000 01846nam a22001577a 4500
999 _c518896
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100 _aGore, Ashlee
_931150
245 _aIt’s all or nothing: Consent, reasonable belief, and the continuum of sexual violence in judicial logic
260 _aSocial & Legal Studies
300 _a30(4), Aug, 2021: p.522-540
520 _aThis paper discusses controversies over the reasonable belief in consent defence to sexual assault shared by many common law jurisdictions. The implementation of a ‘reasonable’ belief standard has been heralded as a safeguard against rape myth narratives that endorsed men’s unreasonable but ‘honest’ beliefs in women’s consent. This paper argues that judicial constructions of reasonable belief in consent continue to apply notions of reasonableness abstracted from the social context of women’s experience of sexual violence and disconnected from sociological insights which contextualise both the encounter and jury decisions. Using a feminist sociocultural analysis (Gavey, 2005; Kelly, 1988), the successful appeal in the case of R v Lennox (2018 Queensland, Australia), against his conviction by a jury is discussed. The reasoning in the Lennox appeal reveals that overriding judicial constructions of women as incredible in their communication of non-consent, and the prevailing legal dichotomies of consent, and credibility as ‘all or nothing’, undo the progressive potential of the standard of ‘reasonableness’ in consent law and reinforce the phallocentrism of legal discourse. – Reproduced
650 _aConsent, Continuum of sexual violence, Cultural scaffolding of rape, Phallocentrism, Reasonable belief, Sexual assault, Sexual violence
_928906
773 _aSocial & Legal Studies
906 _aSEXUAL VIOLENCE
942 _cAR