Unwanted Intimacy: Violent Sexual Transfers in British and American Societies 1870s to 1970s

Perpetrators of unwanted sexual intimacies assault our histories. Their violence is historically specific and, as such, alters form through time. This article examines the sexual abuser as interpreted in the past. Whether understood as an inheritance from the evolutionary past, evidence of a pathological faultline, or proof of a perverse situational adaptation, the great clash between different forms of truth or competing visions of what it means to be human exposes crucial shifts in the accommodation of sexual violence within British and American societies between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.