On rape and property: How legal relations create spaces of violence

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This project seeks to understand the relationship between rape and property. It begins from the empirical observation that sexual violence is particularly prevalent within certain spaces: homes, prisons, contracts for marriage and sex work, and detention centres. While appeals to the sanctity of marriage and family or to the necessity of prisons tend to construct these institutions as natural, they are in fact products of legal and social practices. The central hypothesis of this project is that underlying these apparently very different spaces are common property relations deeply imbricated within practices of sexual violence, through spatialized legal relations of exclusion and enclosure. To test this hypothesis, I analyse US caselaw on sexual violence from the 1870's to the present day as it is indexed to space and property: incest and child sexual abuse within the home; rape in prisons and detention centers; and marital and sex worker rape within contractual space.