ABSTRACT

This contribution provides an outline of a discourse analytical approach to legislation, mainly based on SKAD. This approach aims at the analysis of law-making processes by means of an exploration of different discourses, in terms of divergent institutional knowledge orders, competing in the legislative process, and their effects on the concrete definition of laws. Exemplified by the victims’ rights in the amended Penal Procedure Code in Austria, this discourse analytical approach to legislation shall be demonstrated and discussed. The case study explores different victim discourses circulating in the law-making process as well as victim-related patterns of interpretation constitutive for those discourses, in order to reconstruct the process of discursive construction of the “victim” as a new category in criminal procedure law. The analysis is performed on the basis of official documents from the legislative process (draft laws, minutes of parliamentary sessions etc.). By using SKAD, it can be shown that the Austrian reform of penal procedure was determined by a competition of two essentially different victim discourses (“injured person” vs. “victim”). The enforcement of the concept of the “victim” by victim protection organisations enabled the implementation of a number of further legal rights and protection measures for victims of violence. As a crucial strategy, a discursive feminisation of the victim can be identified, providing for a victim-friendly climate for negotiations by calling on latent patriarchal protection motivations inherent in the modern constitutional state.