"All I have to say": epistemic oppression, agency, and structural power in the wake of reforms to gendered violence laws

Wilmot, Claire (2024) "All I have to say": epistemic oppression, agency, and structural power in the wake of reforms to gendered violence laws. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis traces the afterlives of structural power in the wake of expanded legal protections against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). It is an ethnographic account of victim/survivors’ interactions with law after experiencing gendered harms, detailing how their efforts to attain safety and justice encounter structural power through the everyday operations of criminal-legal systems. While contemporary feminist activism has led to substantial changes in laws and policies governing responses to gendered violence, how these legal changes relate to the reproduction and/or disruption of gendered, racialised, economic, and other forms of inequality remain poorly understood. This thesis develops a framework for studying these structural dynamics in the aftermath of a sweeping set of reforms to Nigeria’s SGBV legislation—the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act (2015). I ask how gendered, racialised, socioeconomic, and other forms of oppression shift and persist after ostensibly progressive legal changes and expanded protections against SGBV. Drawing on feminist and decolonial epistemologies, I argue that the intransigent structural inequities that proponents of new laws seek to challenge are mediated through justice officials’ interpretations of victim/survivor testimonies, which in turn informs how they exercise discretionary power in the ‘shadow’ of law. Specifically, I explore how more endemic or ‘everyday’ forms of SGBV, such as domestic violence, tends to be deprioritized by officials in favour of seemingly ‘exceptional’ crimes, such as violent sexual assaults of ideal victim types, or human trafficking crimes prioritised by Western donors as part of efforts to curb irregular migration. Observations, interviews, case attrition data, and analyses of testimonial encounters recorded in 71 criminal case files provide a novel ethnographic account of the aftermath of the law as it unfolds in the Nigerian policing agency legally responsible for implementing the VAPP (2015), and in a ‘survivor-led’ feminist organization operating on the margins of law. This thesis makes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to understanding how oppressive power configurations might outlive their formal legal structures, while also remaining sensitive to moments when hegemonic reproduction appears to stall or break down. Through this ethnographic account, I show how everyday forms of resistance and feminist experimentation around law can expose the ‘possible’ within the ‘probable’. Even when their transformative potential is thwarted, I suggest these moments warrant greater scholarly attention as emergent sources of change.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Claire Wilmot
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Sets:	Departments > Gender Studies
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4750

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