Blind Justice? Comparing Voluntary and Coercive Rape Legislations

The purpose of this project, based on statistical and computational methods, is to systematically investigate the occurrence and content of judicial bias in rape judgements.

It is broken down into three sub-study aims:  1) to study the effect of background variables for both defendants and complainants, and their interaction effect, on the judgment of rape cases in District court (DC) and Appeals court (AC), including the rate of changed decisions in AC before and after the new rape legislation; 2) to examine the formulations in judgements that motivate legal decisions, particularly those changed by the AC, before and after the new rape legislation; 3) to analyze the correlation between 1) and 2) and its implications for practice in collaboration with legal professionals.

Since 1965, when Sweden introduced its first rape legislation, the charge of rape has been debated, and the judicial rigor in rape trials has been questioned.

In 2017 (effective July 2018) the Swedish Parliament passed a new rape legislation that changed the requirements of force, violence, and exploitation to a requirement of (non-)voluntariness.

By extending criminalization to sexual acts where no force or violence has occurred, the reform has been argued to exacerbate “the problem with evidence” and risk endangering the rule of law.

A previous qualitative project (RJ P19-0515:1) studying the application of the new law has identified a number of specific concerns among professionals.

A systematic large-scale study is needed to examine whether these are justified and to identify areas for development of legal practice in the handling of rape cases. The study is a unique piece of research on advanced consent-based rape legislation in a civil law country.

It is the first to: 1) study the influence of background variables of the complainant and defendant, and the interaction effects of these, on legal decision-making in rape cases; 2) apply computational quantitative content analysis on a large number of judgements (at least 5000) analysing the formulations of motivations and correlating these with background variables 3) compare outcomes and motivations before and after the new legislation; and 4) include and investigate the rate and content of changed verdicts in the appeal courts.

The project contributes to improved legal practice and democratic legitimacy of the law, benefitting both defendants’ and complainants’ equality before the law.