Common sense, which refers to judgement rooted in everyday life experiences, constitutes an important part of legal decisions. In this article, I study how the female victim’s body appears in written rape verdicts, by investigating how common sense invokes ideas about the normal and the abnormal. This builds on a discourse analysis of written rape verdicts handed down by Norwegian courts. I find that the (female) victim’s body in these is problematized if its size and shape is considered uncommon and that the more (un)common something/someone is considered, the more (ab)normal that event/person is perceived to be. I argue that common sense reasoning becomes a normalizing legal gaze directed towards the female victim’s body in a way that makes the court evaluate the body’s relation to the norm to assess whether the incident was rape or consensual sex.
Read the full article in NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.