A “User's Guide” for Participating (and Studying Participation) in the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

I found Amanda Konradi’s work on the lived experience of rape survivors negotiating prosecution processes when I was in graduate school. I immediately realized that her articles in Law & Social Inquiry and in this journal (Konradi 1997, 1999) illuminated facets of rape prosecution and survivors’ interactions with people in the courtroom no other scholar had explored. She showed me what it was like for survivors and articulated this with an interactionist perspective that made her observations a model for my own thinking and writing about victim-witnesses in the criminal justice system. These articles also became vivid and accessible exemplars for my course Victims of Crime, and an impetus toward rethinking how the justice system responds to gender violence. This new work informs and enriches our understandings of this topic (and symbolic interaction) on many different levels. Konradi includes chapters drawing on the important articles I mention above, but most of the book is previously unpublished material. When taken as a whole, it significantly extends her overarching theses and completes the story she began telling back when I first discovered her. Taking the Stand is a “user’s guide” for rape survivors (p. 2) and a richly detailed and wide-ranging description of processes of rape prosecution and their meanings from the perspective of survivors. It is also an introduction to the legal, cultural, and social context for this challenging experience, and an incisive and illuminating sociological analysis of these activities, interpretations, and settings. Konradi does a remarkable job of integration to show how the insights she gleans from research and analysis contribute to guidelines for shaping a more humane and effective public policy. I will say a little about each of these dimensions of the work, concluding with some