A decade after Lynndie: non-ideal victims of non-ideal offenders – doubly anomalised, doubly invisibilised

Abstract

Lynndie England’s conviction, and highly publicised dishonourable discharge from the United States military, for crimes that included photographically documented acts of sexual violence against male detainees in her care, finally succeeded in bringing female sexual offending against male victims to the fore, and served as a watershed moment that forever changed the discourse. Except it didn’t. This event did not disrupt orthodox discourse. It did not breach the gendered binary that casts men as offenders and women as victims. A decade later, it can instead be argued to have bolstered it – being pivotal in maintaining ‘discursive equilibrium’ in preservation of those gendered, normative, binaristic, subject positions that serve to cast men outside of legitimate victimhood; particularly men assaulted by women. This Foucauldian analysis of knowledge production in the academy will examine this stasis, and articulate the discursive mechanisms underlying it - arguing that the ideal victim binary, in the area of sexual violence, constitutes a gender-normative taxonomy that functions as a governmentalised ‘regime of truth’. Ironically, this influence is most stymieing amongst those best placed to resist it.This chapter complexifies Christie’s (1986) concept of the ideal victim through the lens of Foucauldian theory, presenting a clarion call to victimology.