High profile rape trials and policy advocacy

Activists try to use high profile trials to advance their political agendas, and we want to understand why they occasionally succeed in promoting policy reforms. We begin by reviewing literature on agenda setting and social problem construction, conceptualising high profile trials as “focusing events” that offer activists a chance to advance their definitions and remedies for particular social problems. We next outline the feminist movement against sexual violence as a useful example of activists trying to use trials for their own political purposes. Using events data from the New York Times and the secondary treatment of 13 high profile trials from 1960 to 1997, we examine factors that help or hinder activists’ efforts to use a trial to forward their cause. We see that both the nature of the trial and the political context surrounding it affect the likelihood that a movement gains control of its meaning and secures policy reform.