Gender & Rape Coverage
The legal definition of rape in West Virginia specifically refers to rape as a crime that can only be committed against women. Since boys and men were considered physically unable to be defenseless enough for a rape to occur, rape against boys or men legally fell under the crime of sodomy instead.
A majority of the cases of rape that the Intelligencer provides coverage of support the claim that coverage of rape is primarily a crime of men against women and children. Of the total 30 stories from 1880 and 1900, there were 25 that specified a male offender and a female victim, 4 that specified a male offender but the gender of the victim was unspecified, and one story that specified a male offender and a male victim.
2 specific cases from 1880 show the relationship between gender and the interpretation of credibility within the Intelligencer that reflects Freedman’s argument about how women as victims were deemed more credible if they were young, chaste, white women, and men were only credible as offenders if they were lower class and usually if they were black or had some sort of bad reputation. In a local story, “Local Laconics,” a man was charged with attempted rape, but the story mentions that the alleged victim, a Mary Clark, had an “unsavory reputation,” and the opinion of the paper was that the “charge is trumped up against” the alleged offender. In another story from 1880, a police officer from Bellaire, Ohio was accused of attempting to rape a woman, who even showed bruising as evidence, but the officer was discharged and most people believed that it was a false accusation instigated by the officer’s enemies. So, the police officer, as a man with local authority, is deemed more credible than the woman who has physical evidence, and the accusation against man from the first story was dismissed because the victim was considered incredible because of her bad reputation.
The story about the male offender and the male victim represents an anomaly in Freedman’s argument about gender and rape, as the article, “Jailed on a Very Nasty Allegation,” refers to the criminal assault of a local Wheeling 7 year-old boy by a man working at the cemetery. The supports Freedman’s argument about the relationship between rape and age, however, as the boy is still very young and this would have been a very sensational story, as the paper refers to the crime as “the most repulsive in the criminal calendar” and mentions that “the details of the assault” were “too filthy to appear in public print.” It is significant that this story describes the crime the cemetery worker was arrested for as criminal assault and not sodomy.