Complicating Consent: A Study of the Rhetorical Strategies Employed to Interrupt Rape Myths in the Prosecutor v. Kunarac

The justices in the trial of the Prosecutor v. Kunarac were able to interrupt the rape myths that generally exist in rape trials by complicating the notion of consent. In this paper I argue that the justices de-naturalize common myths about consent by relying on the details of victim testimony and the context of the war to fill in the gaps between testimony and lived experience. Rather than allowing rape myths like "she asked for it" to explain the complicated stories of sexual violence during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina the justices use a new definition of rape that broadens consent to allow more of the contextual details of the war and each attack to count as valid evidence