Rethinking Justice - Social Movements in the Aftermath of Sexualized Violence

The dominant legal framework often defines justice after sexualized violence in narrow, binary terms: conviction or acquittal. In contrast, feminist scholars have argued for a more expansive understanding of justice, one that reflects the diverse and complex needs of victim-survivors. One example is McGlynn and Westmarland’s (2019) concept of kaleidoscopic justice. It challenges the conventional legal lens by suggesting that justice is not a singular outcome, but rather a fluid, multifaceted process. This model offers offering a more holistic approach to addressing harm by emphasizing the importance of consequences, recognition, voice, dignity, prevention, and connectedness. It aligns with McLeod’s (2019) concept of grounded justice, an alternative framework that is rooted in the everyday experiences of those seeking resolution.

Drawing on interviews from my doctoral research at the University of Kassel, the presentation will explore how victim-survivors from social movements perceive and experience justice in the aftermath of sexualized violence. While many of my interviewees addressed the aforementioned aspects – consequences, recognition, voice, dignity, prevention, and connectedness –, they struggled extremely with the idea of justice; rejecting the notion of justice as an unattainable »illusion«. This despair is related to the utopianization of social movements and the shattered hope that social movements could be safe(er) spaces. Nevertheless, I argue for keeping justice as a (utopian) concept and using these experiences from social movements for a broader debate on justice after sexualized violence – following Dilts (2017) that the only chance to archive justice is to recognize its incompleteness.