‘Real rape’ and the coverage of sexual violence in Dutch newspapers, 1880 to 1930

Abstract

ABSTRACT Feminist criminologists have used the concept of ‘real rape’ – the understanding of rape as a violent act by a stranger – to explain the low prosecution of acquaintance rape in contemporary society. It is argued that the media perpetuates this understanding of rape by focusing on violent assaults by strangers. Systematic analyses of such distortions in press coverage in earlier periods are, however, lacking. This article considers the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an interesting case because Dutch law explicitly criminalised certain forms of acquaintance assault. The article aims to determine and explain newspaper representations of the relationship between the perpetrator and victim in the coverage of sexual assault. The analysis is based on a dataset of all items on the sexual assault of women and girls in four newspapers and five sample years between 1880 and 1930. The results show that assaults by acquaintances made up only a small proportion of the cases reported in the newspapers. Many of the items match the ‘real rape’ concept. The evidence suggests the journalists were overreporting violent stranger rapes both because such stories were more easily available and because they carried a more appealing message for readers.