Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England: Age, Crime and Consent in the Courts by Victoria Bates (review)

Victoria Bates’s meticulously researched study analyzes the contributions of medical practitioners to the investigation and adjudication of nonconsensual sex offences in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Focused primarily on cases involving male defendants and female complainants, she demonstrates how this form of expertise—what she calls “sexual forensics”—was deeply embedded in broader concerns about female sexual maturity and promiscuity and their effect on masculine self-control. In contrast to previous studies, Bates moves beyond medico-legal textbooks and celebrated trials to capture sexual forensics as a matter of more routine practice. Her source base reflects this ambition: trial and pretrial documents generated from cases of sexual assault tried as lower-level misdemeanors at the Middlesex Sessions and the Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Devon Quarter Sessions between 1850 and 1915.

This material enables her at once to avoid a potentially distorting metropolitan bias, assess patterns of continuity and change over time, and observe how medical testimony contributed to and reinforced what she calls the “scripts” surrounding cases of sexual assault. Written and performed by medical witnesses, these scripts in her view were an integral part of middle-class male attempts to contain and defuse the destabilizing effects of sexual crime. The nature of their intervention, involving intimate physical and verbal examination of female complainants, provided experts with unique access to information—about prior sexual history, character, and physical maturity—that was in principle irrelevant as a matter of law but in practice central to the societal issues these cases raised. The defining quality of this medico-legal testimony was its combination of ostensibly stable and up-to-date scientific knowledge about the stages of sexual development with an insistence on individual variability, which resulted in ambiguities in applying medically derived standards to specific cases. The former lent legitimacy to expert pronouncements on physiological and behavioral norms, while the latter opened up a crucial space for casting doubt on the reliability of crucial legal categories such as the age of consent.

This dual character is essential to Bates’s main analysis of the social function of medical testimony. By blurring lines and inviting scrutiny of individual deviations from physical and emotional norms, medical testimony supported (male) judges, juries, and defense lawyers attempting to find ways round the ostensible clarity of the age of consent law—which in 1885 was raised from thirteen to sixteen for girls. By drawing attention to the multiple ways in which the correlation between age, sexual innocence, and maturity could be blurred—and thus misinterpreted by an alleged assailant—Bates sees the medical witness role as ultimately serving to reinforce “rape myths,” in which pubescent and adult females were positioned as potentially misleading and untrustworthy in body and demeanor unless they could be certified in court testimony as unambiguously “pure.”

Bates’s focus on the uses of ambiguity is persuasive, but it also has consequences for readability. This is a dense work, incorporating lots of evidence that is at times fragmented and repetitive in presentation. The lack of chapter subdivisions contributes to this, with the writing tending to progress without much signposting for the reader. This problem of narrative presentation is one that Bates herself acknowledges as the price of her attempt to develop an account of everyday practice rather than a more conventional (and simpler) one based on textbook theory or high profile case studies. To address this she adopts an interesting mitigating strategy: at the end of each of her five core chapters she provides a condensed case transcript that exemplifies some aspect of the chapter’s content, followed by several few pages of reflections on the case’s significance for sexual forensics. This succeeds in giving Bates’s account (and the reader) space to breathe, and could well serve as useful teaching material. But standing in contrast to the density of the main discussion, it also reinforces the comparative...