The Social Memory of Sexual Violence: “You Touch One, You Touch Us All”

The social imaginary that legitimizes sexual violence is continuously reinforced by discourses that are deployed in the aftermath of physical attacks. These, in turn, nourish a specific type of collective memory from which clear social identities emerge. This article identifies the textual trajectories of social meanings associated with sexual violence and their discursive expressions in media, legal, and political discourses. The examples provided here are related to the Spanish "wolf pack case" and its social and political consequences. It concludes that the case not only generated a conceptual battle about violence but also a mnemonic dispute related to newly interpellated subjectivities.