Sexual Violence and Scholarly Silence: Questions from Early 20th-Century Limón

How should we assess documentary traces of sexual violence and coercion in the past, when it is nearly impossible to make meaningful assertions about patterns or variation in the frequency of such experiences as a result of vexed cross-cutting unknowns regarding reporting and recording? Can we do no better than guess that risks of sexual victimization were roughly a constant in women’s and children’s lives? And if so, does that make it okay for us to leave those risks and those experiences out of our narratives? Or is sexual violence important for scholars to discuss precisely because it was continually present in women’s and girls’ experiences and concerns? As an evidentiary base for raising these questions, the paper draws on judicial records from the late 19th and early 20th century Limón, a province in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica.