ABSTRACT
Some aspects of the legislation on sexual violence in Italy have been discussed in chapter 4. There my concern was with the convergence of the struggle for legislation on sexual violence with other struggles in respect of what I termed a symbolic use of criminal law and, contemporaneously, the emergence of a particular mode of assuming and attributing ‘responsibility’. It was by means of this latter, I argued, that actors were brought back into the picture: as abstractions, free of constraints, mere bearers of rights. But this story is more complex and here I shall examine its contradictory aspects, highlighting that richness which a translation into questions of criminal law risks obscuring, and with which in reality, as I have already hinted, it enters into tension. It is precisely this tension which is my interest here, both because it concerns the difficulty of reducing concrete individuals to simple (and ‘equal’) bearers of rights, and because at the same time it signals the presence of different and contradictory demands for the assumption of responsibility.
