Naming Gendered Harm: Criminal Law and the Semiotics of Legal Categories

Abstract This article asks how criminal law names gendered harm, and why those names matter. Legal categories such as “sexual assault,” “strangulation,” and “victim” do not merely describe events: they construct social reality by shaping what is rendered intelligible as harm, how seriousness is calibrated, and whose accounts are treated as credible. Drawing on two New Zealand–centred case studies—non-fatal strangulation (offence creation, charging/sentencing uptake) and sexual assault (consent/credibility doctrine and interpretive instability)—the article shows that legal naming can make harms more visible and actionable, while also transferring interpretive and institutional power to state actors who may deploy those categories in ways feminists do not control. The article treats legal meaning-making as a contested political process that unfolds over time through interpretation and institutional uptake, not as a completed technical exercise at the moment of enactment. It develops “sceptical reform” as a methodological stance: engaging law’s categories tactically while maintaining critical distance from their distortions, institutional translations, and uneven distribution of recognition.