Making a space for medical expertise: medical knowledge of sexual assault and the construction of boundaries between forensic medicine and the law in late nineteenth-century England

Abstract

This article looks at the boundary work performed by Victorian doctors in order to position themselves as beneficial to the court in helping to determine whether a woman had been raped. These doctors provided tangible physical evidence to support already widely-held beliefs about the nature of the rape victim. Such physical evidence could then be used to support, or undermine, the complainant’s allegation. The paper concludes that the reliance upon forensic evidence, the result of such boundary
construction, is one of the major factors maintaining the current international “justice gap” in rape cases.

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