Rape Law Contesting the Scales of Injustice

This important new book is a successor to Balancing the Scales, published 20 years ago. Revisiting and extending beyond the themes in the previous collection, the authors offer new ways of thinking about the wrongs of rape and the responses of the criminal justice system. A unifying theme of this book, which meld critical and feminist legal analysis, is contestation. Contestation, the authors contend, is part of the DNA of rape law. Examining the principal reforms of rape law – relating to consent, intimate partner rape, legal responsibility (both individual and institutional), trial and sentencing processes – the authors build to their conclusion that contestation is a battle between realities, perceptions and attitudes. It is of course a forensic battle anchored to a question of ‘(un)reasonableness’, whether it relates to the actions, beliefs or decisions of the accused, the victims, the police, lawyers, judges and jurors.

1. Prologue: The Contest Continues 2. Contesting Consent: A Free and Voluntary Standard? 3. Contesting Partner Intimacy and Abuse of Trust 4. Contesting Fault: Beyond Legal Binaries 5. Contesting Harms: Primary and Secondary Trauma 6. Contesting Fairness: ‘Fair Game’ Versus ‘Fair Go’ in the Trial and Investigation Process 7. Contesting ‘The Other’: Intersectionality and Fault 8. Contesting Punishment: Sentencing 9. Contesting Criminal Responsibility for Rape: Reframing Institutional and Individual Complicity 10. Epilogue: Beyond Balancing, Towards Human Dignity

Simon Bronitt is a Professor of Law and Deputy Dean (Research) in the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland. Professor Patricia Easteal AM, academic, author, advocate and activist, is Emeritus Professor, School of Law and Justice at the University of Canberra.