‘What about the presumption of innocence?’ Legal consciousness and himpathy in Facebook users’ comments on Flemish #MeToo scandal

Abstract

In November 2017, after receiving multiple complaints of sexual harassment, the Flemish Radio and Television Broadcasting Organization (VRT) terminated its collaboration with one of Flanders’ most popular TV personalities, Bart De Pauw. What followed was an explosion of opinions from both well-known and ordinary persons. The focus of this article is on the latter: Facebook users commenting on newspaper articles. To gather information about their legal consciousness with respect to the scandal, their comments are analysed using critical discourse analysis. The term legal consciousness refers to the ways in which ‘the law’ is invoked to evaluate and define certain behaviours that occur outside of a legal framework. Legal consciousness is apparent in the comments of social media users with references to elements of procedural justice: the presumption of innocence, to (the absence of) the right to a defence, or to the absence of any evidence. Despite the fact that the women in question have not made a claim in conventional judicial institutions, their complaints are still evaluated within such a framework. The conducted analysis seems to support the paradox identified by Gash and Harding: that law (or rather perceptions thereof) stands in the way of the objectives of an awareness movement and encourages victims of sexual abuse to remain silent (2018). In this context, it appears that commenters are plagued by ‘himpathy’, with a fixation on the harasser’s fall from grace whereby procedural rules are merely used as a decoy. A remarkable finding of this study is the total reversal of victimhood that takes place. It is found that the case at hand clearly illustrates that seizing control of the narrative is part of male dominance, even more so when the alleged perpetrator is popular and powerful.