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Violence Against Women in Europe and America, Part II

© Joseph Sramek

While rape was not a major source of anxiety in the early nineteenth century compared with anxiety about attacks on property, these set of attitudes were to change in the course of the nineteenth century in France. In 1832, the law codes concerning rape were changed to include an offense for “brutality not directly physical” in nature. (p. 132) Furthermore, by the middle of the century, the relationship between violence and non-consent began to be radically rethought. The basis on which Ancien Regime, Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and early nineteenth century French cultures condemned child rape—that a violent act was committed against an “innocent” child with no consent—gradually became extended to adult women in the late nineteenth century. (p. 134) This coincided with the realization later on in the century that crimes against children needed to be considered separate from those against adult women; that the “child was no longer… the ‘normal’ equivalent of an adult victim.” (p. 166) However, even as crime of rape against an adult woman was taken far more seriously by the late nineteenth century than previously, many doctors and judges continued to equate sexual crime with its impact on morals rather than its impact on “the personal and sensitive.” (p. 197)

Nevertheless, a great amount of change occurred, evidenced by the far greater focus paid to sexual violence than to physical violence “in the preoccupations of both public and press” by the late nineteenth century. (p. 201) Patriarchy, although it surely did not disappear, was, Vigarello argues, dramatically weakened by this new set of sensibilities. (p. 215) Societal tolerance for violence against women, even within marriage, dramatically ebbed over the course of the twentieth century as women gained rights long denied them in the public sphere. This heightened sensitivity has extended to the category of child abuse, which has become the “ultimate horror, the extreme violence.” (p. 225)

Whereas Vigarello argues that rape is nowadays considered to be a horrible crime, worse still if committed against a child, Anna Clark describes an England where this was not so. While rape of children by men was widely condemned, rape of adult women not only was considered to be perfectly acceptable, but was also considered by British society at large from the early nineteenth century onward to be the woman’s fault. (Clark, p. 42) Charting the history of the development of what she calls the “rape myth,” Clark argues that rape increasingly during the early nineteenth century became discursively used as a means of regulating and reinforcing gendered boundaries of the then emerging system of separate spheres. The myth of rape, Clark explains, was the chief means by which women were frightened from entering the public sphere.