Gender
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, criminal assault/rape was intrinsically defined as a crime committed against a woman, and as such, men were unable to be considered victims of this particular crime. Similarly, the prosecution of female perpetrators of sexual violence was vanishingly rare, and women being charged specifically with “criminal assault” was practically non-existent. The highly gendered nature of the legal system’s treatment of rape/criminal assault informed reporting on the crime, as news articles frequently sensationalized the crime by characterizing the female victims as innocent, naive, and childlike, while the men who attacked them were portrayed as beastly, brutish, and uncontrollable. The portrayal of the victims of rape/criminal assault as being innocent and naive played into the idea that rape was a crime against the honor and morality of a woman, as much as it was a crime against her individual bodily autonomy. Women with “bad reputations,” prostitutes, those with criminal histories or mental problems, and even those who simply didn’t fight back hard enough, would have an extremely difficult time bringing charges against those who assaulted them. Additionally, because rape was viewed as a violent, forceful crime against morals, rape against one’s spouse or by deception was generally not prosecuted. According to Estelle B. Freedman, “Rape is a troubling and elusive subject. As a crime it has been defined in Anglo-American law as the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will (and, until recently, by a man other than her husband).” (Estelle Freedman, “”Crimes which startle and horrify”: Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, 3 (2011): 465)