1. Rape Victims and the Modern Justice System
On the evening of November 21, 1936, thirty-eight year old Anna Brasy, a white woman who sang soprano in her church choir, finished practice and went home. She lived with her mother and brother in a Lincoln Square apartment on Chicagoâs north side. She went to bed, but later woke up when she heard her bedroom door open. She turned and saw a man standing over her. He was holding a knife and told her not to scream or he would kill her. After forcing her to remove her pajamas, he raped her. He brutally beat her, tied her hands with the cord from her bathrobe, and demanded money. She told him that she had some in her closet. Although the man agreed to leave when he heard this, after taking the money he continued to attack her. He started to choke her as well, but left abruptly as Brasy struggled to free herself. She woke her mother and brother. When her brother saw her condition, he called the police while Mrs. Brasy tended to her daughter. When the police arrived, one officer immediately took Anna Brasy to the hospital and another investigated her bedroom and the alley outside the apartment, searching for the perpetrator. After several months in the hospital, Brasy had still not identified any of the suspects that the police brought there for her to view. When her mother received an anonymous tip about the attack, Brasy informed the police. Shortly after, they arrested twenty-four-year-old Robert Conroy, a white man Brasy ultimately identified as her assailant.1
Anna Brasyâs experiences were extreme, and public attention to the case reflects a great deal of concern about urban crime and violence, especially sexual violence, during the mid-twentieth century in Chicago. Although it involved a level of brutality that did not mirror all Chicago rape cases that ended up in court, the similarities between Brasyâs experiences and those of other rape victimsâeven those who did not spend months recovering in the hospitalâsuggest that authorities pursued rape investigations more aggressively than previously understood. Although current assumptions about the past have doubted the diligence with which male authorities investigated rape allegations, court and media records prove this to be untrue. The Stateâs Attorneyâs Office in Chicago organized a Sex Bureau in January 1937 in order to deal with sex crime cases in the city, forcefully responding to the publicity surrounding a series of attacks against women in downtown hotels since the previous summer.2 This initiative coincided with the establishment of a distinct Sex-Homicide Division within the Chicago Police Department, organized to âcapture the night prowlers who have been raping and killing women.â3 Five detectives were permanently assigned to the Sex Bureau, with additional officers transferred in temporarily when difficult cases like Anna Brasyâs continued until a suspect was identified.4
With regard to identification of suspects, it is during this period that the Bertillonage system of suspect identification via body measurements (named after its nineteenth-century creator, Alphonse Bertillon) was being replaced with fingerprint identification, although investigators continued to rely on multiple forensic identifiers in their search for missing criminal suspects.5 In keeping with these techniques, the police kept on file âthe fingerprints, measurements, and photographs of every person accused of a sex crime in the cityâ in the hopes of catching what a local newspaper called âmoron attackers.â6 Such a derisive label and the published concerns about ongoing attacks suggests that, in spite of Matthew Haleâs historical warning about unproven accusations, many people were alarmed about the realities of sexcrime violence. Chicago authorities kept busy in an attempt to curtail sexual violence in the city, and they responded to womenâs complaints, even when victims were not so brutally beaten as Anna Brasy.
Extensive details of Chicagoâs many rape investigations are lost to the historical record, however. Investigations ended or grew cold when police could not locate viable suspects, or charges might be dropped when a victim withdrew her complaint, due to reasons often left vague.7 Moreover, as part of the professionalization of the modern justice system, by the 1930s nearly 80 percent of all Chicago defendants pleaded guilty, usually to a lesser offense than the original charge.8 Nonetheless, prosecutors brought forward and tried several cases successfully, even if these were a fraction of the rape complaints investigated or even reported to the police throughout the mid-twentieth century in Chicago. While commonly held beliefs about rape myths in many ways shaped how indictments were presented in court, trials ending in convictions did not universally adhere to public expectations about âreal rapeâ victims and violent sexual attacks.9 Likewise, while it was once thought that women were reluctant to pursue legal recourse after being raped, in fact many victims willingly entered the bewildering space of the courtroom in order to claim their right to be protected against unprosecuted sexual violence.
