Acts of balance: emotional double binds among legal professionals in rape trials

This article examines how Danish legal professionals manage competing demands and emotional tensions in rape trials following the introduction of a consent-based law reform. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 legal professionals (prosecutors, defence attorneys, judges and victims’ counsels) and observations from ten rape trials involving young people, I explore the complex balancing acts that these legal professionals, particularly defence attorneys and prosecutors, perform in such sensitive trials. Drawing on theories of emotion management and emotional double binds, the article highlights how legal professionals articulate feelings of uncertainty following the reform and identifies two emotional double binds. The first, between detachment and compassion, was most prominent among prosecutors, who must maintain objectivity while also being attentive to the rising emphasis on victim protection. The second, affecting primarily defence attorneys, involves balancing aggression and restraint to meet their clients’ demands for assertiveness while also conforming to emerging norms that condemn aggressive displays – a shift intensified by the law reform. The emotional double binds reveal that the challenges of rape trials stem not only from alleged evidentiary limitations but also from the high emotional demands placed on legal professionals who have to abide by competing and case-specific display rules. Thus, the article shows how professional display rules are evolving, overlapping and contradictory rather than stable and singular.