On 20 October 2015, the first episode of a new Brazilian TV series, Junior Masterchef, was broadcast. Almost immediately, one of the contestants on this children’s cooking competition -a 12-year-old girl- became the focus of numerous sexually-explicit and abusive messages and posts on social media.¹ In response, thousands of women and girls shared online their first experiences of sexual harassment: the hashtag #MeuPrimeiroAssedio (“#MyFirstHarrassment”) was used on Twitter over 82,000 times within 5 days, attracting international attention and launching a national debate over the ubiquity of sexual harassment, along with broader discussions about sexual violence and how best to combat it.² The following month saw the landmark Black Women’s March against Racism and Violence and in Favor of Living Well in Brasilia, a multifaceted protest against misogyny and racial discrimination bringing together 50,000 women to march through the capital city, an event which was the culmination of a year’s work by Black feminists across Brazil to reach out to other Black women beyond established activist networks.³

These campaigns of the mid-2010s did, of course, not spring out of the ether: they built on (and tapped into) a long trajectory of feminist activism in Brazil, both historical and contemporary.⁴ This included vocal challenges to sexist tropes, victim-blaming and stereotyping about sexual harassment or rape, such as participation in the SlutWalk protest marches held in 2011 and 2012.⁵ This takeover of the streets and social networks by women in favor of freedom, with denunciations of abuse and describing the objectification and violence against their bodies, became known in the Brazilian media as the “Women’s Spring” (Primavera das Mulheres). What was arguably a new tactic and direction, however, was the widespread engagement from 2015 onwards through social media platforms as a way to protest sexual harassment and abuse, including by women (and by some male allies) who were not necessarily involved in feminist activism beforehand, not only relating to specifically Brazilian instances but also participating in international debates over this subject. It has been suggested by feminist scholars that for “fourth wave” feminism in the new millennium, social media and digital activity are integral to the ways the contemporary women’s movement has (and has continued) to develop and evolve.⁶ The success of this medium in forcing these difficult conversations about the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence into an international spotlight, and necessitating responses -even from critics- underscores its significance. While it remains debatable the extent to which this online campaigning and discussion has actually changed broader attitudes towards and treatment of sexual harassment, abuse and gender-based violence in Brazil-just as has been the case in other countries, both within and beyond Latin America-it nonetheless marks a significant historical milestone in terms of generating public debate over these connected issues and their (un)acceptability.⁷ This, in turn, invites further reflection on how these same issues have been variously recognised, denied, and debated in the past. Such historical work can also remind us that an improved degree of public awareness or condemnation of sexual violence does not necessarily lead to more effective interventions, as Lisa Featherstone has recently shown through her research on the history of rape and child sexual abuse in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s.⁸

Historically and culturally distinct conditions have always mediated definitions of -and responses to- sexual violence. As Joanna Bourke has powerfully argued, “Any assumption that sexual violence is a universal experience insults the specificities of individual histories. Terror is always local.”⁹ Since 2017, the international reach of the #MeToo movement (a concept first developed by African-American activist Tarana Burke in 2006) has brought new and global attention to the widespread sexual harassment and assault of women, children, and men.¹⁰ Conversely, however, the successes of this movement have also been met by what have often been overtly misogynistic denials that such a continuum of sexual violence is a widespread and disturbingly “normalised” part of many women’s life experiences. Critiques of #MeToo argue that this awareness feeds into a pious and intolerant “cancel culture” or mob mentality that unfairly targets “innocent” people, primarily men.¹¹

