Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice

The concept of epistemic injustice refers to the injustice that an individual suffers specifically in their capacity as a knower or epistemic agent – that is, as someone who produces, conveys, or uses knowledge. Epistemic injustice is problematic because it undermines individuals’ epistemic agency, or their capacity to produce, convey, or use knowledge. People exercise their epistemic agency every day when they engage in basic epistemic practices: for example, when they contribute to a conversation or when they employ concepts to interpret the social world or make sense of their experience. The literature typically distinguishes between two main types of epistemic injustice. First, when a person is not adequately believed or consulted by their interlocutors due to biases on the interlocutors’ part, the person suffers testimonial injustice. For example, if a woman’s contribution to a meeting is not taken seriously because she is a woman, she faces testimonial injustice because she receives less credibility than she should due to her interlocutors’ biases. Second, when a person or their experience is not adequately understood or represented due to biases in the society’s mainstream pool of interpretive resources (e.g. words, concepts, social representations, shared meanings, or collective understandings), the person suffers hermeneutical injustice. Because a society’s interpretive resources are mainly produced by dominant groups, they tend to neglect or stigmatise the experience of non-dominant groups. For example, prior to the coining of the term, women could not communicate as such their experience of sexual harassment. Their experience was instead inadequately characterised as harmless flirting and therefore remained collectively misunderstood. Women faced hermeneutical injustice because they received less intelligibility than they should have due to their society’s conceptual biases, which obscured and misrepresented the experience of sexual harassment. A person can thus face epistemic injustice in two main ways. With testimonial injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of credibility because they are not adequately believed or consulted. With hermeneutical injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of intelligibility because they or their experience are not adequately understood or represented. In both cases, the person faces these deficits of credibility or intelligibility because they belong to one or more non-dominant groups – for example, women, LGBTQIA2+, BIPOC folks, people of lower socio-economic status, disabled people, neurodivergent people, or psychiatrised individuals. To face epistemic injustice, then, is to be denied equal status as an epistemic agent because of biases – which may be individual or structural, and conscious or not – of a sexist, cisheteronormative, racist, Eurocentric, classist, ableist, neuronormative, or sanist nature, for example. The phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ was introduced by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007), who also introduced the two main categories of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. It is important to underline, however, that the concept of epistemic injustice captures some of the epistemic imbalances that had previously been brought into sharp relief and powerfully critiqued – albeit not under the specific label of epistemic injustice – by feminist epistemologists (e.g. Alcoff 1991; Code 1991), including Black feminists and critical race theorists (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins 1990; Mills 1997) as well as standpoint theorists (e.g. Harding 1986; Hartsock 1983). Fricker’s original analysis of testimonial injustice focuses primarily on undue deficits of credibility taking place in an actual epistemic exchange between two or more interlocutors, where the bias at play is directed at the identity of the speaker (Fricker 2007:ch.1). Further developments of the concept by other scholars have shown that testimonial injustice can also be a matter of undue credibility excesses (Davis 2016; Medina 2011, 2013:ch.2) and of undue deficits of criticism (Hazlett 2020); that testimonial injustice can occur independently of an actual epistemic exchange, through silencing (Dotson 2011b; Fricker 2007:ch.6); that testimonial injustice can also be structural (Anderson 2012; Catala 2022); and that testimonial injustice can also stem from biases that concern the content of the speaker’s contribution, regardless of their identity (Davis 2021). Fricker’s original analysis of hermeneutical injustice has likewise been expanded by other scholars, from one that focused mainly on the lack of appropriate terms such as ‘sexual harassment’ (Fricker 2007: ch.7), to ones that focus on the lack of circulation or adoption of new terms coined at the margins such as ‘date rape’ or ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ (Dotson 2012; Mason 2011; Medina 2011, 2013: ch.1; Pohlhaus 2012, or the lack of adequate understanding of existing terms such as ‘racism’ (Catala 2015, 2019). Further developments in the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression have identified the phenomena of epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), and non-propositional epistemic injustice (Catala 2020, 2025).

