It is the “conventional wisdom” that sexual crimes against women were little regarded by the law until the re-awakening of the feminist movement in the last few decades of the twentieth century. Any nineteenth-century changes in the patriarchal and misogynist status quo were, it has been argued, largely cosmetic, or installed as defensive measures in order to preserve the fundamentals of patriarchy in a changing world. This chapter takes issue with such a flattened view of Victorian treatment of sexual assault. Viewed from the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is easy to paint Victorian criminal justice as either uncaring or patriarchal in its treatment of rape claims. One can dip into the records and soon pull up a case like one that came before the Old Bailey in 1866, in which a twenty-one year old soldier was charged with attempted rape of a seventeen-year-old servant girl. Having gone out after dark near Hounslow to fetch supper beer she had been dragged into a ditch by the defendant and attacked; she hit him on the head with the jug of beer and screamed, bringing a policeman onto the scene. The defense admitted the attack but because the soldier had a good character and “the occurrence had taken place on the night of a merrymaking amongst the troops, when many of them were the worse for liquor,” he was convicted only of indecent assault and sentenced to merely a month's imprisonment.