Victoria Bates. Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England

This carefully argued and fascinating study demonstrates that medical witnesses played a significant role in constructing and reinforcing rape myths in the years 1850-1914, a period of growing public concern about sexual offences and working-class sexuality. The principal novelty of Bates’s approach lies in its focus on age. Legally defined age categories of sexual consent did not necessarily mirror popular understandings of the difference between “child” and “adult,” while at the same time medicine was preoccupied with puberty as a transitional period between these two life stages. In contrast to the modern historiographical distinction between “child sexual abuse” and “rape,” Bates’s analysis highlights the historical concern to define the individual victims of sexual assault, not the perpetrators or the crime itself. This refocusing illustrates the fact that pubescent girls were the most problematic age group; their ability to consent to sexual contact was evaluated on a case-by-case basis irrespective of legal thresholds, set variously at ten, twelve, thirteen and sixteen years of age. Medicine provided a scientific rationale “for prevailing middle-class thought on age, gender, class and sexuality” (17).

BATES · Criminology · Family medicine · Historiography · Human sexuality · Medical emergency · Period (music) · Poison control · Political science · Sexual abuse · Sexual contact · Sociology · Suicide prevention · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine · Psychology

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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