Abstract
In this book, Professor Banner conducts an in-depth qualitative analysis and comprehensively documents several far-reaching sexual assault/rape cases in the United States and their public responses, alongside considerations of their underlying cultural and legal roots. Banner succinctly demonstrates the mutually constitutive relationship between criminal law on the books, the law in practice and public opinion/sentiment. Consequently, numerous unprecedented challenges have arisen within the legal system.
The first two parts of the book depict the societal conceptualisations of sexual assault/rape survivors and perpetrators through several well-known cases, including Phi Kappa Psi v. Rolling Stone, LLC and People of the State of California v. Brock Allen Turner. People v. Weinstein is used in the third part of the book to illustrate the mobilisation of publics to effect legal and social changes with the #MeToo movement’s power. These cases brought to the surface public discourses tracing the longitudinal evolution and perpetuation of myths around gender (e.g. women are liars and gold diggers), race (e.g. the historical use of rape law as a weapon of terror against the Black community) and crime (e.g. American politicians using the term ‘witch hunt’ to describe the contemporary atmosphere surrounding sexual assault) (Banner, 2019).
The author traces the social processes and details how seemingly innocuous locker-room talk or rape jokes could promote environments conductive to sexual assault. Such collective participation in the identification, description and utilisation of gendered assumptions could become heuristics (mental shortcuts) in the public consciousness. This becomes problematic when a single incident remains a cautionary tale years after its occurrence and its resonance becomes rooted in common sense – in other words, when a woman’s ‘actions reflect not only on her personal, human failings but on all future female claimants’ (p. 103). These rape myths then turn into common knowledge and convey a public message concerning who is considered worthy of the law’s protection – a white cis woman who was a virgin, sober and dressed ‘appropriately’ at the time of incident, which aptly fits the description of ‘the ideal victim’ constructed collectively at the social system level (Christie, 1986: 12).
Social media platforms have become a micro-courtroom where incidents are re-enacted, victims’ veracity and perpetrators’ responsibility are evaluated and debated, and the law itself is reimagined. This, in my view, has democratic implications as power is reallocated and redistributed to the public. Drawing on the concept of a network society/public (Castells, 2008), digital technologies have enabled the decentralisation of power and allowed the pursuit of justice to transform from a top-down to a bottom-up activity. That is, the power of the state and judicial elites has arguably weakened due to the opening of unprecedented avenues for public civil participation in governance and the criminal justice arena. In a similar vein, victims might now have a greater ability to achieve their perceived justice, which had previously been largely ignored by legal actors in courtrooms (see Christie, 1977). That said, social media is a double-edged sword. Social media platforms can also be fertile grounds for creating and reinforcing detrimental rape myths due to the disinhibition effect (see Suler, 2004), in which online users tend to act unrestrictedly given the absence of social control and the lacking provision of anonymity in online spaces.
The book contends that the key objective of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is not to search for and find the truth, but involves the ways in which legal actors present and shape an incident’s narrative and convince the jury to see the ‘truth’ that they have presented. Several unique systematic characteristics of the United States make it more susceptible than other jurisdictions to judicial, legal and penal populism, which are also noted and extensively discussed in the book The War On Sex (Halperin and Hoppe, 2017; Lok, 2020). In the United States, the public has the power to vote to remove a judge. For instance, Brock Turner’s case, where the former Stanford University student sexually assaulted an unconscious female student outside of a fraternity party, sparked a recall campaign resulting in the sanctioning of Judge Persky, who handed down a sentence seen as ‘too lenient’ in Turner’s case. In addition, the hue and cry over the case also catalysed certain rapid social changes in the United States, such as the introduction and employment of Title IX proceedings, 1 which could potentially threaten due process in university settings. The book is thus highly recommended to readers interested in exploring the interactions and debates around judicial populism and digital culture.
Finally, we cannot deny the topic’s many nuances. The author takes sexual assault survivors as predominantly cis women and perpetrators as cis men. Nonetheless, Banner points out that male victim-survivors are not less important, and counting prison rape, assault of male college students, and rape in the military would significantly increase the size of this population. It is also paramount to point out that the voices and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and male victims, victims of colour, and LGBTIQ+ communities have remained unreached or excluded by #MeToo. These voices should be collectively amplified. I also support Banner’s suggestion that the #MeToo movement needs to refocus and centre itself towards bringing about the greater collective good rather than exacerbating existing divisions between genders, classes and races. In this regard, let us hope, as Banner concludes that ‘Moments of crisis, however, are moments of possibility’ (p. 220).