Not Just Child's Play: Psychological and Legal Constructions of Female Victims of Child Sexual Assault, 1870-1970

This thesis analyzes psychological perceptions of and legal responses to the sexual abuse of girls between 1870 and 1970, tracing change over time to demonstrate how these responses served to systematically disadvantage victims. Until the late twentieth century, the perception of the harm caused by sexual abuse lay in its resulting damage to a woman or child’s purity. The prosecution of sex crimes, therefore, was viewed as a balance between protecting innocent victims from the violence of perpetrators and innocent perpetrators from the duplicitous claims of alleged victims. In the early nineteenth century, strong perceptions of female innocence could work in a victim’s favor by galvanizing protective instincts and leading authorities to see the risk rape presented to women as outweighing the harm of potentially false accusations.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the sexualization of women and then children more often tipped the scales of justice from the victim to the perpetrator by both minimizing the perceived damage to victims and magnifying perceptions of women and children’s tendency to fantasize and lie about assault. In particular, legal and medical authorities’ embrace of psychosexual views of the child resulted in greater scrutiny and stronger corroboration requirements for victims of child sexual abuse. By the 1930s, these views had become more widely accepted by the public at large, influencing social perceptions and treatments of victims. At the same time, medical and legal communities expanded psychoanalytic perceptions of children’s sexuality and resulting culpability in sexual abuse, portraying children not only as willing participants but also as active initiators of their own assaults and making it more difficult to prosecute cases of statutory rape successfully.
To establish historical and theoretical context for these changes, chapter 1 summarizes views of the nature of sex crimes and reform efforts in the nineteenth century and the psychoanalytic theories that later threatened protective instincts towards victims. Chapter 2 analyzes the rise of psychoanalytic perceptions of the sexualized child, first in the medical and subsequently in the legal community, between the 1910s and 1930s, as well as the impact on responses to victims of assault. Chapter 3 maps changing views of the perpetrators of crimes against children between the 1870s and 1950s. The final chapter traces the rising public acceptance of psychoanalytic theory in the post-World War II era and the simultaneous expansion of these ideas within the medical and legal community that served to complete the shift in views of children from innocent victims to seductive initiators of assault.
Ultimately, this thesis argues, in shaping the discourse on child sexual abuse and constructing female autonomy as dangerous to women, children, and society at large, legal and medical authorities cast these groups as incapable of self-control and therefore of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In this way, changing notions of childhood sexual abuse not only limited the legal recourse available to victims, but also reflected attempts to reinforce patriarchal authority by exerting control over female sexuality and strengthening gender roles. Understanding this “prehistory” of more recent responses to child sexual abuse therefore provides insight into the subsequent construction and legacies of the second-wave feminist response to sexual assault, as well as lessons for anti-rape activism moving forward.