#MeToo, Men’s Sexual Violence against Women and the Chilling Effect of Defamation Lawsuits: A Feminist Critique of the Swedish Criminal Justice System

Sammanfattning: #MeToo became in 2017 a strong and successful movement in Sweden where women exercised their freedom of expression to question structural injustice and men’s sexual violence against women. The movement broke the silence and stigma about being victim of men’s sexual violence and helped fight impunity. However, some of the #MeToo women in Sweden who told their stories also pointed out their perpetrators. Consequently, five of those women were met with a chilling and silencing legal consequence: defamation lawsuits. When examining the interrelation between freedom of expression, men’s sexual violence against women, and defamation under Swedish law, it was found that to disseminate information about being victim of sexual violence and name your perpetrator, constituted the crime of defamation. Moreover, defamation constitutes a lawful restriction on freedom of expression under IHRL. It is meant to protect the reputation of an individual and is applied objectively and equally for all. However, because of deeply rooted discriminatory practices in the Swedish society, such restriction can impose a disproportionate interference with freedom of expression under Articles 19 and 26 in conjunction with Articles 2 and 3 of the ICCPR and Article 5 of the CEDAW. One of the most extreme expressions of such discriminatory practice is men’s sexual violence against women, which restrict women’s freedom of expression because of stigma, fear, and impunity. It is also caused by the inability of the Swedish criminal justice system to handle men’s sexual violence against women, and often women are reproduced in court in as untrustworthy, sexualized subjects that do not fit into the realm of the autonomous legal subject. Serious defamation cases often involve sexual violence, and they affect men and women differently. Women are often victims of being posed in sexualized context, while men are often accused of being sex criminals. The #MeToo defamation cases involve the latter, where the women who claimed they had been victims of sexual violence and had achieved no justice became the perpetrators of a defamation crime. The result of my research shows that the #MeToo cases constitutes a societal, structural, and legal complexity between freedom of expression, men’s sexual violence against women, and defamation. In the Swedish criminal justice system, because of its objective assessment, such complexity not only position women victims of sexual violence as criminals who have overstepped the boundaries of Swedish defamation law. Women are once again reproduced as a sexualized and untrustworthy subjects, whose freedom of expression is limited. As a result, it causes a discriminatory interference with Articles 19 and 26 in conjunction with 2 and 3 of the ICCPR and Article 5 of the CEDAW.