Children and Sexuality in the Victorian Period
In Britain and other Western nations, the Victorian period saw an escalating interest in the sexual abuse of girls, and consequently some of our most comprehensive historical records are from that period.
In part, this was due to the emergence of specific cultural views of childhood, which imagined girls as innocent, pure and requiring protection.[238] The nineteenth century saw a raft of protective measures aiming to impose safeguards for children in the home, the workplace, the school and the street. These targeted the children of the poor, and aimed to instil middle-class values among the working classes. A key aspect was the imposition of sexual morality: it was clear to contemporaries that young girls were suffering various forms of sexual violence. Youthful prostitutes were a visible problem on the city streets. Girls with venereal disease were presenting to public hospitals. As social workers, child welfare experts, parliamentary committees, journalists and writers began to investigate, it was claimed that incest, early pregnancy and other forms of vice and immorality were common in working-class homes and suburbs.[239]The ‘discovery' of the vulnerable child - and the need to impose moral order - led to a flurry of public discussions about age and sexuality. This stimulated debate over the age of consent, and it is worth considering the British situation at length, as it informs all debates that follow. Britain was unusual amongst European nations in its early establishment of laws around child sexual behaviour: the age of consent for girls had been set at 12 in the thirteenth century. It had largely remained 12 until 1875 when the Offences against the Person Act raised the age of consent to 13, and also increased the maximum sentence for an offender having sex with an underage girl to life imprisonment.[240] There was, however, no social consensus over the age of consent and the ending of childhood: many reformers suggested girls should be protected until the age of 21.[241] There was no corresponding ‘age of consent' for boys, and indeed boys as victims were largely absent from these debates.
In the 1880s, there was a great deal of formal and informal opposition to raising the age of consent for girls. Elite men in the House of Commons claimed that raising the age of consent might take young prostitutes off the streets, but immorality would only be driven underground. Given the perceived needs of young men for a sexual outlet, the working-class girl was to be made available, to keep the middle- and upper-class homes virtuous. In the face of a parliament reluctant to raise the age of consent, the journalist W. T. Stead published a sensational series of articles. The ‘Maiden Tribute' articles exposed an underworld of child prostitution, forced sex and the ‘white slave trade'. In the most scandalous of the articles, Stead wrote of his purchase of a girl's virginity for five pounds, and whether true or not, it stimulated a vast, unprecedented outcry over sexual danger and the ruin of young girls working in London's brothels.[242]
‘The Maiden Tribute' pressed the Conservative government into action, and the Bill to raise the age of consent was reintroduced into parliament. Many of the old oppositions still stood - for members of the House of Lords, it was their sons, not young girls, who needed protection.[243] [244] [245] Under significant public pressure, however, the Bill was passed, raising the age of consent to 16 (though carnal knowledge with a girl aged under 13 was a felony, while sex with a girl aged 13 to 16 was a misdemeanour).11 It is questionable whether the law had a significant impact on child sexual assault, and some men effectively used the defence that they believed the child was older than 16, even in cases where it was clear she was quite young. 12
Similar debates took place in other Western nations.[246] Most American states had an age of consent for girls of 10 years old. By 1895, twenty-two states had increased the age to 16 or 18 years.
Many southern states did not raise the age of consent, however, and at the turn of the century five states still set the age of consent at 10 years. Infamously, Delaware had an age of consent of 7 years.[247] Debates in the USA were similar to those we have encountered in Britain: on the one hand, there were fears over the social and economic ruin of young girls; on the other hand, there was a reluctance to punish men for sex with girls, especially those who were considered delinquent or otherwise sexually experienced.This was further complicated in the US states by troubled race relations that permeated ideas of crime and violence. Age of consent laws had not applied to slaves, and black women were seen as routinely sexually available. Child sexual assaults perpetrated on black children by white men were not a policing priority, especially in southern states.[248] [249] Instead, there was a racialisation of sexual assault, where black men were readily imagined as brutish or barbaric rapists. In many states, sexual assault of a white child by a black man would lead to harsher penalties than if the perpetrator had been white.16
Child sexual assault might be handled by the judiciary, but it was also managed through extralegal means, including mob violence. Lynching involved the ritual or actual death of the alleged perpetrator, and, at worst, his torture and mutilation. Historians of lynching argue that this form of mob violence was utilised to maintain racial hierarchies in the post-slavery society.[250] In the period from 1880 to 1920, when 90 per cent of lynchings were of African Americans, around one quarter of all lynchings had their basis in sexual violence, either real or imagined.[251] Race would also have important implications for official reactions to sexual violence, with black Americans making up the vast majority of offenders executed for sexual offences.1[252] Not all lynchings were mob law for assaults against children, of course, but young girl victims featured in many of the most violent lynchings, whether white or black men were accused.20 By the early twentieth century, the black presses were regularly reporting sexual assaults on black girls by white men, and black writers also drew attention to the fact that few of these crimes were recorded in the mainstream media.21 Nonetheless, in America and elsewhere, black men were more readily imagined as bestial, as uncontrolled, and most specifically as rapists of women and children (see Bourke, this volume for further detail on race and rape).