TY - CHAP
T1 - "Monstrous and indefensible"? Newspaper accounts of sexual assaults on children in nineteenth-century England and Wales
AU - Grey, Daniel
N1 - This material has been published in Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 edited by Edited by Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, Sanne Muurling, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108774543. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © 2020 Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2020/1/30
Y1 - 2020/1/30
N2 - Popular crime reportage of sexual violence has a long history in England. Despite the fact that from the 1830s onwards newspapers and periodicals – and sometimes even law reports – were increasingly liable to skim over the reporting of sexual offences as ‘unfit for publication’, this does not mean that such reportage vanished entirely. Instead, certain linguistic codes and euphemisms were invoked to maintain a respectable discourse. Given the serious problems with gaps in the surviving archival record for modern criminal justice, newspapers remain an essential tool for understanding the history of sexual violence in nineteenth century England and Wales. Using keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers Database, this chapter examines the continuities and changes in the reporting of sexual violence against children between 1800 and 1900, and explores what these euphemisms and elisions reveal about attitudes to gender and crime in nineteenth-century England and Wales.
AB - Popular crime reportage of sexual violence has a long history in England. Despite the fact that from the 1830s onwards newspapers and periodicals – and sometimes even law reports – were increasingly liable to skim over the reporting of sexual offences as ‘unfit for publication’, this does not mean that such reportage vanished entirely. Instead, certain linguistic codes and euphemisms were invoked to maintain a respectable discourse. Given the serious problems with gaps in the surviving archival record for modern criminal justice, newspapers remain an essential tool for understanding the history of sexual violence in nineteenth century England and Wales. Using keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers Database, this chapter examines the continuities and changes in the reporting of sexual violence against children between 1800 and 1900, and explores what these euphemisms and elisions reveal about attitudes to gender and crime in nineteenth-century England and Wales.
U2 - 10.1017/9781108774543.010
DO - 10.1017/9781108774543.010
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
VL - 3
SP - 189
EP - 205
BT - Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914
A2 - van der Heijden, Manon
A2 - Pluskota, Marion
A2 - Muurling, Sanne
PB - Cambridge University Press
CY - Cambridge
ER -