In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 6 Rapto, Seducción, Violación, and Estupro moving beyond the loss of honor G This chapter addresses questions of sexuality and how women and men of the lower orders reconciled their actions with their concern for reputation and honor. To this end I analyze trial transcripts catalogued under the labels of ‘‘rapto,’’ ‘‘seducción,’’ ‘‘violación,’’ and ‘‘estupro’’—abduction, seduction, and rape. Legally, the terms overlapped and partially contradicted one another;1 nevertheless, most plaintiffs used them interchangeably and apparently indiscriminately . Thus Bartolomé Gálvez complained that his niece had suffered estupro, violación, and seducción, but he did not differentiate among the mutually exclusive meanings of these terms. Marcos Paz sought to force his daughter’s recalcitrant fiancé to the altar by accusing him of rapto y estupro, and Pedro Chavarri charged his stepdaughter’s abductor and lover with both rapto and violación, adding later that seducción had been involved as well.2 In reality, only a few of these cases dealt with rape or sexual violence; most transcripts, in order to rescue the reputations of the young women concerned, relate tales of consensual relationships described as forced intercourse or seduction resulting from deceit. Both in terms of legal definition and in the eyes of the litigants, the trials were about honor rather than personal suffering. However brutally carried out, rape was punished only if the victim could prove herself to have possessed honor prior to it. ‘‘The abduction of a married woman, a virgin, or a chaste widow, if carried out with violence, is to be punished with prison to the fifth degree,’’ observed García Calderón. If the victim did not fit the above description, the sentence was reduced.3 Although the law stipulated a prison sentence for the rape of women without honor (i.e., an adulterous wife or a 115 disobedience, slander, seduction, and assault never-married woman who had given up her maidenhead), in practice, such cases did not result in prosecution. In the thirty-eight years of legal documentation I studied, I found only sixteen cases of sexual crime;4 of these, only five dealt with genuine incidents of rape (as opposed to cases of seduction camouflaged as rape by plainti ffs).5 In addition, there were three accusations of attempted rape; however, all three plaintiffs desisted from further proceedings after filing their complaints .6 The sample of sex-related crime includes seven charges of rape,7 four of attempted rape,8 two of breach of promise,9 and two of seduction.10 We can assume that fifteen cases of sex-related crime represent only a fraction of the total number of such crimes that took place in the province of Cajamarca between 1862 and 1900. Confirming that the underreporting of rape was evident to contemporaries, an article from 1862 in La Opini ón, a Cajamarcan newspaper, complained that the authorities had failed to take any action in the matter of the rape of a young girl, even though the crime had been reported forty days earlier.11 Instances of rape of peasant and other lower-class women, including servants and other dependents, are totally absent from the criminal court records.12 Unlike slander trials, trials dealing with sex-related crime could not de- flect suspicions of sexual misconduct; instead, they were intended to oblige the defendant to marry or monetarily compensate his victim for her loss of honor, or (failing that) to sway public opinion in favor of the victim. Although virginity might be indisputably lost, plaintiffs sought to demonstrate to the public that the woman in question was the victim of violence or engaño (deceit), and hence not responsible for the misfortune that had befallen her. In this way, a woman could be represented as the victim of a man’s designs, rather than being herself considered morally flawed, and, in PittRivers ’ words, lacking in shame.13 The trials were therefore essentially about shifting the blame from the female to the male. In addition to illuminating how honor, once damaged, was redefined and, where possible, restored, these trials shed light on the differences and tensions between lower-class sexual practice and elite definitions of female sexual behavior. Between the two extremes—the elite ideal of feminine seclusion and chastity, and the cohabitation and serial monogamy practiced by the uneducated and poor of color—we find gradations of socially differentiated gender practice. The...

Share