Rape and the Legal Process
There were significant boundaries to reporting rapes during this time period, and as now, many sexual crimes likely went unreported. At the time, rape/criminal assault was conceived of as a violent crime, where a woman was attacked with force, and the failure to “properly resist” a man’s advances could be used against a woman’s claim of rape. Because of this, a significant portion of news reports on rape concerned men who were caught red-handed, in the act, by third-party observers. Over time, the prosecution of rape increasingly focused on young girls and female children, as their very age and implicit innocence made them “better victims” within the legal system than adult women. This led to an infantilization of rape victims and an emphasis on the loss of innocence and virginity, to the detriment of victims long past their girlhood. (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): 469)
There were several instances in the reporting on rape where capital punishment was either sentenced or carried out; rape still had the potential to be a capital crime, along with murder, burglary, and arson, but the majority of the cases encountered in this period were not treated as capital cases, and those that were tended to have extenuating factors (such as murder or incest). The majority of the cases which I encountered during my research, (where sentencing information was available), involved prison sentences or sentences “on the roads,” which constituted hard labor.
There was also a not-insignificant number of cases in which the perpetrator was killed during or after the act, on the part of those interceding to save the woman. Lynchings were not uncommon in cases that black alleged perpetrators were caught in the act with a white alleged victim, and those who fled after attempting criminal assault were sometimes shot and killed in the attempt to capture them. Overall, the treatment of these lynchings were fairly neutral; the newspaper’s tone did not seem to encourage them, but little protest was made about them, either.
To prevent any confusion, "Arrest" constituted instances where the suspect was taken into custody by the police and transported to jail. “Arraignment” is the formal reading of a criminal charge against a defendant.
In this chart, you can see how criminal assaults/rapes were reported on in The Caucasian. Sentencing, pardoning, and the trials themselves comprised a minority of the articles reported in the paper, while accounts of the crime itself, the arrest of a suspect, and their arraignment comprised a significant portion of the articles within the dataset. In this case, the designation “extralegal” means a vigilante treatment of the offender, usually through lynching.