STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY: THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AS A SPACE FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF SITUATED KNOWLEDGE OF GENDER VIOLENCE VICTIMS

Abstract

This article proposes a theoretical articulation between standpoint epistemology and the notion of testimonial injustice, aiming to analyze how the criminal justice system operates as a space for the suppression of the situated knowledge of gender violence victims. Drawing on the Marxist and feminist tradition of standpoint epistemology, particularly the contributions of Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins, it is argued that the claim to technical neutrality in legal discourse conceals a particular standpoint, that of the dominant group, which structures the production of procedural truth. Furthermore, building on the concept of strong objectivity developed by Sandra Harding, it is argued that the objectivity of judicial decisions can be epistemically enhanced when adjudication takes historically marginalized perspectives as its starting point and critically examines the interpreter's own assumptions. On these grounds, it is sustained that the suppression of the victim's situated knowledge operates, in criminal proceedings, primarily as a structural deficit in testimonial credibility, in Miranda Fricker's sense of testimonial injustice. Three fronts in which this testimonial injustice demands the judge's attention in the assessment of evidence in gender violence proceedings are demonstrated: the reading of victim recantation in light of Brazilian Superior Court of Justice case law, attentive to the risk of structural coercion over the victim's epistemic agency; the interpretation of psychological and psychiatric expert reports, attentive to the mismatch between the logic of traumatic memory and the logic of narrative coherence demanded by criminal proceedings; and the very position of the judge, whose claim to neutrality is itself untenable in light of standpoint epistemology. The article concludes that the articulation between these frameworks provides the necessary grounding to make visible what the law's claimed neutrality conceals: that judging without listening to what the victim knows as knowledge is, in itself, a form of exercise of power.