Abstract
The ‘paedophile’ emerged as a named object of concern in the late-nine-teenth century as a result of sexologists’ interest in the categorisation of sexual deviance. However, the label was rarely used in mainstream medicine. As Stephen Angelides notes, ‘of principle concern to sexologists were sexual deviations with respect to the aim or gender of object choice, not the age of object choice’.1 Only in the late-twentieth century was there an ‘explosion of social panic’ around paedophilia.2 The belief in a specific type of offender prone to abusing children existed in the late-nineteenth century, but it gained little traction until a century later. In the absence of any clear-cut notion of ‘paedophilia’, or even of ‘child sexual abuse’ as a single type of crime, Victorian and Edwardian medical practitioners had no coherent idea of what motivated perpetrators of sexual offences against the very young.3
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Notes
Steven Angelides, ‘The Emergence of the Paedophile in the Late Twentieth Century’, Historical Studies 36 (2005), 272–95, p. 273.
Garthine Walker, ‘Everyman or a Monster? The Rapist in Early Modern England, c. 1600–1750’, History Workshop Journal, 76 (2013), 5–31.
Francis Ogston, Lectures on Medical Jurisprudence (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1878), p. 127.
John Abercrombie, The Student’s Guide to Medical Jurisprudence (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1885), p. 353.
Alfred Swaine Taylor, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, 8th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1866 [1844]), p. 571.
This presumption was not removed from law until the Sexual Offences Act 1993; Michael Jefferson, Criminal Law, 8th edn (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007 [1992]), p. 572.
Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 71.
On the so-called ‘puberty gap’ or the difference between ‘biological adolescence’ and ‘social adolescence’ see Alice Schlegel, ‘The Cultural Management of Adolescent Sexuality’ in Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture, ed. Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 177–94, p. 178.
Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 87–88.
Barry Reay, Microhistories: Demography, Society, and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 41.
Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, ed. F. M. L. Thompson, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–70, p. 32.
Elizabeth Blackwell, The Moral Education of the Young in Relation to Sex, 6th edn (London: Hatchards, 1882 [1878]), p. 62.
William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life, Considered in their Physiological, Social and Psychological Relations (London: John Churchill, 1857), p. 14.
J. A. Russell, ‘The Eugenic Appeal in Moral Education’, The Eugenics Review, 4 (1912–13), p. 136.
F. W. Lowndes, ‘The Criminal Law Amendment Bill’, The Lancet, 1 August 1885, 221–22, p. 222.
Charles Roberts, ‘The Physical Maturity of Women’, The Lancet, 25 July 1885, 149–50, p. 149.
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
W. A. Guy, ‘On Insanity and Crime: and on the Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 32 (1869), 159–91, pp. 170–71.
C. B. Radcliffe, ‘Croonian Lectures on Mind, Brain, and Spinal Cord, in Certain Morbid Conditions’, British Medical Journal (BMJ), 5 April 1873, 359–63, p. 359.
Peter Bartlett, ‘Legal Madness in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine 14 (2001), 107–31, p. 109.
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 [1975]).
Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 3rd edn (London: Longman, 2012 [1981]), p. 29.
Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: with especial reference to antipathic sexual instinct: a medico-forensic study, trans. by C.G. Chaddock, 10th edn (London: Rebman, 1899), p. 525.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. An Introduction, trans. Richard Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 43.
Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?”: Constructing the Child Rapist in Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 23 (2014), 21–52, p. 22.
F. W. Lowndes, ‘The Criminal Law Amendment Bill’, The Lancet, 1 August 1885, p. 222; ‘Middlesex Sessions’, The Times, 8 Jun 1870, p. 11.
Lucy Bland, ‘“Purifying” the Public World: Feminist Vigilantes in Late Victorian England, Women’s History Review 1 (1992), 397–412.
Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 118–9.
Frederick W. Lowndes, ‘Venereal Diseases in Girls of Tender Age’, The Lancet, 22 January 1887, 168–69, p. 169.
Taylor, Manual, 11th edn (London: J&A Churchill, 1886), p. 690.
‘The Criminal Law Amendment Bill’, Lancet, 8 August 1885, 252, p. 252; for further reading on W. T. Stead’s articles see Deborah Gorham, ‘The “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” Re-Examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1978), 353–379.
Carol Smart, ‘A History of Ambivalence and Conflict in the Discursive Construction of the “Child Victim” of Sexual Abuse’, Social and Legal Studies 8 (1999), 391–409, p. 397.
For example see Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, ‘On the Virgin Cleansing Myth: Gendered Bodies, Aids and Ethnomedicine’, African Journal of AIDS Research, 1 (2002), 87–95.
Garthine Walker, ‘Everyman or a Monster? The Rapist in Early Modern England, c. 1600–1750’, History Workshop Journal 76 (2013), 5–31, p. 15.
For example, see William Norwood East, ‘The Interpretation of some Sexual Offences’, Journal of Mental Science, 71 (1925), 410–24, p. 421. Thanks go to Janet Weston for recommending this reading on old age and sexual offences.
Auguste Forel, The Sexual Question, trans. C. F. Marshall (Brooklyn, New York: Physicians and Surgeons Book Co., 1931 [1906]), p. 254.
Joseph Bristow, ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency’ in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992), 44–63, p. 49.
A. S. Wohl, ‘Sex and the Single Room: Incest among the Victorian Working Classes’ in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. A.S. Wohl (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 201.
W. Rendle, ‘The Residential Conditions of the Lower Classes of Inhabitants of this Kingdom, with reference to Health and Complementary Conditions’, BMJ, 22 August 1868, 207, p. 207.
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© 2016 Victoria Bates
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Bates, V. (2016). Offenders: Lust and Labels. In: Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441720_7
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