Capricious credibility – legal assessments of voluntariness in Swedish negligent rape judgements

Reasoning from background knowledge: Evaluating and explaining behaviour in Finnish rape judgments

“…However, these myths were explicitly resisted by the courts as often as they were relied upon. These results are in line with earlier research in Finland (Jokila, 2010) and research in Sweden (Wallin et al, 2021).…”

Sense and Caution. A Comparative Perspective on Sweden’s Negligent Rape Law

“…Another study of court judgments found that 'it appears arbitrary [as to] when the judge finds that gross negligence is attained' and 'the practice of proving gross negli gent behavior appears difficult.' 25 This arbitrariness is problematic from the point of view of legal certainty, and it poses the broader, important question: what should be the required standard of care in sexual situations? Further, criteria for the assessment need to be worked out that take into account the significance of the protection of sexual integrity but prevent the punishment of conduct that lies within the limits of a reasonable degree of carelessness.…”

Re-Imagining Sexual Harassment

“…5 The judgments are texts written with the purpose of presenting the arguments for and against a person being found guilty of a crime. We approach them with a different purpose: to analyse them as stories about acts that we identify as sextortion, produced by Swedish and Norwegian institutions, and as their interpretations of the stories told (compare: Westerstrand, 2017;Wallin et al, 2021). Therefore, the reasonings put forward in the judgments offer clues for understanding how acts of sextortion are handled in a Nordic context.…”

“…The Swedish sexual offences legislation does not stipulate what an expression of consent entails; this is up to the Court to determine (Wallin et al, 2021). The District Court in the Swedish case decided to take into consideration the situation as a whole -including the power imbalance and relationship of dependence -while the Court of Appeal took into account only the details in the situation and what could be assumed about the victims' intentions.…”

“…Within a framework of consent, it is presumed that consent is expressed through communication between the parties involved in a sexual encounter (Gunnarsson, 2020, pp 16ff, see also Wallin et al, 2021). However, it is also argued that people may 'consent' ('say yes') while 'lacking desire or willingness because they are exposed to interpersonal forms of power, ranging from violence and clear violations of consent' (Linander et al, 2021, p 121; see also Gunnarsson, 2020, p 20f).…”