The newspapers all glossed over what the pirates did to the women. Since most of the initial published Morning Star content was correspondence to and from Lloyd’s, the marine insurance house, this was not surprising. An insurer's primary concern was what the pirates stole and the damage done to the ship, not what happened to the passengers. Only one account of the events on board alluded to the women's ill-treatment at the hands of the pirates. The absence of reference to it in other accounts could have stemmed from a desire to protect their reputations. After all, in the patriarchy of British society, a man's honour was traditionally fixed in the purity of his wife or daughter. Yet a deeper look reveals the women of the Morning Star stood at the centre of a turbulent confluence of old and new gender and class constraints specific to the pre-Victorian era in Britain. Early nineteenth-century men expected women at sea to always conform to the mores of their social class on land. This included during extreme situations like shipwrecks, or when subjected to sexual coercion or violence. The early nineteenth-century societal attitudes towards sexual assault in Britain at the time often made women morally complicit in the crimes committed against them. Their society swiftly judged and vilified them accordingly.

Since pirates operated outside of accepted societal conventions, the sexual violence committed against the Morning Star women was a rare exception to this judgement. In Spain, authorities openly treated their assaults with compassion and understanding. However in Britain, excusing the women from judgement over the sexual violence inflicted on them manifested as ignoring their stories entirely. The omission of the women from the Morning Star story obfuscated the fact that if it had not been for their bravery and fortitude, the ship and its occupants would have sunk to a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

By the nineteenth century women had been on the sea, either intentionally or under duress, for centuries. They remained largely absent from formal records until the escalation of transoceanic passenger travel revealed the increase of their presence on board.