Rape Myths, Rape Law and Mendelsohn’s Victimology: Law’s ‘Bio-psycho-social’ Witness

Abstract

This article provides a feminist reading of a neglected text: victimology founder Benjamin Mendelsohn’s essay about rape victims and the law, ‘Rape in Criminology and the Importance of the Female Judge’ (Mendelsohn Benjamin in La Giustizia Penale I-II-III-IV:28–50 1940). Following the heuristics of feminist socio-legal scholarship, my reading unsettles the established origin story of victimology and furthers feminist knowledge about the persistence of rape myths. I show victimology sprang from Mendelsohn’s work as a rape trial lawyer and was a vehicle for modernising rape myths, brought into being in response to rape survivor-corroborating advancements in forensic science. Mendelsohn’s ‘bio-psycho-social’ method of criminal defence sought a modern scientific foundation for rape myths, mobilising biological, psychoanalytic and sociological knowledge to contrive new grounds for invalidating complainant testimony as corrupt data.