Eleonora Volta

“Le false denunce di stupro sono molto comuni”; “Una donna può sempre prevenire la violenza respingendo il suo aggressore”; “Le vere vittime denunciano immediatamente”: questi enunciati non sono solo falsi, ma esprimono narrazioni stereotipate – miti – che influenzano profondamente il modo in cui comprendiamo e comunichiamo la violenza sessuale. Il volume indaga il linguaggio nel contesto processuale e mostra come i miti dello stupro possano inficiare l’ascolto di chi rende testimonianza. Prefazione di Paola Di Nicola Travaglini

Scholars and activists have introduced the notion of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) to describe any act involving the non-consensual production, distribution, or threat of distribution of private sexual images. In common parlance, these harmful practices are frequently referred to as ‘revenge porn’ – a colloquial expression rooted in misogynistic internet subcultures. In this paper, we challenge the use of this term, arguing that it constitutes a case of positive hermeneutical injustice. Departing from Fricker’s lacuna-centred account, we contend that the concept of ‘revenge porn’ distorts the collective understanding of IBSA by preventing the uptake of more accurate concepts, while simultaneously reinforcing misogynistic background ideologies that eroticize autonomy-violation. Drawing on real-world cases, we show how this concept obstructs institutional redress and reinforces epistemic marginalization: it hampers the identification of IBSA, obscures the structural nature of the abuse, recasts it as entertainment, objectifies victims, and shifts blame onto them. We conclude by calling for the disuse of the term ‘revenge porn’.

This paper develops an original approach for theorising about himpathy by examining the courtrooms’ environment. Kate Manne (2018) defines himpathy as the excessive sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence. While Manne discusses himpathy in connection with the moral and political problem of exonerating narratives and through the lens of testimonial injustice, we want to explore cases in which the testimony of the rape survivor is believed, but nevertheless misinterpreted due to conceptual resources that obscure women’s experience of sexual violence. We argue that the concept of himpathy can be expanded and himpathy can be seen as an instance of hermeneutical injustice in which epistemic and emotional dysfunctions are deeply intertwined and sustained by forms of meta blindness (Medina, 2013) that present the male standpoint as neutral. We then put this insight into practice to analyse how himpathy influences the constitution of testimonial evidence in Italian criminal trials for sexual violence. The aim is to shed proper light on the role of himpathy in presenting biased epistemological stances as impartial in judicial reasoning.

Much recent work in feminist philosophy of language and epistemology has focused on how power constrains speech and testimony. This paper aims to highlight the flip side of silencing by looking at the productive power of sexist ideology in the context of the Italian gender-based violence crime trial. Building on José Medina’s performative account of epistemic injustice (2013; 2021), I argue that when sexist conceptual resources are used by the judge as an epistemic lens, they do ideological work by setting unfair constraints on the communicative and epistemic agency of the complainant in the obtaining of her testimony. Moreover, I argue that the very same hermeneutical insensitivities and distorting concepts that shape patterns of silence can give rise to forms of agential testimonial injustice (Lackey 2023) in which the only witness statements believed by the Court are those elicited through oppressive questions that obscure, deny, or minimize the reported violence, constituting a form of extracted speech (McKinney 2016). In practical terms, this paper intends to offer a possible theoretical tool to detect and counteract those unjust discursive practices that prevent an unbiased constitution of testimonial evidence.