Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England

Louise A. Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134736645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England is the first detailed investigation of the way that child abuse was discovered, debated, diagnosed and dealt with in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
The focus is placed on the child and his or her experience of court procedure and welfare practice, thereby providing a unique and important evaluation of the treatment of children in the courtroom. Through a series of case studies, including analyses of the criminal courts, the author examines the impact of legislation at grass roots level, and demonstrates why this was a formative period in the legal definition of sexual abuse. Providing a much-needed insight into Victorian attitudes, including that of Christian morality, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the history of crime, social welfare and the family. It also offers a valuable critique of current work on the history of children's homes and institutions, arguing that the inter-personal relationships of children and carers is a crucial area of study.

1 Introduction

‘The children of the poor'

DOI: 10.4324/9780203007433-ch-1

Social and cultural contexts

The Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in London, England, is renowned world-wide for its iconography; most particularly for the symbolic figure of Justice, rising above the domed roof, holding her golden scales and sword outstretched to judge good from evil with clarity and equity. ¹ Less well known is the inscription carved in stone above the main entrance to the present court: ‘Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrong-Doer’. Taken from the Bible – Psalm 72, verse 4 – this text evokes justice as a Christian principle in contrast to the neo-classical presence of the female statue. The court building, designed by Edward de Montford and rebuilt on the original site of Newgate Prison, was officially opened in February 1907; construction had begun in 1902 and the design plans date back to the turn of the century. ² The inscription can, therefore, be seen as a snapshot of the ideals of the late Victorian/early Edwardian paternalistic State and gives an insight on attitudes to criminality and victimology in this period. The older biblical understanding of the ‘Children of the Poor’ as all whom Christ would save had acquired new layers of meaning in relation to nineteenth-century ideas about children and childhood.

On a literal level, the inscription identified working-class children as the immediate beneficiaries of justice and their protection as the primary purpose of the judiciary. Its significance, however, cuts far deeper. As Anna Davin has demonstrated, children were, by the end of the nineteenth century, seen as the future of the nation, their welfare a vital part of the imperialist project. ³ The late Victorian notion of children’s rights was delineated in relation to their role as future citizens; the association of children with justice can, therefore, be seen as a statement of State-building, of defending citizenship. The child had also, by this time, come to play a vital symbolic role in terms of the individual. Carolyn Steedman has drawn attention to the emergence, from the Enlightenment onwards, of the child figure as a personification of ‘ideas about the self and its history’. ⁴ In this light, the evocation of the child in relation to the concept of justice is a bid for psychological security: the child must be protected to guarantee all our pasts and indeed all our futures.

The association is also a gendered one. ⁵ One could say that, on the symbolic level, it is maternalism rather than paternalism that is invoked as protection; it is the female figure of Justice who is defending her children. However, as Marina Warner has written, female allegorical figures had very little to do with ‘the actual order’ which consisted of male judges and statesmen. ⁶ In practical terms, justice was undeniably masculine. What of the child? Steedman has also argued that, by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘when the child was watched, written about and wanted, it was usually a feminised set of qualities (if not a female child) whose image was left behind for our analysis’. ⁷ These ‘feminised qualities’ are apparent in the inscription’s positioning of the child as a weak passive victim rather than active doer (of either right or wrong); caught in a double bind of ‘littleness’ and poverty, she is defenceless. As a child she represents innocence, in opposition to, on the one hand, the experience and knowledge of adult self-determination, and, on the other, the guilt of the wrongdoer. She is object/victim in relation to the subject figures of both the wrongdoer and her ‘defender’, the masculine mechanism of State power. The association of the feminine with the victim is apparent in the very names of the ‘Societies for the Protection of Women and Children’ which proliferated throughout the nineteenth century.

By the turn of the century, therefore, the figure of the (female) child had become an important symbol of the innocent victim of crime. The prevention and punishment of child abuse was deployed as a paradigm for the ideals of the English criminal justice system. ⁸ This book will concentrate its attentions on one specific form of abuse: child sexual abuse, portrayed by child savers as the most sinister, examining its treatment within the law, and in relation to wider social, political and cultural agendas.

