Abstract
‘No sane man can believe, that a woman of average height and strength, and not overcome by drugs, could be violated by one man’.1 These were the words of gynaecologist Lawson Tait in an 1894 article on sexual offences against females. Tait used knowledge of the ‘average’ woman’s body to justify the expectation that she could, and should, fight off an attempted offence. His work suggests that he was more cynical than most of his peers, as he published widely about the prevalence of false claims in rape trials, but was not alone in believing in a normal woman’s capacity to resist. The Medical Press had published similar comments in July 1890: ‘[g]enerally speaking, few medical men of experience believe much in rape in the case of a moderately healthy and vigorous woman’.2 Such claims were grounded in the belief that a man could not achieve penetration of a woman who resisted to her utmost, as articulated through the rape myth that it was ‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard’.3 As late as 1913 the US Police Surgeon Gurney Williams pointed out in International Clinics, published in London and Philadelphia, that mere ‘crossing of the knees’ would prevent rape.4
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Notes
Lawson Tait, ‘An Analysis of the Evidence in Seventy Consecutive Cases of Charges made under the New Criminal Law Amendment Act’, Provincial Medical Journal, 1 May 1894, 226–235, p. 227.
On this myth see Joanna Bourke, ‘Sexual Violation and Trauma in Perspective’, Arbor-Ciencia Pensamiento Y Cultura 743 (2010), 407–16, p. 410.
Gurney Williams, ‘Rape in Children and in Young Girls’, International Clinics 23 (1913), 245–67.
Lydia Morris, Dangerous Classes: The Underclass and Social Citizenship (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 2.
Alfred Swaine Taylor, Medical Jurisprudence, 4th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1852 [1844]), p. 587.
Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer and Parish Officer, 30th edn, vol. 1 (London: H. Sweet, Maxwell & Son and Stevens & Sons, 1869), p. 309–10.
David Taylor, Hooligans, Harlots, and Hangmen: Crime and Punishment in Victorian Britain (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), p. 119.
Steve Hedley, ‘Brett, William Baliol, First Viscount Esher (1815–1899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3350> (accessed 23 July 2015).
Thomas Dixon, ‘The Tears of Mr Justice Willes’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17 (2012), 1–23, p. 2.
Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘“The Body Evidencing the Crime”: Rape on Trial in Colonial India, 1860–1947’, Gender & History 22 (2010), 109–30.
Throughout the editions of Taylor’s Manual … and Principles and Practice he claimed that women could resist, setting aside only ‘infants, idiots, lunatics, and weak and delicate females’. Only one of these categories was deemed a natural product of age, until Taylor added older women in 1910. For example see Taylor, Medical Jurisprudence, 4th edn, p. 587; Alfred Swaine Taylor, The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, ed. Thomas Stevenson, 6th edn, vol. 2 (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1910 [1865]), p. 112.
Charles Roberts, ‘The Physical Maturity of Women’, The Lancet, 25 July 1885, 149–50, p. 149.
Francis Ogston’s 1878 Lectures on Medical Jurisprudence described one nine-year-old complainant as ‘precocious’ because her ‘familiarity with the usual details connected with sexual intercourse showed that she was no stranger to the subject’; Francis Ogston, Lectures on Medical Jurisprudence (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1878), p. 93.
J. Matthews Duncan, ‘Gulstonian Lectures on Sterility in Woman’, The Lancet, 31 March 1883, 517–29, p. 529.
William A. Guy and David Ferrier, Principles of Forensic Medicine, 5th edn (London: H. Renshaw, 1881 [1844]), p. 71.
Taylor, Principles and Practice, vol. 1 (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1865), p. 19.
Stephen Robertson, ‘Signs, Marks, and Private Parts: Doctors, Legal Discourses, and Evidence of Rape in the United States, 1823–1930’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1998), 345–88, p. 348.
Carolyn A. Conley, ‘Rape and Justice in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 29 (1986), 519–36, p. p. 520.
Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 121.
Rees also notes that ‘[a]ttrition rate studies have discovered that attacks similar to that described by the “real rape” discourse are actually quite rare’; Gethin Rees, ‘“It is Not for Me to Say Whether Consent Was Given or Not”: Forensic Medical Examiners’ Construction of “Neutral Reports” in Rape Cases’, Social & Legal Studies 19 (2010), 371–86, p. 372.
Judge Wild cited in Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 35.
Hilaire Barnett, Britain Unwrapped: Government and Constitution Explained (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 14.
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© 2016 Victoria Bates
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Bates, V. (2016). Consent: Violence and the Vibrating Scabbard. In: Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441720_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441720_5
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