A child disappears: Law in the courts, law in the interstices of everyday life

Abstract

In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of a case in which an eight-year-old girl was abducted, tortured and raped. She was recovered under somewhat mysterious circumstances. In my analysis, I knit together events inside the court as reflected the judgment and related events outside the court. I try to show, first, how legal technology produced ‘facts’ in court. I then take up what seemed like minor contradictions within the documents and oral testimonies, navigate the processes through which these discrepancies were ironed out in court, resulting in a narrative that could lead to successful prosecution of the case and justice for the victim within the limits of legal proceedings. However, the same minor contradictions are later shown to have a different life in the neighbourhood from which the case originated. I argue that once we undo the solidity of the narrative that the court is obliged to fix and look at each micro-event that makes up the case, we see that truth and falsity, fact and fiction, certainty and scepticism, are mutually implicated. The stable conceptual furniture that many feminist scholars have come to expect in rape cases then begins to disperse into the finer grains of what makes up the texture of the law.