The Law, the Courts and Conviction

Chapter 7 examines violence and the law and explores the deeply gendered assumptions about female and male sexuality that have characterised the law's approach. The focus here is rape, since it is arguable that this, more than any other issue, encapsulates the sheer inadequacy of the law in relation to gendered violence and the deeply gendered assumptions that surround legal responses to it.∗ As seen in Chapter 3, sexual abuse and sexual violence also feature strongly in much ‘domestic’ violence and, as seen in the previous chapter, most child sexual abuse takes place in families, committed by fathers or other male carers on their or their partners’ daughters. In some form, then, sexual violence ...