Virgin or not, and dishonest?

The treatment of female victims of sexual violence within the Brazilian criminal justice system (1890-1930)

Abstract

The present work is part of a broader research which found that female sexual honesty functioned as a formal social control norm in the sphere of sexual crimes in Brazilian First Republic (1890-1930) (Sassi, 2023). A bibliographic review of studies on criminal procedure and an analysis of jurisprudential materials cited by Brazilian legal doctrine were conducted, with a focus on the crime of rape. The objective was to understand 1) how discriminatory discourses were (re)produced during criminal proceedings, reinforcing gender, class and race stereotypes associated with female sexuality; and 2) how and to what extent female victims of rape, intersected by markers of race (non-white) and class (poor), adhered to the discriminatory gender discourses propagated by justice operators. It was found that the imputation of the category "virgin or not, but dishonest", implicit in the interpretation of the Criminal Code, suppressed the presumption of honesty for virgin women and the presumption of violence for young women under the age of 16, subjecting complainants to a judgment of their honesty.

Keywords: rape, secondary victimization, sexual honesty, criminal legal history.