Naming Injustice, Reimagining Justice: How Victim-Survivors of Sexual Violence in Portugal Perceive Criminal Justice and its Alternatives
Abstract: This thesis addresses the sexual violence justice gap in Portugal descriptively by questioning how victim-survivors of these crimes experience and/or perceive criminal justice, including those that have resorted to formal law and those that haven’t Normatively, it reflects on the justice needs of victim-survivors of sexual violence and connects these needs to the restorative justice movement - an umbrella term for non-carceral responses to sexual violence, including inputs from feminism, abolitionism and social harm theory. It thus aims to explore innovative survivor-centered justice models and draft policy recommendations specific to the Portuguese context. The data was collected through 7 in-depth semi-structured interviews with female-identifying victim-survivors of sexual violence. Liz Kelly’s continuum of sexual violence was used to describe the range of their experiences, namely as some overlapped with domestic violence situations. The theoretical framework centers on Bourdieu’s theory of law’s symbolic power, reflecting on how the juridical field and other social fields impact the victimological experience of sexual violence, namely focusing on the experience of recognising injustice. In this process, the law is seen, as in Bourdieu, as a constructor of social reality, but his analysis is expanded to include other powerful acts of naming relevant to victim-survivors’ process of coming to terms with their victimization. The research found that, in the Portuguese context, a lack of awareness of gender-based violence and patriarchal cultural norms contribute to the normalization of violence. It finds that the recognition of violence is hindered by this context, and that emphasis should be placed on understanding the barriers to this recognition. In crimes of sexual violence, it is found that law’s symbolic power is eroded due to a widespread notion of their impunity, affecting law’s legitimacy and thus its normativity. This is tied to a disbelief in punishment as a solution for crime, and to an interest in alternative, non-carceral justice models. The research finds that victim-survivors already fulfill some of their justice needs through means beyond the law, showing how these should be further investigated as models of survivor-centered justice.
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