, I analyse both the societal and political context and the implications of such discursive frames. 

Building on both my empirical work and the few scholars who have worked with legalistic narratives in sexual violence boundary perceptions, I engage in extensive theoretical analysis of the consequences of such narratives. Focusing on the unequal and especially gendered distribution of sexual violations and the discrepancy between dichotomous legal notions of guilt, truth, and evidence on the one hand, and the complexity and uncertainty of victim experiences on the other, I shed light on how legalistic narratives can facilitate individualisation and obfuscation of the structural inequality which is so intrinsically embedded in sexual violations.

I thus address how legalistic discourse emerges as a principal instrument to fragment and individualize the causes and contexts of sexual violence, with the representations of law providing dichotomous, privileged, and legitimizing classifications of truth. I explore how this tendency may exacerbate individualisation and obscure structural and gendered foundations of sexual violence, thereby furthering depoliticizing, and constraining discussions on its structural aspects of victimisation and perpetration.