The double-edged sword : trauma, mental health, and sexual violence testimony in England and Wales

Yapp, Emma Jane (2024) The double-edged sword : trauma, mental health, and sexual violence testimony in England and Wales. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis critically examines how the interaction of feminist, legal, and psychiatric discourses shape the experiences, and testimonies, of people who have experienced sexual violence and identify with psychiatric diagnoses in England and Wales. This is an interdisciplinary mixed-methods qualitative project analysing case law (n=11), policies (n=5), and qualitative interviews (n=9) with people who have experienced sexual violence and identify with psychiatric diagnoses. In bringing these materials together, I reveal the ways in which societal stereotypes and norms concerning the relationship between sexual violence and mental health come to bear on sexual violence testimony. The injustice of the law’s treatment of sexual violence and mental health here extends beyond the courtroom. This socio-legal project contends that the success of legislative reform concerning sexual violence and mental health must be understood in dialogue with both societal norms and stereotypes, and the experiences of people who have experienced sexual violence themselves. In a critical review of secondary feminist scholarship, I demonstrate how people who have experienced sexual violence are represented as “not sick” (hysterical), but “traumatised”. Norms and stereotypes then come to bear on the adjudication of cases, and the relationship between sexual violence and mental health is constructed as “legitimate trauma” or “abnormal” psychology. Interview participants discussed how identification with psychiatric diagnoses complicates the narrative demands of sexual violence testimony, by introducing new ways to diminish credibility that were mobilised along structural inequalities, producing “testimonial injustice”. Participants had to find ways to articulate sexual violence to both emphasise that they were “not sick”, but still “sick enough” for their experiences to be legitimate, revealing the “double-edged sword” of the medicalisation of sexual violence (McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance, 2011). This thesis provides insight into how engaging with lived experiences of mental (dis)abilities can deepen, and support a more expansive, feminist anti-sexual violence politics.

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