Free Handbook on Sexual Violence by Jennifer Brown Sandra. Walklate Page B

constitution of offenders and victims especially since the nineteenth century, have all tended to define sexual violence both narrowly and imprecisely. Those who have experienced sexual violence have frequently been held as at least in part culpable. Of course, it was central to the feminist politics of Liz Kelly’s research to demonstrate the limitations of pre-existing definitions and to place the blame for sexual violence emphatically with the perpetrator. However, the idea of a continuum of violence does have some limitations in historical analysis. It is a concept that emerges out of feminist readings of modern sexual identities and
    as such mounts a powerful critique of the insidious presence of violence in contemporary sexual culture. Superficially, the same kinds of things seem to have happened through history. As a feminist researcher one recognises and empathises with the stories of those who have experienced sexual violence, even in the far distant past. However, it is also important to distinguish this emotional and political reaction from historical analysis. Historians are now sensitive to the histories of superficially timeless aspects of human existence. The body, sexuality, reproduction, intimacy and emotion are physiological and psychological ‘facts of life’ but they are also culturally produced and reproduced and shift over time in meaning and how they are experienced. It is therefore questionable how far we can read back modern formulations of sexual violence into past societies in which both violence and sexuality figured rather differently than they do today.
    This is not to say that modern feminist theory, such as the idea of the continuum of violence, has been ignored in historical analysis. Recently, gender historians have read the historical material against the grain, looking outside of the criminal justice system’s own definitions and boundaries. The historical record is inevitably incomplete and these interpretations are always contingent and often tentative, though they are expanding knowledge about the intersections of violence and sexuality over time. Furthermore, the changing nature of the sources means that different questions can be asked and answered for different periods and also the varying concerns of historians researching specific eras means that sexual violence crops up rather differently in their writing. Nevertheless, it is possible to detect changing perceptions of sexual violence in the law, medicine, psychiatry and later psychology from the nineteenth century which, by the twentieth century, coincided with recognisably modern sexualities. In the later twentieth century, a new generation of feminists challenged the blind spots about power and gender in these dominant perceptions both theoretically and politically, not least by developing concepts such as the continuum of sexual violence.

    Rape law and medieval society
    Research on the medieval period has explored the origins of the laws on sexual violence. These differed from current formulations, but established principles and assumptions which proved historically enduring, despite the changes in the social contexts of sexual violence which were brought about by centuries of historical change. Social experience of sexual violence and people’s uses of the medieval courts are harder to recover, but there are indications of tensions between the written law, legal practice and individuals’ sense of injury (Carter 1982, 1985).
    There were few cases of sexual violence in the medieval legal system and the conviction rate was significantly lower than for other crimes (Jones 2006: 78). This period saw the growth of written law and the development of criminal justice. The individual harm to women and girls was de-emphasised in new statute law on rape (Gourlay 1996). The trend was to conflate laws against rape (bodily sexual assault) with the punishment of raptus or
    ravishment (the abduction of women, in particular of virgins).