Handbook on Sexual Violence (14 page)

The history of sexual violence therefore involves some key continuities. Sexual violence works across power differentials including but not exclusively those of gender. Many of those victimised by sexual violence have, across centuries, been disadvantaged by the criminal justice system, however much statute law and dominant discourse decried these as heinous crimes. Nevertheless, sexual cultures have shifted over time and consequently sexual violence has been differently understood, not only by criminal justice but arguably by those who have experienced and perpetrated it. Medicine and psychiatry came to shape knowledges about sexual deviance which became embedded in criminal justice, penal and eventually popular cultures and produced deviant sexual identities, not least violent ones.

The development of modernity saw a slow transition in sexual violence law which eliminated the residue of rape as a property offence and named it as individual psychological and physical injury. Eventually this enabled the recognition of sexual violence against men and boys on similar terms to that against women and girls, and the limited amount of sexual violence

perpetrated by women. The historical invisibility of much sexual violence contrasted with moments of high visibility when specific kinds of sexual assault or coercion (most often against females) have become bound up with questions of gender, society and nation. Ultimately, sexual violence disturbs metanarratives which talk about civilising processes or the growth of the modern and affective in intimate relations.

Further reading

Joanna Bourke’s
Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
(2007) is a powerful and wide- ranging analysis for the modern period, though for earlier periods much of the best recent work on sexual violence is contained in studies of gender, violence and sexuality or gender, crime and law. For the medieval period, C. J. Saunders’s
Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England
(2001) has a thorough discussion of the law as well as other literature and Barbara Hanawalt’s
‘Of Good and Ill Repute’: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England
(1998) includes a close study of a medieval rape case in the context of other kinds of gendered social control. Karen Jones’s
Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460–1560
(2006) places sexual violence in the context of gender and crime more generally. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cynthia Herrup’s A
House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven
(1999) prefaces an examination of one notorious case with a discussion of rape and sexual violence at that period. Both Garthine Walker (in particular,
Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England
(2003)) and Laura Gowing (for example,
Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England
(2003)) have much insightful analysis of how violence and sexuality intersected in Early Modern England. Randolf Trumbach’s
Sex and the Gender Revolution
, volume 1,
Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London
(1998) and Tim Hitchcock’s
English Sexualities, 1700–1800
(1997) argue for changing cultures of masculinity in the eighteenth century, with a heightened potential for sexual aggression. For the nineteenth century, Martin Wiener’s
Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England
(2004) finds that English higher courts were tougher on violent men, including rapists, in contrast to studies which emphasise how women and girls who had experienced sexual violence and abuse were disadvantaged in court. See for example Anna Clark,
Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845
(1987), Carolyn Conley’s
The Unwritten Law; Crime and Justice in Victorian Kent
(1991), Louise A. Jackson’s
Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England
(2000) and S. D’Cruze,
Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women
(1998). The highly searchable online Old Bailey Sessions Papers at http:// www.
oldbaileyonline.org give direct access to sexual violence cases between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. On the modern history of sex, violence and warfare,
Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century
(2009), edited by Dana Herzog, is a powerful collection of articles.

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