In many societies and over substantial periods of time, sexual violence has also routinely been dismissed as not being of serious concern; and discussions (whether medical, legal, political, or cultural) on the topic have explicitly blamed and stigmatised the victims of such attacks, rather than condemning the perpetrators or seeking justice.¹² For example, the British physician Alfred Swaine ^{Taylor assured readers of his influential textbook on medical jurisprudence in 1865} that false allegations of rape were often “wilfully and designedly made”-a statement that had little to do with any evidence of such false accusations coming before the courts, and everything to do with the myths surrounding sexual violence in Victorian England.¹³ These narratives emphasized the intrinsic untrustworthiness of all victims, further complicated by attitudes to gender, race, and class that, for instance, disturbingly argued that so-called “precocious” girls might be as much or a greater source of sexual danger as they were vulnerable to it.¹⁴ Similarly, the Brazilian medical examiner and psychiatrist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues claimed in the early twentieth century that the bodies of Black and mixed-race women and girls were more likely to be “mistaken” by the unwary physician as being victims of sexual violence.¹⁵ As the anthropologist and sociologist Mariza Corrêa has pointed out, Rodrigues’s claims helped establish him as an international authority in criminal justice matters and meant that Black victims of sexual assault faced even more substantial challenges in seeking redress through the Brazilian courts.¹⁶

Both the cases of Taylor and Rodrigues also demonstrate the constant concern with claiming the (female) body as a site of objective and neutral “truth” that could easily prove or disprove allegations of sexual violence, despite the fact (that?) such interpretations were marked by racial, gender, and class prejudice both in practice and in discourse. Particular contexts, such as war and conflict, or institutions such as slavery or imperialism, have also intersected with these ideas and have frequently been used by perpetrators to excuse sexual violence against subjugated peoples or enslaved women and men.¹⁷ The impact and legacy of this stigmatisation and erasure of sexual violence have also often required historians to read archival sources against the grain or to listen carefully for what remains unsaid in oral history testimony and interviews.

In short, the study of sexual violence necessitates bearing in mind the intersecting realities, actors, discourses, practices, prejudices, and contradictions that, in different historical and geographical contexts, have aided in promoting it and, at the same time, normalised it or even condemned it. The ways that sexual violence has been understood, accepted, tolerated, contested, or rejected by perpetrators, victims, or commentators have also depended on specific cultural frameworks. Reading the -often scarce, ambiguous, or implicit-evidence (textual, verbal, corporeal, or visual) of sexual violence and its responses has frequently posited a challenge for historians, who have needed to refine their methodological and theoretical tools to address and study this phenomenon.¹⁸ For instance, the Holocaust historian Anna Hájková has advocated for using the term “sexual barter” as a more accurate and nuanced descriptor for instances in which people during World War Two engaged in sex in return for food or other scarce resources with soldiers or camp guards and officials-something that they would not have done under peacetime conditions and where references to these encounters as “consent” would not be appropriate, but reframing this as “barter” attempts to acknowledge and respect what agency they could utilize at the time.¹⁹ Similarly, as Michelly Eustáquia do Carmo and Francini Lube Guizardi have demonstrated in their work on contemporary health and social policy, it can also be useful for scholars to consider the extent to which the potentially nebulous concept of vulnerability, specifically, impacts on lived experience and risk.²⁰

Each of the articles in this special issue of Historia Crítica focuses on an aspect of historical sexual violence in Latin America across a time period ranging between 1830 and 1976, and examines case studies taken from Chile, Mexico, and Peru. There is an increasing body of important work by social scientists in fields such as politics, law, sociology, anthropology and psychology exploring issues of sexual and gender-based violence across contemporary Latin America.²¹ However, despite the wealth of both established and ongoing research that has been carried out into the histories of gender and sexuality in the Latin American context during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,²² relatively little historiography to date has focused specifically on sexual violence in this region over the same period.²³ By focusing specifically on this issue, the authors of each article offer new insights into the histories of gender, sexuality, and violence in later modernity.

The first article, by Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero, examines surviving judicial files relating to rape and sexual assault in Yucatan that were tried between 1830 and 1875. As Cuartero shows, it is possible to trace distinct patterns emerging through these files in how such cases were understood and dealt with in the nineteenth century, one striking feature of which is that the majority of victims in this rural area were indigenous Mayan women and girls. Charting how sexual violence was approached by a criminal justice system that still relied extensively on colonial precedents in the decades following independence and prior to codification in 1871 (especially when far from cities), Cuartero demonstrates that concerns about honour-both that of the accused and that of the victim-were central to the court, and thus had a profound influence in shaping the outcome. As was the case in nineteenth-century England, where the nebulous concept of “respectability” played a similar role, the degree to which the men and women involved in the case were believed by the authorities and within their community to adhere to the expected behavioural norms and conventions for their gender, class, and ethnicity all impacted on proceedings.

