Tragic Tales of ‘Victims’ and ‘Villains’ – A Study on Narratives and Emotions in Danish Rape Trials

Abstract

Given the fact that rape is difficult to prove in court and trials primarily are based on the defendant’s word against the plaintiff’s, it becomes highly significant to study the narratives about rape presented in criminal trials. This thesis is an ethnographic-inspired study conduct-ed in Danish courts from January to May 2023. Observations of court proceedings during rape trials were conducted in four different county courts. Through a narrative theoretical perspective, which rests on the assumption that the form and structure (the genre and story characters) of a narrative become influential in the way it encourages particular emotions in its audience, this thesis investigates what characterizes narratives about rape in criminal tri-als in Denmark. The analysis shows that most defense narratives were characterized by an inversion of the claim to harm, in which defendants are constructed as “victim” characters in the form of a tragedy and the plaintiffs as “villain” characters who commit false allegations. In contrast, most prosecution narratives are characterized as melodramatic stories that con-struct the plaintiffs as the “victims” through a dramatization of their morality, innocence, and suffering, and defendants as bad, immoral, and in some cases even evil “villain” charac-ters who commit rape with full intent. This study adds to the existing literature by showing how trial narratives’ internal organizations (genre use and character construction) are inter-twined with prosecutors' and defense attorneys’ use of rape myths concerning both victims and perpetrators and how defense attorneys and prosecutors construct narratives to convey meaning and evoke specific emotions among its audience about who should get perceived as worthy of receiving sympathy.

Popular Abstract

Given the fact that rape is difficult to prove in court, and trials primarily are based on the defendant’s word against the plaintiff’s, it is important to study the stories that defense law-yers, defendants, on the one hand, and prosecutors, and plaintiffs on the other tell during criminal trials about rape and how these stories become convincing.
In this study, I looked at Danish criminal trials about rape and the stories told in this setting. I observed four rape trials in four courthouses and wrote down all arguments presented in court by all the abovementioned parties. One of the main ideas behind this study is that well-known features from fictional literature, such as specific genres (tragedy, melodrama) and stereotypical story characters such as “victim” and “villain” characters, strategically can be applied by storytellers to impact the emotions in the people who listen to the story.
My findings suggest that the stories presented by the defense in the trials about rape were characterized by turning the claim to harm upside down. In these stories, defendants were constructed as “victim” characters of a tragedy, and the primary focus was on the defend-ants’ suffering. In contrast, the plaintiffs were characterized as “villain” characters who committed false allegations of rape. The plaintiffs’ victim status was challenged by how the defense positioned the plaintiffs and their behavior in relation to various false beliefs in soci-ety regarding whom we consider a “real rape victim” and how we think a “real rape victim” behave. In contrast, the stories presented by the prosecution were characterized by the way plaintiffs were established as the good and moral “victim” characters of exaggerated melo-dramatic stories and how the plaintiffs’ morality, innocence, and suffering were dramatized. The prosecutor also reproduced or challenged false beliefs about victims when presenting these stories. Defendants were, in contrast, characterized as immoral “villain” characters in these prosecution stories and, in some cases, even as “evil” characters who committed rape with full intent. Here the lawyers also hinted at false ideas about how a “real rapist” looks and behaves.
This study’s findings are important, as they show how lawyers, in different ways, spin stories by using well-known features from fictional literature to compel people in court, including juries and judges, to make conclusions about whether they find the defendant's or the plain-tiffs’ story as the “real version” of events, whom they find credible, and ultimately who they feel should receive sympathy from the court.

• author: Kristensen, Kristine Louise
• supervisor: Sebastien Tutenges
• organization: Sociology; Department of Sociology
• course: SOCM04 20231
• year: 2023
• type: H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
• subject: Law and Political Science; Cultural Sciences; Social Sciences
• keywords: narrative, trial, rape, emotion, genres, story characters, rape myths, court ethnography
• language: English
• id: 9135018
• date added to LUP: 2023-08-29 16:58:59
• date last changed: 2023-08-29 16:58:59