Womenâs efforts to represent themselves as victims of crime rather than as instigators of sexually deviant contact indicate their rejection of rape myths. Moreover, the support they received from State authorities suggests that these myths were publicly contested in the decades surrounding World War II. Court officials allowed women to narrate their experiences of sexual violence without extensive corroboration during these decades, privileging their testimonies above that of other State witnesses. Many judges also prevented defense attorneys from straying too far from the specific details of attacks and criminal investigations by limiting questions about victimsâ personal backgrounds and sustaining State objections on these matters. The legal maneuverings of both prosecuting and defense attorneys affected the treatment of women during trials in different ways, of course, but rape victims maintained some authority in the courtroom. After all, it was their testimony that would ultimately make or break cases. During this period, womenâs courtroom efforts reveal how essential they were to the judicial process and how authorities took seriously their right to claim the protections of the criminal justice system.
Prosecutors emphasized victimsâ chaste and forthright character while building their cases, even when their marital, racial, or class backgrounds defied the expectations demanded of sexually victimized women. Downplaying victimsâ social differences during these years emphasized that the State did not automatically succumb to suspicions that certain victims (middle-class, chaste white women) were more believable than others (black, working-class, or divorced women). As the cases analyzed here demonstrate, prosecutors supported many different women in their pursuit of State protection. Defense attorneys were unable to destabilize these muted differences, at least until African American rape victims began appearing in court more regularly during the mid-1950s. Black womenâs social status was easier to interrogate within the confines of a system rooted in both racial and gender privilege. For a time, however, Chicago court officials respected rape victimsâ testimonies, avoiding particularly harsh scrutiny of their social circumstances in the courtroom. The overlapping experiences of women who reported rapes and helped the State successfully prosecute defendants highlight the ways in which they coped with their unwelcome involvement in the judicial process and asserted their own, albeit limited, power in this venue. Although prosecutors may have relied on historic notions of chivalry and of awarding protection to a select few, victimsâ efforts to claim security within the public sphere of the judicial system expanded a culture of rights for all women.
Throughout the mid-twentieth century, Chicago police investigated thousands of reports of rape and other violent crimes. In the years leading up to a departmental reorganization in 1960, Chicago police arrested rape suspects in an average of almost 67 percent of all investigations, which compares to the 72.5 percent average arrest rate for felonious homicide investigations between 1936 and 1959.10 These data correspond to changes in the modern city. During the crisis of depression and the early years of World War II, investigations of violent crimes were downplayed in favor of other national concerns, even as authorities expanded the apparatus that dealt with reports of sexual violence. Still, Americansâ attentions lay elsewhere during these years, which was especially true for crimes that involved victims whose veracity was already potentially suspect, like women who reported charges of domestic or sexual violence.11 Rape arrests in Chicago during the early 1940s were also limited by investigative difficulties, as a transient military population shipped in and out of the city, making it difficult to find alleged perpetrators. Enlisted suspects also could have been turned over to military police, which held jurisdiction over civil crimes at this time. The 1920 Revised Articles of War gave the U.S. military jurisdiction over all crimes allegedly committed by servicemen and women, whether on or off base. Its World War IIâera court docket was crowded because of the existence of the largest American military force ever assembled at home or overseas. Civil prosecutions of enlistees and officers became possible only after 1950, when the revised Uniform Code for Military Justice replaced the earlier Articles of War.12 Not coincidentally, the number of arrests for violent crimes in Chicago expanded significantly after World War II as well.
In spite of investigative difficulties, hundreds of Chicago women regularly came forward with reports of sexual violence, influenced by their changing status in the public sphere. During the 1930s and especially after the United States entered World War II, women joined the paid labor force in greater numbers than ever before, challenging gender role expectations in American society.13 As more women entered new public arenas, they relied less on the traditional, and sometimes false, security of domestic boundaries. Instead, women displayed an expectation of the protections accorded American citizens, reflected in their willingness to defy questions about their sexual culpability and report rapes to authorities. They continued to do so in the years following the war, when rape complaints and investigations never again fell to prewar levels.
Table 1. Differential Arrest Rates for Rape, Felonious Homicide* in Chicago, 1936â1958
Source: Chicago Police Department, âAnnual Reports,â 1935â1958. Data published as raw numbers; percentages tabulated by author.