The ratification of the Penal Code in 1871 presented new challenges and opportunities for lawyers in Mexico, and, as Pamela Loera illustrates in the second article of this special issue, one key avenue for exploring and debating these issues was the influential newspaper El Foro. Published between 1873 and 1899, the paper was not only cheap but widely accessible in a range of venues, offering those who wrote for it and its audience the chance to both develop and challenge understandings of how the new Code should be interpreted. Focusing on reportage of child sexual abuse cases, Loera notes that moments of disagreement on specific aspects of these cases and their prosecution also underline the tacit consensus about other elements, such as the correlation between supposed “modesty” or ignorance of sexual matters and “innocence” in the case of female victims. Such constructions were not only marked by class and gender but also ethnicity: Loera demonstrates here that indigenous girls were especially liable to be stereotyped as “uncivilized” or prone to making malicious allegations of abuse against “innocent” men -both of which were ideas that severely limited their chances of being believed by the courts or the press.

The experiences of indigenous women, and how they navigated a court system in transition is the central theme of Laura Bunt-MacRury’s article, which examines sexual violence in Cuzco between 1924 and 1949. While the intention behind the new Penal Code of 1924 was reformist, part of the swathe of projects during the early twentieth century that were aimed at making Peru “modern,” Bunt-MacRury compellingly argues that this new focus on legal positivism could not compete with the powerful colonial and republican legacy that held only a woman or girl who had been a virgin at the time of her assault was a credible plaintiff. Since all women plaintiffs studied in cases of rape and sexual assault in Cuzco during this period were indigenous or mestizas and from working-class backgrounds with a strong local tradition of premarital cohabitation, this had profound implications for how such cases were dealt with. The continuing emphasis by Peruvian justices on virginity, “honour” and a conviction that younger victims were more likely to be believable (though this relative judicial sympathy was still never guaranteed), despite the reforms introduced by the Code, made it difficult for women to secure justice in cases of sexual transgression.

The final article in this special issue, by Jorge Pavez Ojeda, examines sexual violence in the torture centres of the Chilean dictatorship during the mid-1970s. The years 1974-1977 marked the zenith of attempts by the dictatorship to terrorise the population in order to secure its goals, and detainees were frequently subjected to sexual abuse. As this article shows, sexual violence was an integral element in in state-sponsored sadism. Despite this, it was not until 2014 that the first lawsuits were filed against perpetrators that specifically referred to rape, and the first judicial ruling that condemned torture during the dictatorship as including “sexual harrassment” was only made in late 2020. As Pavez Odeja concludes, the length of time it has taken for survivors to gain redress, and the relatively high levels of ongoing support for some political figures who were closely associated with the dictatorship, can be considered as a failure of the transition to democracy since the 1990s.

Taken together, these articles open up new avenues of inquiry in modern Latin American history. They also sound a collective cautionary note about the dangers of overestimating “progress” (either as a rhetorical device or in practical reformist terms) in developing strategies to understand and combat sexual violence effectively. The fact that official statistics documenting the incidence of sexual assault in Brazil dropped during the global COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, reflects the greater difficulty for victims in lockdown in reporting the crime rather than an actual decrease in such violence.²⁴

Despite differences across time and space, many of the issues that were prevalent in sexual assault cases tried during the nineteenth and early twentieth century-victim-blaming, stereotyping, a belief in the unreliability of witnesses, racist and misogynistic attitudes (whether implicit or explicit), the difficulty of accurately determining rates of sexual violence, and conflicting views of how best to prevent and punish such crimes-remain just as relevant to the experiences of victims in 2022.