Prosthetic empathy: Emotion work across time and place in the criminal justice system

• In Event: Gender, Crime and Justice Working Group Panel 1: Emotions work in gendered violence

Abstract

This paper contributes to recent theoretical discussions around the practice of empathy by professional legal actors within the criminal justice system. Drawing on the field of emotion-sociology, empathy has been used as an analytical frame to inquire into various types of work performed by legal actors ranging from the interpretation of police reports to the managing of witness testimonies. The present paper builds on this work and suggests, furthermore, that some types of professional empathy might be conceived of as emotion work across time and place aided by prosthetic devices. Empirically, the paper explores the work of evidence evaluation by Danish public prosecutors in rape cases. In evidence evaluation, a prosecutor goes through the material collected by police investigators to decide whether to press charges. Based on 20 qualitative interviews, 5 focus groups and 11 case studies with prosecutors, the paper shows how text messages via SMS or social media between the alleged victim and perpetrator have gained new significance as evidence in rape cases since Denmark adopted a new rape legislation in 2021. With the new legislation, premised on the requirement of voluntariness, witness statements and evaluations of credibility increasingly become the subject of complex qualitative interpretation. In this context, text messages perform what might be termed a prosthetic extension of the empathy of legal actors across time and place, seemingly allowing legal actors access to ‘immediate’ and ‘spontaneous’ emotional reactions of alleged victims and perpetrators close to the time and place of the reported incident. The paper draws on Haraway´s notion of the cyborg to open up discussions around the temporal dimension to legal evaluations of credibility as well as around mediating devices in the emotion work of legal professionals.

Author

• Brigitte Dragsted-Mutengwa, University of Copenhagen