* refers to murder, negligent manslaughter, non-negligent manslaughter
** data unavailable
Helping to explain the increase in rape reports and arrests in Chicago by the end of World War II was public attention to womenâs activities, including concerns about female sexuality. Such anxieties were embodied in the wartime image of the âVictory Girl,â who sought sexual adventures out of a sense of patriotism and to explore newfound freedoms, but whose exploits had the potential to undermine the sexual health of fighting men and, indeed, the moral health of the American nation.14 Wartime newspapers lamented an increase in female criminals, chastising the amateur âpick up girl,â who was crowding out her professional prostitute counterpart in Chicagoâs jail cells.15 Moreover, critics noted the alarming rates of sexual attacks being reported during the later war years and connected these violent crimes to the violence of war.16 Womenâs sexual activities and contested status may have led some men to believe that they could push flirtations beyond the consensual stage, resulting in more instances of attempted and forcible rape, or at least more reports of sexual violence by this period. Chicagoâs growing population affected criminal statistics as well; there were simply more people in the city by the end of the 1950s than there were at the beginning of the 1930s. 17 Consequently, there were more crimes to investigate and more criminals to pursue. The investigation and arrest rate for forcible rapes in Chicago grew much faster than did the cityâs population, however, suggesting that local authorities were prioritizing a problem once downplayed.
Telling Someone
Few women called the police directly after being raped, opting instead to report the attack to a neighbor, a family member, or sometimes to strangers. Both men and women helped rape victims in traditionally gendered ways, without automatically dismissing their claims or succumbing to the suspicions that popular myths directed them to feel. Women offered immediate aid and emotional support, while men played the protective role of intermediaries who called police, or initiated an amateur search for the perpetrator. In Brasyâs case, her brother called the police immediately after he saw his sisterâs brutalized condition. After Mary Elson, a middle-class white woman, was dragged into an alley and raped in Chicagoâs downtown âLoopâ neighborhood in 1946, she asked the man who found her to take her to her nearby church, where she expected help from her priest. The man was âgood enough to take her to the police stationâ instead and the police called Elsonâs priest, who accompanied them to the hospital where she was later examined.18 Forty-three-year-old Marguerite Thorpe, a divorced, working-class white woman, was attacked in 1948 while waiting for a bus on the southwest side. She told the first woman she saw on the street after it was over. This woman took her into a friendâs nearby apartment, where the women attended to Thorpe and the husband called the police.19 Maurice Brown, an African American resident of the Wells housing project near Chicagoâs south side Bronzeville neighborhood, ran to her motherâs home when she was raped in 1951. A male neighbor overheard Brownâs panicked claim and, while her mother called the police, he went to the alley where she said she had been attacked to see if the assailant was still there.20 Both men and women volunteered assistance to victims and helped alleviate some of the isolation that women felt after being raped. None of the courtroom testimonies from these witnesses suggest that rape myths about lying women diminished the support these victims received after they were attacked. Indeed, newspaper articles from the period are filled with details about Chicago clubwomen demanding action to âcurb moron crimesâ and praising the efforts of those who kept vigilant watch for suspects after rape victims filed reports.21 Even if a womanâs rape allegation did not make it to trial, it is clear that many Chicagoans demanded support and protection for female residents against sexual violence.
Police followed a standard procedure when they responded to a report of rape. Their duties were to observe and to take statements from everyone who was possibly involved in a case, including victims, suspects, and any other relevant witnesses. The officers in Chicagoâs Sex Bureau had to, as one detective explained, âmake proper preparation of the case for the Stateâs Attorneyâs office.â22 This was often difficult for police because victims were understandably traumatized by sexual attacks and could not always talk about them right away. When investigating Mary Elsonâs complaint, police later testified in court that âshe was very nervous and unable to talk,â but that the officer quickly âtried to get as much information as [he] could.â23 Although legal precedents did not demand it, reports made without delay were usually viewed with less skepticism than those from women who waited to report sexual attacks.24 Police interviewed victims several times during the course of an investigation, but immediate statements helped prosecutors build stronger cases because these women did not have time to think up excuses about why they were on the street or at a tavern before they were attacked.
An investigatorâs job meant not only interviewing witnesses but also determining the extent of a rape victimâs physical injuries and assessing her demeanor. Their observations were important for later courtroom testimony concerning the truthfulness of womenâs complaints. Police expected rape victims to be upset; as female sexual chastity was highly valued even in modern American society, its violent ruin was understandably devastating for sexually victimized women. An officerâs testimony about a womanâs tr...