Review of journals. While rape has been the subject of much historical research since the 1980s – starting with the pioneering work of Georges Vigarello – the same is not true of sexual violence, especially against children. Although fragmented and subject to debate as to the methodological approach, this field of research nevertheless experienced a boom in the mid-1990s, marked by the Dutroux cases or those which broke out within the Catholic Church.
A boom reinforced in recent years by the #metoo movement, which has contributed to making sexual violence a national and transnational political issue. It is in this context of a renewal of the historiographical perspective that the new issue takes place. Clio. Woman, gender, story, coordinated by Didier Lett, Sylvie Steinberg and Fabrice Virgili.
After being interested a few years ago in rapes during wartime (Clio noto 39), the review today focuses on sexual violence committed in an intimate, daily setting, from Antiquity to the 21st century.e century, with in particular Elisabeth Elgan, historian of social movements and feminism, professor at Stockholm University, which looks at the immediate legislative repercussions in Sweden of #metoo.
“Euphemization and double meaning”
This transversal approach makes it possible to understand the words of sexual violence (“to rapter”, “to know fleshly”, “to take without consent” …) and their evolutions. A lexicon of which one of the characteristics is “To be marked by banality, to have blurred outlines and to play on euphemism and double meaning”. As shown by Nephélé Papakonstantinou, of the University of Athens, in “The“ raptus ”seized by Roman law”.
Throughout the studies, we also measure, that the judicial record – although imperfect in quantifying the prevalence of rape and sexual violence – remains a “Precious vantage point” and exciting to understand the voices of the various actors, especially the rare ones of women; to assess what is repressed or tolerated according to the social and cultural contexts of the time.
In a setting that will remain, for centuries, the protector of male honor, marriage and the family, we also discover the various remedies used by women to put an end to the abuses they endure and to condemn their attackers. Whether these are the pregnancy complaints procedures studied by Mathieu Laflamme, or the requests for residential separation, annulment of marriage for sexual impotence or forced marriage that, for her part, Marion Philip analyzes in an investigation into violence. conjugal in the XVIIe and XVIIIe centuries. It is understood that it will be necessary to wait nearly three centuries before marital rape enters French jurisprudence, in 1992.
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