'Easy to charge, hard to disprove': responses to sexual assault on women in New Zealand, 1860 - 1910

Abstract

The above quote, commonly known as 'Lord Hale's dictum', probably had a greater effect on the court's and public's perception of sexual assault than any other single piece of legal opinion, common law or statute. The dictum was devised by Sir Matthew Hale more than 120 years before the start of the period under study, yet was regularly quoted by Supreme Court officials of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And, as would appear to be the case, for most of the rest of twentieth century as well. See the Conclusion of this thesis for examples of this quote remaining influential in attitudes towards sexual assault right up until the present day. As the title of this thesis is evidence to, however, even these quotes were not always faithful: convenient abbreviations which removed the 'hard to be proved' part were cited with more frequency than the full quote itself. The most common of these read that charges of rape (or sexual assault) were 'easy to make and hard to disprove', or 'easy to bring and hard to defend'. Yet, whilst the dictum effectively represents the attitudes towards rape and sexual assault predominant during the second half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, it encapsulates only a small (if notable) part of the multiplicity of responses to sexual assault on women during this period. It is these responses which are the primary concern of the study: the various ways in which different sectors of the public and the justice system responded to the incidents of sexual assault which came to their attention. What is beyond the immediate focus of this thesis are the events leading up to and including a sexual assault: the combination of such factors as environment, power relations, acquaintance, attitudes toward women and sexuality, and so on, which may have contributed to a rape or sexual attack. This in part is dictated by the main sources of evidence for this thesis, which will be discussed below, but also in part by the author's interest in the history of criminal justice.