Date Rape Among Adolescents and Young Adults

Date rape risk communication is a key component of education-based Date Rape Prevention Programs, common across colleges. In such programs, risk assessment in date rape is approached cautiously in order to avoid a tone of “victim blaming.” Since it is important in the assessment of any risk to understand the surrounding social context of the risky situation and the individual's unique relationship with that social context, this study examines Protection Motivation Theory as it applies to handling the risk of date rape without victim blaming. The paper links individual personality and social contexts with risk communication. The study sample comprised 367 undergraduate women enrolled in a large Southern Public University. The study examines the relationships between dating activity, social competency, and type of information provided with the dependents variables of date rape related protection behavior (intent), belief, and knowledge. A factorial multiple analysis of covariance analysis found that the dependent variables had a significant relationship with aspects of social competency and dating activity. The exposure to varying information about date rape was not significantly related to the dependent variables of date rape-related protection behavior (intent), belief, and knowledge. The identification of social competency and dating activity status as protective factors in this study makes a significant contribution to the practice and research efforts in date rape education.

In her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” Hermeneutical injustices are part of the systemic patterns of structural injustices that members of particular social groups (for example, women, GLBTQ, people of color, and dis/ abled individuals) are susceptible to; they are, therefore, aspects of oppression. A hermeneutical injustice occurs when “a collective hermeneutical gap impinges so as to significantly disadvantage some group(s) and not others.” Those wronged in this way are excluded from participating in the spread of knowledge; a significant area of their social experience is not intelligible through collective understanding or dominant narratives because a gap in the collective hermeneutical resource renders them marginalized. Fricker offers the condition of women before the legal and social term “sexual harassment” existed to describe their inappropriate treatment by men in the workplace as an example of hermeneutical injustice. Owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, women were unable to fully express workplace experiences without the concept of sexual harassment and the legal and social assumption the concept now communicates (for example, “boys will be boys” does not justify inappropriate touching in the workplace). The lack of a shared concept, “sexual harassment,” harmed women in terms of physical and mental stress, but it also occasioned an “epistemic harm” because the experience of women was unintelligible to others.

This online experiment examined how Iranian women and men (N = 525; 321 women, 204 men) perceived a heterosexual rape encounter depending on the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator. Participants read a vignette describing a non-consensual sexual encounter in which the victim and the perpetrator were either married or dating. They then indicated victim blame, certainty of rape judgement, and punishment attribution to the perpetrator. Women and men blamed the married victim more and were less likely to judge the marital encounter as rape, with larger differences between conditions for men than for women in exonerating the married perpetrator. Stronger honour and religious beliefs predicted more victim blaming, lower rape certainty judgements, and lower punishment, more so in marital rape than date rape. The discussion highlights the need to recognise rape in various victim-perpetrator scenarios beyond stranger rape and to address the societal context that condones and perpetuates sexual violence against women.

The molecular target of antidepressants: J. Perez 1, S. Mori 2, D. Tardito 3, R. Zanardi 1, E. Smeraldi 1, M. Popoli 2, G. Racagni 2,3. 1Istituto Scientifico H. San Raffaele, Dep. of Neuropsychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Milan; 2Center of Neuropharmacology, University of Milan; 3I.R.C.C.S. Centro San Giovanni di Dio-Fratebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy

Victims of rape sometimes suffer from being blamed for their assault. This cross-cultural field experiment investigated victim blame with respect to victim–perpetrator relationship, benevolent sexism (BS), hostile sexism (HS) and belief in a just world (BJW). Participants were recruited in the United Kingdom (N = 75) and Sweden (N = 83). Participants read a vignette depicting either a date rape or a stranger rape and rated the level of victim blame. The victim of a date rape was blamed more than a victim of stranger rape and benevolent sexism was the only significant predictor of this blame. There were differences between British and Swedish informants in BS, HS and BJW, but not level of victim blame.

This paper identifies and analyses a novel species of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (HI). Fricker’s traditional account analyses HI in terms of a collective conceptual gap. (Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Building on this, Simion’s analysis (in: Bondy P, Carter JA (eds) Well-founded belief: new essays on the epistemic basing relation. Routledge, New York, 2019) suggests the phenomenon is broader, and thus more ubiquitous: specifically, that agents who have been hermeneutically marginalised can be susceptible to HI through failing to ground their social experience in conceptual resources that are already available. This paper advances the literature further and presents a novel strand of the phenomena, where agents both have, and base, their experience on available concepts but are still subject to HI. I argue that this is an important species of HI that should be investigated and accounted for, and I suggest that in virtue of being hermeneutically marginalised, often agents only have available to them defective or oppressive concepts. I further provide a case study of what this can look like online and new concerns social media presents for this kind of HI. CW: Mentions of transphobia, racism, sexism, rape.

