Kim Stevenson

Unequivocal Victims: The Historical Roots of the Mystification of the Female Complainant in Rape Cases

Historically, numbers of women complainants in rape trials have been regarded suspiciously, or prejudiced in that their credibility has been seriously called into question, or undermined, both from within and outside the courtroom. Arguably, public and legal perceptions as to the expected conduct and behaviour of the stereotypical rape victim have been grounded in the belief that genuine women who allege rape should act and portray themselves as unequivocal victims. This suggests that the contemporary construct of the female rape victim and her associated stereotypical image should be considered not solely as a legal derivative but also within a wider cultural context. This article explores the historical influences that shaped the cultural construct operating in the U.K., in particular, the societal and legal attitudes of the mid-Victorians towards women and sexual violence, creating an historical mystification around the construct of the female rape victim and the crime of rape itself. Reference is made to a number of cases reported in The Times newspaper between 1850–1885 which underline the requisite portrayal of the rape complainant as an unequivocal victim. It is argued that the relocation of this historical and socially constructed mythological imaginary within the context of the law and the trial process has disproportionately contributed to the modern scepticism which surrounds the female complainant.

Truth, law and hate in the virtual marketplace of ideas: perspectives on the regulation of Internet content

Rising international concern about the problem of hate speech on the Internet has led to calls for greater regulation. The Internet is arguably a true marketplace of ideas but one where ‘dangerous words’ may have a disproportionate impact. The paper suggests that looking to historical parallels can offer a more fruitful and workable solution moving beyond the current temptation of knee-jerk legislative responses and regulation; and one more universally acceptable. Lockes philosophical argument for free speech, for instance, delivered against a background of seventeenth-century religious intolerance and perceived sedition, provides interesting analogies to the current problem in relation to terrorism. We question whether current legal approaches to hate speech are practical and appropriate, and the extent to which the transposition of ‘real life’ regulation can be imposed onto ‘virtual life’ regulation. Is the Internet in fact a qualitatively different form of communication which renders Lockean principles, and their subsequent interpretations, powerless in the face of hate speech? The repressive extension of the law to criminalise the expression of ideas deemed offensive raises key issues relating to the problem of veracity and authenticity of Internet content. Not least that the legal enforcement of any such regulation may require an unacceptable level of State intrusion into personal communication and privacy. Drawing on the historical perspective reminds us that censorship is the enemy of democratic values and that while calls for censorship of hate speech on the Internet may appear superficially attractive, there are dangerous implications and undercurrents for our hard won liberties.

‘Not Just the Ideas of a Few Enthusiasts’: Early Twentieth Century Legal Activism and Reformation of the Age of Sexual Consent

Abstract In July 1885, a reluctant House of Lords was eventually persuaded to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Bill after three years of intense Parliamentary debate and prompted by W.T. Stead’s shocking expose of the Maiden Tribute scandal. The 1885 Act finally, and controversially, settled the age of sexual protection for young girls at 16 years but this threshold would be repeatedly contested over the next four decades. Moral campaigners continually sought to exert pressure on the Home Office to reform what we now recognise as a legal age of consent. But their contradictory demands to impose repressionist measures to punish young girls for sexual immorality while simultaneously lobbying for a more protectionist stance against sexual defilement made any legislative consensus impossible. This article explores and teases out the associated socio-legal complexities of such contradictions which, somewhat ironically, served as a stark rehearsal for the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1922. An Act which did no more than simply reiterate the 1885 determination that 16 years should be the age of consent, a provision that has endured well into the twenty-first century.

Reparation for Betrayal of Trust in Child Sexual Abuse Cases: The Christian Duty of Care, Vicarious Liability and the Church of England

Abstract Feminist challenges to the traditional principles of vicarious liability highlight the difficulties facing claimants seeking redress via a doctrine largely developed in relation to the corporate model reflecting masculine traits of institutional power and control embedded in the traditional enterprise employer/employee relationship. This article explores the ways in which the recent spate of claims made against UK religious authorities regarding present and historic acts of child sexual abuse perpetrated by clergy have forced a paradigm shift requiring the courts to consider influences on the legal process associated with tropes of restorative justice, powerfully supported and explained by feminist legal theorists. The position of the Roman Catholic Church, however, is shown to be very different to that of the Church of England, highlighting the need for the paradigm shift to develop further and to consider the role of validation and vindication as elements in reparation, institutional as well as individual.

Enhancing Sensationalism: 1939–1960

This was a period when the challenge of broadcast journalism increasingly required strategic rethinking by print journalists and editors in order to keep newsprint relevant as a way of delivering news. One significant result was an enhanced emphasis on crime intelligence. The importance of broadcast news throughout this period was, for differing reasons over time, considerable, but can be summed up in the greater immediacy of its headlines at points in the day when people were accustomed to looking for news from morning or evening papers. Lacking an ability to compete on immediacy, newspapers had to rely on the detail they provided to flesh out those headlines. Here, they had enhanced opportunities to do this in ways that, it was believed on the basis of past experience, would attract and keep the most readers: by presenting those details in the most sensational ways possible. It was also to their advantage that print journalists were not constrained by a code of conduct when generating their reportage, as broadcast journalists were. Renewed editorial emphasis on sensationalism in reportage to attract readers encouraged further excesses. Coming after a period when crime news had been increasingly restricted to murders in daily practice, a wide range of criminal events were once again included in newspapers. There are clear echoes of the Victorian emphasis on crime, but this time the sensationalism had no accompanying didactic purpose. This reportage was essentially only to entertain. The scope of the change between pre- and post-war reportage is illuminated by examining crime reportage during the Second World War.

