As scholars and activists have addressed the problem of violence against women in the past 25 years, their efforts have increasingly attuned us to the multiple dimensions of the issue. Early activists hoped to change the structure of power relations in our society, as well as the political ideology that tolerated violence against women, through legislation, education, direct action, and direct services. This activism resulted in a plethora of changes to the legal codes and protocols relating to rape and battering. Today, social scientists and legal scholars are evaluating the effects of these reforms, questioning anew the ability of law by itself to redress societal inequalities. As they uncover the limitations of legal reforms enacted in the past two decades, scholars are turning—or returning—to ask about the social and cultural contexts within which laws are formulated, enforced, and interpreted.

What organizational and community conditions influence legal officials to treat rape victims “unresponsively”? Our analysis is guided by Goffman's theory of organizational frameworks and frames of activity and March and Olsen's institutional theory of organizations. Using data from 130 organizations in Florida that process rape cases, we compare six types of organizations (including hospital emergency rooms and rape crisis centers) on eight criteria and review their frameworks and frames of activity relative to unresponsiveness. We use the issue of victim legitimacy to illustrate the utility of our model. Our results show that well-meaning staff in legal organizations are oriented to routinely treat victims unresponsively. Their organizations routinely orient them to be concerned with, for example, public approval, the avoidance of losing, and expediency more than with victims' needs. In our conclusion, we identify ways legal officials and rape crisis centers can promote responsive treatment of victims. We also call for research on legal organizations that are responsive to victims and for a nationwide discourse on the “politics of rape victims' needs” as a means of addressing the gender inequality issues that underlie rape crimes and laws and orient legal officials to treat victims unresponsively.

How might feminist law reform serve all women? The author explores this question within the context of sexual violence involving girls and women with developmental disabilities. She presents the difference impasse as a theoretical tool for understanding how women are positioned in law differently and unequally in relation to each other. She explores how, within the consent framework of a rape trail, competing social narratives or subtexts about race, class, gender, and disability circulate in the courtroom. She also explores the issue of pity in rape traiIs and argues that focusing on interlocking systems of domination and on our complicity in maintaining categories of women in law and law reform is a useful approach for feminist law reformers.

In this exploratory cross-cultural study, we use interview data from representatives of social service, criminal justice, and policy-making agencies in two capital cities (Washington, D.C.) and Madrid, Spain) to compare responses to domestic violence within each country's sociolegal and cultural context. While both countries have patriarchal structures, there is great difference in the history, funding, development, and participants of the battered women's movement. For instance, in Spain the government determined the appropriate response to domestic violence from the onset, whereas in the United States the power to frame, find, and respond to the issue operated through a more insidious process of state cooptation. In both countries, wider social changes did not result; rather, services were provided as the movements became tied to finding requirements and to satisfying bureaucratic exigencies. Within this context, we analyze respondents' perceptions and interpretations of domestic violence as well as the institutional practices and future strategies proposed for continued social action.

Stories told by and about men who batter women in the courts of Hawai in the mid-19th century and in the late 20th century are strikingly similar. Courts, then as now, accept some justifications for battering and reject others, in the process constructing the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Throughout this period, the legal system claimed to focus only on the violent act itself, not the emotional or personal violation. The law interprets the violence as brute fact, knowable without regard to the social relationship or system of cultural meanings within which it occurs. There are persistent contradictions between the law's construction of domestic violence as an unambiguous physical act and litigants' and judges' views that these violent acts are moments within the social dynamics of gendered power relations. At the same time, there are recurrent tensions between the efforts of the legal system to portray violent acts against women in terms of rational categories of action and, in contrast, the experience of violence and the meanings within which it occurs that are often opaque to such sense-making, defiant of a simple means-ends calculus.

What counts as evidence? What is accepted as true in court given the evidence admitted? How are subordinated peoples further oppressed in courts because they cannot demonstrate that their experience is fact? Drawing on the confirmation brings for Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the testimony of Anita Hill in those hearings, the author explores the ways in which representations of sexual violence against women can be seen as not “real.”

This article compares U.S. and Kenyan media representations of an incident at a Kenyan boarding school during which many young women were raped and several killed by their male schoolmates. The author's analysis of print media accounts reveals that how the press constructed the identities of “rapists” and “victims” relied on nationally specific stereotypes, myths, and scripts of rape and its relation to differences of culture, race, and rationality. U.S. accounts simultaneously explain the rapes by emphasizing difference and foreground legal constructions of rape identities that meat experiences of rape as essentially similar. The tension over difference and law in the U.S. accounts parallels the highly visible, though largely unproductive, debate among feminists pitting cultural relativism against legal universalism, and such dichotomized approaches preclude the development of politically useful conceptions of rape and rape identities. The analysis suggests that issues raised in the Kenyan press-the relation between sexual practices and rape and the state's role in furthering sexual violence-directed attention to complexities of rape and power elided by the m o w legal models pervasive in U. S . media and scholarly representations of rape. She concludes that fighting rape more effectively entails exposing limited representational practices and also attending to a broader range of understandings of rape and rape identities in various contexts