Carlos Zelada Acuna

What is the title of your research, and what is it about?

My research is titled The ‘Feminisation’ of IHRL Models of Adjudication in Cases of Sexual Violence. It examines how IHRL tribunals have constructed their models for adjudicating sexual violence over the past decades. I focus particularly on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

I use the term ‘feminisation’ deliberately and critically. Women are, of course, the primary victims of sexual violence, and feminist legal thinking was crucial in making forms of violence that had long remained invisible to international law legally recognisable. The cases that reached the Inter-American Court reflected that reality: most involved women subjected to sexual violence, often by male perpetrators.

My argument, however, is that these cases gradually produced models of adjudication built around particular assumptions about the ‘ideal’ victim and perpetrator. Those assumptions have been extremely productive in allowing judges to identify sexual violence against women and to understand its gendered nature. But they have also generated adjudicative and evidentiary assumptions that international judges and litigants now tend to reproduce when deciding what sexual violence looks like, why it occurs, and who can be recognised as its victim.

The difficulty arises when a case does not fit that model — for example, when the victim is a man, or when the purpose of the violence does not correspond to the paradigm around which the case law developed. One of the findings of my research is that the Court has struggled to recognise sexual violence against men as sexual violence, even when similar acts committed against women have been readily recognised as such.

So, ‘feminisation’ describes a paradox. The transformation of the Court’s jurisprudence made sexual violence visible in international human rights law, but the models of adjudication produced by that transformation can themselves generate new forms of invisibility. My research examines both that extraordinary legal achievement and its limits.

Who is your supervisor?

My supervisor is Professor Jonathan Herring. His work on criminal law, family law, vulnerability and care has been particularly valuable in helping me think critically about some of the assumptions underlying legal responses to sexual violence and, more broadly, about the ways in which law constructs vulnerability and victimhood.

How did you come up with your research topic?

The project grew very directly out of my professional experience. Before beginning my DPhil, I spent around ten years working at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. I therefore had the opportunity to observe from inside the Inter-American Human Rights System how legal categories develop and, importantly, how they can transform the way in which certain forms of violence become visible to international law.

I became particularly interested in the extraordinary transformation of the Inter-American Court’s case law on sexual violence. Conduct that had once been overlooked, or treated as incidental to other human rights violations, gradually came to be recognised as sexual violence, torture and gender-based violence. Feminist advocacy and legal thinking played an essential role in that transformation.

But as I began looking more closely at that jurisprudence, I became interested in its boundaries. I started asking what happens when a victim of sexual violence does not resemble the victim around whom those legal categories were originally constructed. Would the same legal and evidentiary presumptions work if the victim were a man? And can international law recognise sexual violence when its perpetrators, circumstances or purposes differ from the paradigm it has learned to recognise? At Oxford, my early discussions with Dr Shreya Atrey were particularly important in helping me turn those initial intuitions into a more clearly defined research problem. 

Why did you choose Oxford to undertake research in Criminal Law?

Although my project sits primarily within international human rights law, it engages closely with questions that are also central to criminal law: how law defines sexual violence, how it understands consent and coercion, how it constructs victimhood, and how assumptions about gender influence legal reasoning.

Oxford was especially attractive to me because of the strength of its scholarship in these areas. My research is primarily doctrinal: I am interested in reconstructing the development of the Inter-American Court’s case law and identifying the legal assumptions that have shaped it. But doing that also requires thinking critically about the concepts of sexual violence, gender and victimhood that underpin the Court’s legal reasoning. Oxford offered an exceptional intellectual environment in which to pursue those questions, and that made it an ideal place for the project.

How do you hope your research will contribute to law and society?

I hope the research makes two contributions. The first is doctrinal: to provide a clearer account of the evolution of the Inter-American Court’s understanding of sexual violence, and to identify the legal and evidentiary assumptions that shaped that evolution. The Inter-American System has made an extraordinary contribution to the international legal understanding of sexual and gender-based violence, and I hope my research helps explain how that happened.

The second contribution is more critical. One of the central ideas behind the project is that legal progress can itself create new forms of invisibility. The categories developed to recognise and protect one group of victims can become the template through which all victims are subsequently understood. When that happens, people whose experiences do not fit the template may once again become difficult for the law to see.

By examining sexual violence against victims who do not conform to the paradigmatic model around which much of the existing jurisprudence was constructed, I hope the research can contribute to a more inclusive understanding of sexual violence and victimhood without losing the insights that feminist legal thinking brought to this field in the first place. Ultimately, the broader ambition of the project is quite simple: to help ensure that the law can recognise sexual violence even when the person who experiences it does not look like the victim the law has learned to expect.

This interview was conducted in September 2026 by Megan Smith-Dobric (DPhil in Law candidate, Wolfson College, Oxford).