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.