ABSTRACT
This chapter elucidates a host of additional ideological problems that constitute significant barriers to changing the legal responses to sexual assault. It explores how the legal process frequently results in experiences of secondary victimisation for victims/survivors. Feminist analyses are useful in assisting us to understand the impact of patriarchal ideology on workings of the legal system, and how this is borne out in specific legal processes and problems. The difficulties for practitioners engaged in supporting victims/survivors who access the legal system have been described as 'a crisis of witnessing'. The significant problems in the legal system are not discrete, but intersect to compound disadvantage for victims/survivors in multiple and complex ways. Given that feminism is a modernist emancipatory project that seeks to end the gendered oppression and exploitation of women, feminist projects seek such change through social and political reform via the development of liberty, democracy, human rights, the eradication of poverty and oppression.