Crime and the law

It is usually acknowledged that the sexual abuse of children was both discovered and constructed in the late 1970s within a very particular framework of aetiology, diagnosis, treatment and cure. ⁹ In other words, sexual abuse is a late twentieth-century phenomenon, located specifically within contemporary culture and society. Historians, however, have been quick to demonstrate its historical antecedents and to point to the late nineteenth century as a period when mass campaigning and parliamentary legislation were mobilised over the emotive topics of child prostitution, incest and the age of consent. ¹⁰ Victorians used a wide collection of euphemisms – ‘moral corruption’, ‘immorality’, ‘molestation’, ‘tampering’, ‘ruining’, ‘outrage’ – to refer to sexual abuse, which was prosecuted in the courts as indecent assault, rape, unlawful carnal knowledge or its attempt. Although not widespread, the term ‘sexually abused’ was indeed used by Scottish surgeon George William Balfour in his 1864 translation of a work on forensic medicine by Johann Ludwig Casper. ¹¹ Although Victorians had no umbrella term that was uniformly applied, they would certainly have recognised the term ‘child sexual abuse’. Indeed, Jan Lambertz has made a similar deduction in relation to sexual harassment cases in her study of gender relations in the cotton factories of Lancashire during the 1890s. ¹² Victorians had a clear concept of inappropriate sexual attention that constituted abuse of power and which, on various occasions, was brought to public attention as an issue. It clearly makes sense to talk of both ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘sexual abuse’ in a nineteenth-century context. Recognising that child abuse is, nevertheless, a socially and historically constructed category, this book explores the specific meanings attached to sexual abuse in Victorian and Edwardian England, demonstrating how the actualities of criminal cases intermeshed with the symbolic delineation of the child.

Nineteenth-century parliaments enacted a long string of statute laws concerned with the regulation of sexual offences, many of them affecting the way in which child abuse was treated and dealt with in the courts. The death penalty was lifted in cases of rape in 1841, the statutory age of consent for girls was raised twice of from 12 to 13 in 1875 and from 13 to 16 in 1885 – and incest was finally made a criminal offence in 1908. ¹³ It was in this period, too, that many of the legal practices and principles which govern the way child sexual abuse is treated in the courts today were established and negotiated. This book focuses on the period c. 1830–1914, in order to assess the immediate impact of the changes in statutory law and court practice. Historians who adopt the notion of a long nineteenth century see the First World War rather than changes of monarch as a cultural and social watershed. While dominant attitudes towards sexual abuse that were developed and promoted during Victoria’s reign continued to influence twentieth-century interpretations, the rising interest in psychoanalysis and child psychology after 1914 suggests that the post-war period requires separate evaluation. ¹⁴

Although the number of crimes tried on indictment in England and Wales was falling in relation to population between 1830 and 1914, the number of sexual offences sent for trial – a large proportion of which involved the sexual assault of children – increased drastically (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). News reports, witness statements and the records of voluntary agencies all defined the sexual corruption of children as crimes of ‘the most aggravated and serious character’. ¹⁵ But, throughout the period, only a small proportion of reported cases of sexual abuse – probably less than a third – resulted in conviction. ¹⁶ Why this paradox? Why the contrast between the vehement rhetoric and the apparent leniency of magistrates and judges? In solving this central conundrum, this book grapples with a list of related questions regarding the perception and treatment of sexual abuse, the impact of shifts in legislation, and the experiences of those involved in the criminal justice system. How were child witnesses treated in the courts? What stories did they have to tell? How did relations or neighbours deal with abuse in their midst? How were abusers judged? What happened to the children concerned after proceedings? I shall demonstrate throughout that the ambiguities and complexities surrounding sexual abuse were related to Victorian constructions of gender difference, childhood, sexuality and social class.

