A history of the right to bodily integrity in practice: the case of forensic vaginal examinations

Speaker: Dr Willemijn Ruberg, Utrecht University

The right to bodily integrity was anchored in human rights treatises and national constitutions in the second half of the twentieth century, even though important developments such as the abolition of torture and corporal punishment had already taken place since the Enlightenment. However, the inclusion of the right to bodily integrity in law still leaves us with many unanswered questions: how is this right applied in practice? Which bodies are seen to be deserving of bodily integrity and which are not?

This talk will focus on medical and forensic practices of vaginal examinations in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women underwent internal examinations in different circumstances: nineteenth-century prostitutes suffered compulsory medical examinations as part of the acts on venereal diseases; girls and women who filed complaints about sexual assault underwent bodily examinations to gather evidence; women accused of infanticide were examined for signs of recent delivery; female prisoners were submitted to bodily searches. In all of these cases, there was discussion on which body of law to apply, on whether the law allowed for these examinations, on what consent meant and on who was allowed to perform these examinations. This talk will discuss this ‘grey area’, exploring how law works in practice and how the (gendered) body and its material boundaries are enacted.

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