In her article, “Ruined”, Maybell Romero adopts an autoethnographic methodology to examine the harms judges cause by using the adjective “ruined” to describe sexual assault victims.
Romero takes us to a sentencing hearing in Utah, where she was a prosecutor for rape and sexual assault cases, and recounts how a sentencing judge referred to the rape victim as “ruined.” This experience shook her. The description of a rape victim as ruined triggered her as someone who had also experienced rape. Was she too ruined?
By explicitly centering how her personal history shaped her as a legal insider within the criminal system (prosecutor), she makes transparent what so many legal scholars try to hide—that our experiences in life shape our experiences in law. What I mean by this is who we are as people affect how we interpret the law, examine the law, advocate within it. This simple fact might be unremarkable to scholars in the humanities or other disciplines, but it is disorienting for some legal scholars who embrace the appearance of objectivity even when the substance of their work reveals subjective premises and biases that they are unwilling to confront. Professor Romero avoids this trap. Her choice to adopt an autoethnographic methodology is honest. The article openly meditates on how she personally experienced the legal phenomenon of judges’ use of the word ruined and is an example of the value of express subjectivity in scholarship. I think personal experiences can add to the expertise that one has in a subject. Transparently acknowledging that our experiences affect us as legal insiders (law professors) allows for textured legal scholarship that is informed by experience rather than fabricated from ivory towers, or even worse, rationalized and cloaked with legal doctrine when it is in fact prompted and motivated by the author’s personal biases.
But the transparency of her choice to put herself into the scholarship is not the only thing that makes this article remarkable. Romero shares her experience of rape, a crime that she describes as exceptional in experience and harm although we work in a profession marked by impersonality and performative neutrality. Her colleagues, her students, and others now know about her experience of rape. Her story of rape includes familial trauma and the exposure of personal relationships riddled with horror. Her vulnerability in this piece is laudable, but her positionality as someone who has experienced the trauma of rape makes her especially qualified to assess how a rape victim might experience judges marking them as ruined.
And labeling someone as ruined is a marking. Ruined means “the physical destruction or disintegration of something or the state of disintegrating or being destroyed.” Ruined reflects a permanence. A complete destruction of the person. It is an irrevocable status, and when the highest authority within a courtroom – the judge – labels a victim ruined, it is a permanent marking of the person’s disintegration. Romero experienced the harm of this labeling as she sat in courtrooms listening to judges repeatedly mark rape victims ruined. She was able to identify the issues with this labelling because of her subjective position in society, and she is using the tools of the law, which include legal scholarship, to address this harm that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Romero argues judges should embrace non-stigmatizing language that does not reduce all rape victims to ruined women (people). While women are clearly not the only victims of rape, Romero persuasively argues that rape cases with women victims received greater law enforcement support during her investigations and prosecutions. The woman victim was the conceptualized ideal. The impulse to label rape victims as ruined illustrates the value placed on a woman’s virtue. The rapist robs a woman of her virtue by taking away the thing that makes her valuable in society. A woman’s virtue is tied to her ability to be a dutiful wife and mother. It reflects her ability to reproduce the next generation. So, from the perspective of the misogynist, a woman who has her purity taken from her is permanently destroyed. Historically, the greatest assault of a rape is not just to the woman directly but to the men around her who had some ownership interest in her sexuality.1 Historically, the woman’s sexuality belonged to her husband or father, and when the rapist took it from them, it made the woman permanently less valuable to the men around her. Within this historical framework, the raped woman truly does appear ruined. The law should not embrace this misogynistic perspective of womanhood.
As Robert Cover recognized, “A legal tradition includes not only a corpus juris, but also a language and a mythos – narratives in which the corpus juris is located by those whose wills act upon it.”2 Romero’s piece invites judges to embrace a language that rejects a narrative that reduces rape victims to the permanent status of ruination. Given the legal history of rape, the direct harm that might flow from labeling someone permanently destroyed, and Maybell’s personal account of how she experienced the use of the term, I am persuaded that judges should avoid this term. I hope others in the legal academy are similarly moved by this remarkable article.
- See Anna High, Sexual Dignity and Rape Law, 33 Yale J.L. & Feminism 1, 8–9 (2022) (“The harm of rape has historically been framed as an affront to (white, landholding) male dignity–by violating (trespassing on) another man’s wife or unmarried daughter (property) without his consent, the rapist undermined the patriarch’s authority and honor (sex within marriage, by definition, involved no such affront to dignity, regardless of whether the woman consented).”).
- Robert M. Cover, Nomos and Narrative, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4, 9 (1983).
