Visualizing sexual assault: An exploration of the use of optical technologies in the medico-legal context

This article is an exploration of the visualization of sexual assault in the context of adult women. In investigating the production of visual evidence, we outline the evolution of the specialized knowledge of medico-legal experts and describe the optical technologies involved in medical forensic examinations. We theorize that the principles and practices characterizing medicine, science and the law are mirrored in the medico-legal response to sexual assault. More specifically, we suggest that the demand for visual proof underpins the positivist approach taken in the pursuit of legal truth and that the generation of such evidence is based on producing discrete and decontextualized empirical facts through what are perceived to be objective technologies. Drawing on interview and focus group data with 14 sexual assault nurse examiners (SANEs) in Ontario, Canada, we examine perceptions and experiences of the role of the visual in sexual assault. Certain of their comments appear to lend support to our theoretical assumptions, indicating a sense of the institutional overemphasis placed on physical damage to sexually assaulted women's bodies and the drive towards the increased technologization of visual evidence documentation. They also noted that physical injuries are frequently absent and that those observed through more refined tools of microvisualization such as colposcopes may be explained away as having resulted from either vigorous consensual sex or a “trivial” sexual assault. Concerns were expressed regarding the possibly problematic ways in which either the lack or particular nature of visual evidence may play out in the legal context. The process of documenting external and internal injuries created for some an uncomfortable sense of fragmenting and objectifying the bodies of those women they must simultaneously care for. We point to the need for further research to enhance our understanding of this issue.