Miranda Fricker (2007) explains that hermeneutical injustice occurs when an area of one’s social experience is obscured from collective understanding. However, Fricker focuses only on the injustice suffered by those who cannot render intelligible their own oppression. I argue that there is another side to hermeneutical injustice that is other-oriented; an injustice that occurs when one cannot understand, to a basic extent, the oppression of others. Specifically, I discuss the hermeneutical injustice suffered by nonhuman animals made possible by objectifying concepts available in the collective hermeneutical resource.

Hermeneutical injustice is an epistemic injustice that happens when a person's experience cannot be well understood or articulated because of the problem with the collective hermeneutical resource -- a collection of concepts and words that we use to understand one's experience and to communicate with one another about it. Previously, Miranda Fricker and Rebecca Mason have suggested two types of hermeneutical injustice: Hermeneutical Gap and Hermeneutical Distortion. Fricker believes that hermeneutical injustice is a gap between hermeneutical resources, whereas Mason suggests the collective hermeneutical resource can also be distorted when the words and concepts that comprise it are inferentially related in ways that are invalid or inductively weak. However, in this paper, I identify a novel type of hermeneutical injustice that I call Hermeneutical Weakening. In a case of HW, hermeneutical injustice is neither caused by the collective hermeneutical resource being deficient nor it being distorted, but due to it being weakened. I define Hermeneutical Weakening as the loss of word significance when the lexical effect of the word is weakened due to overuse. I then differentiate hermeneutical weakening from both hermeneutical gap and distortion. In particular, I analyze the subtle differences between weakening and distortion and argue the lexical effect can also be weakened through non-literal uses of words when the literal standard meaning of words to which distortion tied is suspended. Finally, I explain the generation of hermeneutical weakening and how it is also a form of oppression of the marginalized group generated systematically under the social system.

This chapter defends a novel view of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (HEI). To this effect, it starts by arguing that Miranda Fricker’s account is too restrictive: hermeneutical epistemic injustice is more ubiquitous than her account allows. That is because, contra Fricker, conceptual ignorance is not necessary for HEI: hermeneutical epistemic injustice essentially involves a failure in concept application rather than in concept possession. Further on, I unpack hermeneutical epistemic injustice as unjustly brought about basing failure. Last, I show that, if this view is right, HEI is a form of distributive injustice, and affords the corresponding traditional normative theorizing.

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Background: Date rape is a type of acquaintance rape wherein non-consensual sex occurs between two people who are in a romantic relationship. The aim of the present study was to find out the pattern of date rape cases in Imphal. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study was carried out in our center on all the cases of alleged sexual assault cases during the period of 7 years, i.e., from 2007 to 2013. A case of sexual assault where the victim and the offender are or have been in some of personal social relationship has been considered as a case of date rape. A detailed study of the history given by the police and the victim, and the medical examination findings was carried out and the findings were analyzed. Results: Out of the total 210 cases of alleged sexual assault cases, 17 (8%) were date rape victims. Most of the victims of date rape were Meitei girls below the age of 20 years (70.5%), and 58.8% of these cases were assaulted in the afternoon and 52.9% of the assaults occurred in restaurants. The history of consumption of beverage in the form of alcohol offered by the perpetrator was present in 52.9% of the cases. Conclusion: The true incidence of such cases may be higher than identified because of non-reporting. The exact type of the drug/agent used in some of the cases could not be established because of delayed reporting and untimely collection of samples. The spread of consciousness of date rape among the young girls is indeed a need of the hour. They may be advised to be cautious and avoid suspicious food or drinks.

Forensic urinalysis of drug use in cases of alleged sexual assault

In this study we investigated the effects of gender and gender roles upon attitudes toward rape among 432 female and 368 male college students in Turkey whose mean age was 22.08 (SD = 2.09). The Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and measures of attributions toward date rape and stranger rape, and myths scenarios were used. All 3 scenarios were given to each participant. It was hypothesized that women would attribute less responsibility than men would to the rape victim, more responsibility to the assailant, and describe the assault as a serious crime. Women and men who have masculine gender roles were expected to attribute more responsibility to the rape victim and less responsibility to the assailant and show higher tolerance of the assault than would those in the other classified gender roles. Both men and women were expected to attribute more responsibility to the victim of a date rape and less responsibility to the date rape assailant and show higher tolerance of date rape than stranger rape. Results indicated that gender, but not gender role, was an important factor in Turkish college students' attitudes toward date rape. Women and men shared a similar point of view on stranger rape, but date rape was considered less serious than stranger rape. Gender role was not a significant factor in attitudes toward rape.