Maybell Romero on "Shamed"

Maybell Romero has posted a draft work-in-progress on SSRN titled "Shamed." The abstract previews: 

Victims of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse have long had to contend with victim blaming and victim shaming. While legal scholars have had fruitful and theoretically engaging debates regarding the validity and merits of using shaming sanctions and shaming criminal defendants, there has been precious little written about the shame that victims face, let alone a recognition that their interaction with shame as both a social force and emotion is multidimensional. In a previous piece titled “Ruined”, I examined the language judges use during sentencing hearings in sexual assault cases to describe victims, such as pronouncing them “broken,” “ruined,” or “destroyed.” This Article serves as a continuation of the inquiry I started in “Ruined” by expanding in focus. It seeks to differentiate between the related concepts of shame and stigma and explain why shaming of rape victims is so common. I propose a novel typology with which to examine a rape victim’s experience and separate the shame that victims are made to feel by the criminal adjudicative process, the shame victims are supposed to perform, and the shame victims are supposed to feel into discrete components to consider, revealing that shame in relation to such victims is multilayered and much more complex than legal scholarship has made it out to be.

I share my own experiences with each of these manifestations of shame to demonstrate the usefulness of my new typology, but I also relate how I have felt ashamed to come forward with my story as a practicing attorney as well as my experiences of being shamed in the legal academy. I conclude, however, with a note of optimism, reflecting on the positive things to have come with my very public self-disclosure of being a rape and sexual abuse victim and hoping to encourage others to employ personal narrative and autoethnographic methods in their own scholarship, as well.