Brittany Daniels

HIS 320
Research Paper
Professor Muller
The Earliest Image of the Victim and the Rapist
The topic of rape is complicated. The courts and the press in the early 1900s came up
with an image of what the typical victim of a rape should look like. This victim is a white middle
class girl from a young a good family who has never been involved with the law or made any
mistakes. How she could be raped was another topic in the spotlight, women and girls never had
consent, unless they fit the white middleclass prerequisite. On the other side of this rather offense
coin there is the person who is committing these crimes and what they look like. This side of the
coin is not only driven by money but by racism. In the early 1900s black men were often used as
the scape goat for white men and white women who were ashamed of what they might have
done.
Seduction as a Defense
The image and meaning of sex has change over the past generations. The debate of how
rape cases are tried and treated is never ending, especially in a modern spotlight. There are a
number of factors which fuel both sides of the debate like the media, politics, and race. In the
early 1900's all three played a factor in the push to change the law to protect children and women
to from lack of consent and being treated as the perpetrator instead of the victim. "Prosecutors
abandon rape cases where the victim falls short of middle-class norms of feminine propriety,
lives in an impoverished neighborhood, or engages in illegal activities."1 The victim in case
1 Gender Inequality and Criminal Seduction: Prosecuting Sexual Coercion in the
Early20th Century." Law & Social Inquiry 30, no. 1 (2005): 64.

(1771) is a 13 year old girl who doesnt have very much money, it is assumed by the defense
throughout that she is bringing these charges for some sort of attention. During the early 1900's it
was openly admitted that if a woman or young girl wasn't what upper class society viewed as
proper she had no consent and men could do with her as they wished because they would not be
prosecuted meaning that poor women had no protection. By not being protected many women
who have been raped or assaulted feel like they have received justice "Male-centered gender
ideologies order and shape linguistic and rhetorical strategies of defense attorneys, leaving many
women feeling traumatized by their court room experiences.... patriarchal beliefs about romance
and sexuality hamper the successful prosecution of rape, from the initial screening of a given
rape case to the verbal tactics used by defense attorneys to blame the victim."2 When some girls
make it as far as the court room attorneys make the girls feel like what happened to them was
deserved or their fault. Often times attorneys change the spotlight from the girls' consent being
stolen to mistakes she may have made in the past. Another problem with rape of young girls and
women is that some people feel that if romance was ever involved there is no possibility of rape.
The defense asks repeated questions about the victims past sexual experiences. The defense then
asks if she had ever had sex with this man and if she thought it was okay.When two people are
together and one forces themselves on the other person it is called "date rape". "In Against our
Will was the first feminist work to use the term "date rape to refer to acts of forced intercourse
where people involved know one another and where physical coercion may be less of a factor
then in stranger rape."3 Date rape is often used as a defense. "Critics of the anti-rape movement
also emphasize the supposed prevalence of "seduction" in romantic relationships to undermine
2 Donovan, Brian Gender Inequality and Criminal Seduction: Prosecuting Sexual Coercion in the Early
20th Century." Law & Social Inquiry 30, no. 1 (2005): 66.
3 pg 72.

arguments about the seriousness of date rape." Many people feel that one person in a relationship
may use the excuse of date rape if they were seduced but never clearly gave consent. "The
cultural schema that establishes "seduction" as a legitimate gray area of sexual assault strongly
affects the treatment of rape cases in the legal sphere." The idea of seduction being a defense
against date rape is not a new concept. "The blurred distinction between seduction and date rape
worked as a defense against rape accusations in colonial America and it has continued to animate
contemporary defense strategies against rape claims." Many times seduction is used as a defense
in date rape cases. "Courts have used the notion of seduction to interpret women's resistance to
men's sexual advances as consent, thereby perpetuating the legal legitimacy of the "no means
yes" defense against rape. Historically, seduction claims have constituted a particularly potent
defense against charges of acquaintance rape." Modern rape date rape, which is most closely
associated with drug use is not the first use of coercion.
Rape, Race, and the Media
During the early 1900's young immigrants and African Americans were used as the scape
goats by the media and middle class white America for the explosion in accusations of rape.
"Press portrays of a primitive black male rapist with the trope of a sexually civilized white
male."4 White men were made out to be the correct definition of what a sexual male should be
while an African American is a beast that all of society should be afraid of. The press had a huge
responsibility in this image. Throughout the case (1771) the victim is a young immigrant who
has sex with a black man for a nickel, he is arrested for rape.Several historians have noted the
critical role of newspaper accounts of rape in establishing gender and racial norms.5 The
4 Freedman, Estelle B."Crimes Which Startle and Horrify": Gender, Age, and the Radicalization of
Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900. Pg 465-97.
5 Pg 469