Figure 1.1 Criminal cases tried on indictment in England and Wales in relation to population, 1830–1910

Sources: (Parliamentary Papers, annual judicial statistics, 1830–1910; B. R. Mitchell, British historical statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988))

Figure 1.2 Sexual assault cases tried on indictment in England and Wales in relation to population, 1830–1910

Sources: (see figure 1.1)

Note: The term ‘sexual assault' encompasses all charges of rape or unlawful carnal knowledge, attempted rape or unlawful carnal knowledge, assault with intent to rape, and indecent assault

Child welfare and social purity

It is vital to stress that sexual abuse was, throughout the period, associated with female children. English child-saving agencies almost always spoke of offences against ‘young girls’ (rarely boys), usually committed by men (although female accomplices might be implicated). Court proceedings, as this study demonstrates, reflected this specificity: 99 per cent of defendants tried on charges relating to the sexual assault of children were male, while 93 per cent of victims in these cases were female. While French forensic specialists had researched and debated the signs of sexual abuse on male as well as female bodies during the 1850s, their findings were never translated into English. ¹⁷ The ‘discovery’ of sexual abuse in England from the 1860s onwards was the product of a coalition of interests between the social purity societies and the burgeoning child welfare movement. The reason for the invisibility of boys (despite police knowledge of a market for adolescent boy prostitutes) lies in the emergence of the issue from the social purity and rescue societies’ preoccupation with ‘fallen’ women and young female prostitutes. A woman’s character, unlike a man’s, was judged in relation to her sexual reputation. Girls and women could ‘fall’ but boys could not, according to the Victorian sexual schema. Sexually abused girls, as a group, constituted a specially targeted social problem. Boys did not and their futures were rarely discussed.

A growing body of interdisciplinary studies has drawn attention to the emergence of the romantic concept of childhood and its increasing hold on nineteenth-century minds. ¹⁸ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Calvinist notion of original sin had stressed that children were evil by nature, requiring rigorous discipline to resist temptation. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, this was replaced with the idea, promoted by Wordsworth and the romantic poets, that children, born as innocents, were innately virtuous. As Steedman has demonstrated, the figure of the romantic child, reproduced and reworked through a variety of genres during the course of the nineteenth century, became the object of a great deal of psychological investment as a personification of the essence of self, as a key aspect of personal identity; our view of childhood today is still profoundly shaped by this inheritance. ¹⁹ The romantic child represented the ideal condition which, as Jacqueline Rose and Carol Mavor have shown in their studies of the work of J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, adults might long for but never return to. ²⁰

But the newly identified romantic child had a sinister or ugly twin: the juvenile delinquent. It is no coincidence that the concept of juvenile delinquency also emerged between 1780 and 1820, as a by-product of romanticism. ²¹ Ideas of childhood innocence and juvenile delinquency must also be linked to the formation of middle-class cultural identities in this period and to demonstrations of status and respectability in opposition to both a debased aristocracy and an uneducated labouring poor. ²² If the child was born innocent, then environment led to corruption. Amidst concerns about social unrest, the 1830s and 1840s saw a proliferation of investigations into the living conditions, demeanour and behaviour of labouring children in the mining and manufacturing industries and in agricultural gangs. ²³ Delinquency was related to social class; delinquents were the children of the poor. As one member of parliament put it in 1885: ‘the conditions of life in which a large proportion of the population was placed brought young girls into contact with vice, and gave them experiences to which women of 20 in a higher class were strangers’. ²⁴ The effects of delinquency were clearly gendered. ²⁵ In boys, corruption began as petty thieving and led into a downward spiral of criminal activity. For girls it took the form of immorality or sex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: 'the children of the poor'
• 2 Family, neighbourhood and police
• 3 The child savers
• 4 Signs on the body: the medical profession
• 5 'Witnesses of truth?' Children in the courtroom
• 6 Masculinity, 'respectability' and the child abuser
• 7 Specialist homes for 'fallen' girls
• 8 Conclusion: from 'corruption' to 'neurosis'?
• Notes
• Further reading
• Name index
• Subject index