A History of Rape

If a court would not simply take a woman's word, something else had to speak for her, and for a long time that something was her body, read by others. Vigarello follows the rise of the medical examination and the surgeon's report as instruments of proof. The question a court wanted answered was not what the woman had felt but what her body could be made to testify: was the hymen intact, were there bruises, were there signs of forced entry? The victim was present as evidence rather than as a witness.

This produced a strange displacement. The person best placed to describe the crime — the one who had lived it — was the one whose account carried the least weight. Her testimony was treated as suspect by definition, colored by shame, by interest, by the possibility of a lie meant to cover a consensual affair or extract a marriage. So authority passed to the men who examined her: surgeons, then physicians, whose signs were held to be objective in a way her words were not. The body was made to confess what the mouth could not be trusted to say.

The nineteenth century is where Vigarello locates the decisive turn, and it is not a simple story of enlightenment. Two forces pull against each other. On one side, a new sensibility toward children and toward the vulnerable pushes the crime, especially the rape of minors, into fresh visibility; sexual violence against children becomes an object of horror and prosecution in a way it had not quite been before. On the other side, a booming medical and psychiatric literature spends much of the century casting doubt on accusers, cataloguing supposed female lies, hysteria, and fantasy.

Yet underneath the contradiction, something shifts in what the crime is understood to damage. Slowly, the injury migrates from honor to the person. Romantic culture, the growing attention to inner life, the new prestige of psychology — all of it makes it thinkable that the real wound of rape is not a torn membrane or a stained reputation but something done to a self. Vigarello reads this as the beginning of a modern idea: that the victim suffers a violation of her dignity, her will, her intimate integrity, and that this is what the law is meant to protect.

Step back from the four centuries and a single question organizes the whole story: whose account does a society allow to define a violation? Vigarello's history is, at bottom, a history of authority over meaning. For most of the period, that authority sat with everyone except the victim — with fathers and husbands who owned the honor at stake, with judges who read social rank, with surgeons who read the body. The person who had actually been assaulted was the one voice the system was designed not to trust.

What his book traces is the slow, contested migration of that authority toward the victim herself. The wound moves from the outside inward, from the family's name to the surgeon's report to, finally, the person's own sense of having been violated. And as the site of the harm moves inward, so must the source of the evidence. If the essential injury is to dignity and will, then no external sign can capture it; only the account of the one who suffered it can. To recognize rape as a crime against a person is, in the end, to accept that her word carries weight.

The book closes where it opened, on the distance between a crime the law claims to abhor and a crime the law has struggled to see. Vigarello's four hundred years do not draw a rising line. They draw a reorientation: away from honor and property and visible signs, toward the person, her will, and eventually her word. The savage penalties of the sixteenth century punished an offense against rank; the modern law aspires to punish an offense against a self. Between the two lies a long labor of learning to look in a different direction.