Introduction: A History of Crime News

This is a book about crime intelligence — intelligence in the sense both of the information provided through media formats (principally newspapers) and of the way in which it has been received, understood and used. Our focus here is an exploration of the ways in which crime has been presented in the media, using the print format for the obvious reason that newspapers were an important feature of the media landscape throughout the key period under discussion — the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Essentially, the media are a means of mass communication that can purvey ‘news’ to a series of audiences. What has always made some events ‘newsworthy’ and others not is a combination of ‘values’, notably danger and conflict, the involvement of a well-known individual, scandal (in other words that which is morally if not actually legally offensive to society), and that which is ‘out of the ordinary’ in some way. Crime has always manifested several of these ‘news values’ and so has long been a media staple, as both criminologists and media studies experts recognise. But this is not primarily either a criminology or a media studies text, though it is certainly informed by both these disciplines.1 It is, rather, an interdisciplinary text drawing mainly on both history and law for its methodology and its analysis and

Positively Criminal? Press, Police and Politicians: 1960–2010

This chapter addresses a lengthier chronological period than any of the others; substantially because this is a period which, in terms of the details of crime coverage in the media, has been extensively addressed elsewhere by authors from Steve Chibnall to Maggie Wykes.1 It would be redundant to rehearse again that which has been so thoroughly investigated and analysed by other scholars. Instead, the chapter highlights aspects of the presentation of crime reportage which stress the continuities and changes with the earlier periods discussed. It thus locates the crime reportage of the last half century in its historical-legal context in order to aid comprehension of how the crisis of public confidence in print journalism arose, leading to the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry, in the aftermath of the sensationalism surrounding the trial of Levi Bellfield in 2011.

Challenging the ‘Golden Goose’? 1885–1900

This 15-year period saw some of the most mature and wide-ranging legal reportage, but also the shift towards a new approach for incorporating sensationalism into crime reportage, with a renewed emphasis on investigative journalism. Starting with W.T. Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ campaign in 1885, such practices were to challenge the conventions established by lawyers as reporters and journalists for legally responsible and informed reportage with the emphasis on in-trial and post-trial journalism. In many ways, Stead’s reportage in the Pall Mall Gazette was a harbinger of things to come, because, though his own trial for unlawful kidnapping featured heavily in the newspapers, the contextual background to that trial was Stead’s own exercises in investigative journalism. The purpose behind Stead’s series had been to demonstrate the ease with which he and his coadjutors (including Bramwell Booth and Josephine Butler) had procured an under-age girl for the ostensible purposes of facilitating sexual intercourse with a certified virgin. The aim was to ensure that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill currently before Parliament would be passed before the session ended, unlike its predecessors since 1881. These had failed largely due to entrenched positions in the Lords. His investigations into matters then of more moral than criminal concern, in order to promote legislative change in the shape of what became the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, required him and his collaborators to break the existing law.

New Perspectives and New Informants: 1914–1939

The interest of professional journalists in pre-trial investigations was fundamental to the construction of a new set of relationships within the broad area of providing crime intelligence. Increasingly crime reportage was to be characterised by conflicting standards of behaviour and ideas of responsibility towards the community in shaping and presenting its subject matter for consumption. The involvement of lawyers in crime reportage during the nineteenth century had been encouraged by the belief that this ensured that coverage of a case would not breach safe limits. A first generation of professional journalists reporting from the courts worked with legal professionals and largely observed those same conventions. But those restraints and practices did not survive the war and the final withdrawal of legal professionals from active involvement in crime reportage. As a result, the interwar years were characterised by tensions between journalists and their police informants, and their view of what constituted acceptable reportage, and the legal profession. Senior figures in the legal profession increasingly criticised the ways in which some members of the various police forces shared details of their investigations with journalists that would previously only have come into the public domain during the formal trial process.

The Beginnings of Crime Intelligence: 1800–1860

If modern crime intelligence is constituted by a public audience informed by the media about crime and (at least to an extent) about the legal processes contextualising it, its origins lie within the development, in the sixteenth century, of the printed broadside or broadsheet ballad. These early print productions emerged as powerful cultural factors shaping how crime (particularly murder) was popularly understood within and between communities. While not addressing the legal process directly, they helped establish its importance as the key tool for managing crime and protecting the community.2 In broadsheet ballads, offenders, once caught, were tried, convicted and suitably punished, and increasingly that punishment was mediated through or at least sanctioned by a formal legal process.3 However, they made no attempt to portray the legal ‘truth’ of any criminal proceedings, concentrating only on their outcomes. Yet, for the first time, news of criminal events managed within a formal legal context could be spread with some uniformity to a mass, if not (strictly speaking) a contiguous, market. Broadsheets narrating crimes which caught the imagination could be copied and recopied; they helped to fuel the demand for more information about criminal activity, which resulted in productions such as the Newgate Calendar with its retrospective and moralistic framing of the more sensationalist narratives of crime.4