‘If she asked for settlement money, she must not be a real victim’: an interdisciplinary analysis of the discourse of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the discourse surrounding a high-profile sexual assault case in South Korea. While most research on language and sexual violence has focused on the media portrayal or online resistance movement, not much has focused on the language and the law. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and rhetoric, this present paper seeks to show the importance of value of paying closer attention to legal decision-making process, showing how this can make a significant contribution to the literature. The analysis reveals two distinctive discourses at work. One is that victims must embody and display certain characteristics as a ‘pure and destroyed’ individual in order to avoid being dismissed or appearing untrustworthy. The second is that the perpetrators represent themselves as victims seeking to makes it the goal of the court to protect the perpetrators’ rights, rather than those of the victims.

KEYWORDS:

• Language and law
• rape myths
• rape trials
• sexual violence discourse
• critical discourse studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The criminal law regarding sexual assault in South Korea (mainly Criminal Act Article 298) have two main requisite elements: (1) whether a certain act (sexual assault) has happened (2) whether that act has been forced upon against the victim’s will. I will be focusing on these two elements in the following analysis.

2 Blue House petitions are submitted through a government website where citizens can freely post their complaints. When a post gets enough petition from other people, a government official must answer to the post.

3 It is worth noting that all the speakers for the perpetrators are the perpetrators’ female family members.

4 The first text was accessed through the online website it was posted, and the second one was retrieved from the media report who interviewed the victim. Both texts are open to public.

5 The text is actually from the perpetrator’s wife but I will refer to the Text A as perpetrator’s text for convience.

6 This evaluation is based on the sentencing from the first trial.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huijae Yu

Huijae Yu is a Ph.D candidate and a lecturer in the department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her main research interests are language and the law, language and gender, and queer linguistics in South Korean context. She is also working as a lexicographer at the Yonsei Institute of Language and Information Studies.