Review of Women’s Studies 21 (2): 51-71
DISCOURSE AND RAPE:
AN ANALYSIS OF A TRIAL PROCEEDING
Venus Papilota-Diaz
Abstract
This essay offers a linguistic perspective to understanding secondary
victimization in a rape trial by adopting Gricean principles, speech act
theory, and Hymes’ theory of context as key concepts of pragmatics
to rape discourse and attempt to locate power and gender relations in
socially-situated courtroom interactions. The first section discusses rape
myths as forms of secondary victimization of women rape complainants
in the courtroom while the second section includes foreign studies that
deal with issues of reproducing and representing rape through language
use. The last section presents an analysis of extracts of courtroom
interaction to serve as an illustration of the viability of analyzing discourse
in understanding secondary victimization of women rape complainants.
Introduction
According to Ehrlich (2001, 1), “the ‘turn to language’ that
has characterized much recent scholarship in the social sciences
and humanities identifies ‘discourse’ as an important site in the
construction of social relations.” In this view, language becomes
central to the construction and reproduction of gendered selves,
social structures, and relations; that is, it is through language that
gender is enacted or constituted. In the Philippines, previous studies
(Feliciano et al. 2002; 2005 and Women Legal Bureau, Inc. 1995;
2001; 2005) on gender sensitivity in the courtroom did not attend
to the linguistic details of verbal interaction in order to show the
biases that result in secondary victimization of women during rape
trial proceedings. In this article, I offer a linguistic perspective to
©2012 UP Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines
ISSN 0117-9489