The Role Of Rape Cases In The Twentieth Century

Looking throughout history, at the many different cases that surround the crime of rape; numerous amounts of the cases were quick to judge based on race and ethnicity. Most cases were unfair because of the circumstances that were given, women couldn’t rape a man, and women were treated innocent in a courtroom. During the twentieth century many murders occurred after a raping, “Murder literature was closely related to sexual pornography, through its tendency to fuse sex with violence on the grounds of their common obscenity, and its special interest in crimes of passion, rape-murders, prostitute-killings, and abortion-homicides” (Halttunen, 83). In a case that ended with a murder, it would be very problematic to try to find evidence of rape
Lack of evidence was not a clear reason to conduct the offender not guilty, because of race or ethnicity. There was no such thing as DNA testing, the court went just on individual witnesses and physical evidence, no finger prints or blood samples would come into play until around the 1920s or 1930s. Men were treated much different in race cases against a woman, because the women were looked as to be innocent, and men were not. Yellow journalism played a huge role in speeding the trial up because of non-true accusations it will make up to make the offender look bad, such as the Fatty Arbuckle trial. Yellow journalism would make the offender look like an extremely horrible person and made the case quicker because the public wanted that individual of the street for safety and felt that the individual was not meant to be free long and should be prosecuted. “Murder literature was closely related to sexual pornography, through its tendency to fuse sex with violence on the grounds of their common obscenity, and its special interest in crimes of passion, rape-murders, prostitute-killings, and abortion-homicides” (Halttunen 83). The quote explains that during the early 1800s to the turn of the century, that rapes became more common. It is very interesting because during this time period was the time that the deal the Blacks trying to become free was starting to become a reality. In the previous section it is explained that, some of the first rape cases were accused of being caused by black men. “Some of the earliest of these cases involved, significantly, African American men accused of assaulting white girls. In 1803, a slave named Cato, of Charlestown, New York, was convicted and executed for beating to death twelve year old Mary Atkins, after she had called him ‘black son of a bitch,’ and he tried and failed to rape her” (Halttunen, 175). For Cato, he was accused and convicted of