Example: In large stretches of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, if a woman is raped or assaulted, police officials, politicians, and religious leaders will stress that the whole mess could have been avoided if only the woman had stayed home in their appropriate sphere, gotten permission or escort from a male guardian, not strayed into a place where they could tempt men, etc, rather than focusing on changing the norms that allow the crime, or punishing the perpetrators.
Although western countries have their own fair share of problems in this area, women face far fewer of these issues than they do elsewhere.
Did a blame-the-woman approach once predominate in the west? If so, when and how did the west begin to move away from it?
First off, I would like to note that there are a ton of issues at play here including, but not limited to, religion, community structures, the role of women in society, etc. I am not going to address every one of these concerns. Further, Europe or “the West” is not at all a cohesive unit for analysis. Thus, I am going to demonstrate a little bit of the divergence of the responses of the English legal system and those of English culture to the crimes in which women were the victims.
On September 16, 1902, the London police escorted Ellen Andrews into the Old Bailey in preparation for a hearing. Detective-inspector Walter Dew and the police with him had to “guard her against the molestation of a hostile crowd.” Thus, did Ellen Andrews, enter the court in order to testify against her common-law husband Henry Williams.
The case at hand was unique. For our purposes, it does not even fit within the category of your question (though the ideas of the English crowds demonstrates its relation). Ellen had not been either raped or assaulted by her husband. In fact, in an argument, she claimed that he had specifically told her that he would not hurt her. Ominously, however, he claimed to have “found another way of breaking your heart so that you shall never hold up your head again.” However, what is important is that though we would not categorize her husband’s crime in the same category as rape or domestic violence, their peers acted in the same was as they did those crimes.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 10th of September, Henry Williams took his daughter, Margaret Anne Andrews, from her mother Ellen and, not too long thereafter, cut her neck with a razor. He waited for the police and surrendered to them. When speaking to Detective Inspector Dew, he stated that “I have killed my beautiful little girl to save her from prostitution.” Williams then commented that he knew that “I shall hang for it.”
On that morning, Henry Williams took a razor to his daughter’s neck, a girl who by all accounts he loved dearly, because of his perception that his wife had been unfaithful. While he had been fighting in the South African War, she had, according to Williams, been unfaithful. Indeed, in the days leading up to the murder, he had obsessed over her sexual behavior during his time abroad. According to Andrews, he had asked on both the Monday and Tuesday nights before the murder about her relationship with “a sailor.” He claimed that she had “been intimate with the sailor for two years.” Ultimately, she would testify to the court that she had told Williams that “I had been familiar with him [the sailor], but that there had been nothing improper between us—I told him that I did like the sailor, but not better than him if he had been all right—I said that it was a friendly arrangement and the matter was over.” In other words, she claimed that her relationship with the sailor had never gone beyond friendship.
This testimony, whether accurately representing her relationship with “the sailor” or not, points to important themes. Ellen clearly emphasized, throughout her testimony, that she had no “inappropriate” relationship with the sailor that Henry had heard about. This was likely not just because that is what she had said to Henry, but because she knew of significant ramifications had she admitted to a sexual relationship with someone other than Henry.
In fact, the crowd had gathered on the 16th because they agreed with Henry. They felt that Ellen was responsible for having acted in ways that led to the death of her daughter. When The Times reported on the trial, they noted that the prisoner had told Detective Inspector Dew that he had “killed his child in order to save her from a fast life” and that he would be glad to die and meet his daughter because she was “far happier where she was than if she had lived.” The newspaper also noted that Margarate Andrews had been William’s “illegitimate child.” Henry William’s barrister, Percival Hughes, recognized that by emphasizing this aspect of Ellen’s life, he might be able to alleviate the severity of William’s sentence.
Nevertheless, the jury ultimately found Henry Williams guilty of murdering his daughter. However, the manner in which they did so speaks to a level of disagreement. While declaring him guilty, they “Recommended [him] to mercy…’on account of the somewhat honourable motive he had in saving the little girl from a life of prostitution.’” Thus, though the jury recognized his guilt, they also condemned Ellen as, essentially, a prostitute and validated the implied accusations of the crowd and William’s barrister.
Ultimately, the English judicial system would ignore the recommendation. On November 11, 1902, at 9:00 A.M, William Billington and Henry Pierrepoint executed Williams at Pentonville Prison.