newspapers are what people believe. Political cartoons, radio commercials, and movies were all
used to paint all African American men as predators with animal like instincts and features to
instil fear and often times to gain political influence. The numbers of rapes didnt matter much
only the person committing the act. For this sexual "protection racket" to operate and patriarchy
to be enforced, only a few men had to assault women, but their crimes had to be widely known
and publicly acknowledged, a requirement fulfilled in part by the press.'6' The press was used as
a tool to help further drive racism and fear of the African American population. Frequent news
coverage of rape accusations, courtroom scenes, and lynching by vigilante mobs informed both
black men and white women about their vulnerabilities and white men about their entitlements.
Many publishers felt they were doing their civic duty by warning young women against what
became referred to as the black beast White men began also being seen as a possibility of a
rapist but their stories in the media were usually much smaller along with their punishments. The
prosecutor in the case pointed out continuously that the defendant was not white. African
American men were not always lynched when accused or convicted of interracial rape, but the
threat clearly loomed over them; white men faced lesser charges than rape and were more likely
to be arrested when the victim was a child or young woman; white men felt entitled to sexual
contact with girls; and the character of a woman and her family mattered a great deal in defining
rape. Although white men became a possibility of a perpetrator when it came to rape they were
never truly seen as a rapist. Nonetheless, representations of white assailants and black victims
deepened the association of rape as a "negro crime" and served to justify lynching because the
press offered contrasting depictions of white men as exceptional rapists but black men as natural

6 Pg 469

predators.7 African Americans being viewed as the rapist were also politically driven. The
gradual identification of the rapist as a violent black stranger who preyed upon white women and
children escalated soon after emancipation, when southern whites invoked the specter of "social
equality"-implying race mixingto undermine African American claims to full citizenship.8
Some scholars and historians as well as African American activists feel that African American
was purposely targeted to be the bad guy to be controlled by the white population. W. E. B. Du
Bois said the charge of rape against colored Americans was invented by the white South after
Reconstruction to excuse mob violence" and became "the recognized method of re-enslaving
blacks.9 Many political leaders used the excuse of African Americans being rapists to show that
they could not handle being a citizen in white world. The unsubstantiated rumors about black
men raping white women that fueled the nightriders of the 1860s and 1870s clearly responded to
racial anxieties about the political prospects of former slaves, for these accusations defined black
men as incapable of the self-rule necessary for citizenship.10 The defense repeatedly asked the
victim if she was sure this is what really happened to her and she wasnt making it up. Political
reach to achieve control went as far as forcing newspapers to publish Anti-African American
headlines. One southern newspaper, for example, rarely reported rapes by black men until
politicians debated black enfranchisement in the late 1860s. Only then did the Arkansas Gazette
both editorialize against black suffrage and begin to reprint reports from other papers about black

7 Pg 482
8 Pg 471
9 Pg 471
10 Pg 468

men assaulting white women.11 The defense was warned by the judge when he repeatedly
harassed the victim on the witness stand about whether she had read about other cases of black
rape on white girls and that was why she was bringing these charges. This image and media
attention about racism towards African Americans kept tensions high between the North and
South. The portrayal of black men as innately violent appeared, for example, in the coverage of
an incident at the Rochester, New York, jail in 1872, when a local militia fired upon a mob
attempting to remove an African American man accused of raping a white child. The Atlanta
Constitution seized upon the attempted lynching to justify southern vigilante practices,
suggesting that now that "the thing has gone home,"12 northerners who had opposed the Ku Klux
Klan should understand why southerners resorted to "a swift penalty on the brutal assassin of
priceless innocence." African American men were used as a tool by political means, to sell
newspapers, and be scapegoat or some white men and women.
Possible Victim, Certain Perpetrator
In the early 1900s in the south rape made its earliest appearance in United States history.
Although rape is always tragic on the victim in some cases in the South it was even more tragic
on the accused. Often times the accused was just that and nothing more. Rape by any man is not
always so. There are a number of crimes that were reported that never received justice because a
womens right to consent was taken away. In the south white men fought to protect women from
African Americans but not from white men who stole their rights.

11 Pg 473
12 Pg 473

References
Donovan, Brian. "Gender Inequality and Criminal Seduction: Prosecuting Sexual
Coercion in the Early20th Century." Law & Social Inquiry 30, no. 1 (2005): 61-88.
Freedman, Estelle B. ""Crimes Which Startle and Horrify": Gender, Age, and the
Radicalization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 18701900." Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 465-97.