Crimes against Children

Crimes against Children
Author: Stephen Robertson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2006-03-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0807876488

In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans' intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children. Robertson describes how the nineteenth-century approach to childhood as a single phase of innocence began to shift at the end of the century to include several stages of childhood development, prompting reformers to create legal categories such as statutory rape and carnal abuse to protect children. However, while ordinary New Yorkers' involvement in the prosecution of those offenses reshaped their understandings of who was a child and produced a new concern to establish the age of their sexual partners, their beliefs in childhood innocence and in a concept of sexuality centered on sexual intercourse remained unchanged. As a result, families' use of the law and jurors' decisions ultimately diminished the protection the new laws offered to children. Robertson's study, based on the previously unexamined files of the New York County district attorney's office, reveals the importance of child sexuality and sex crimes in twentieth-century American culture.

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes
Author: Chloë Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Feminism
ISBN: 9780367664992

This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other, to argue for an anti-carceral feminist Foucauldian approach to sex crimes. The author expands on Foucault's writings through intersectional explorations of the critical race, decolonial, critical disability, queer and critical trans studies literatures on the prison that have emerged since the publication of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Drawing on Foucault's insights from his genealogical period, the book argues that those labeled as sex offenders will today be constructed to re-offend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which they are inculcated through criminological discourses and in the criminal punishment system, and second in virtue of the manners in which their sexual offense is taken up as an identity through psychological and sexological discourses. The book includes a discussion of non-retributive responses to crime, including preventative, redistributive, restorative, and transformative justice. It concludes with two appendixes: the original 19th-century medico-legal report on Charles Jouy and its English translation by the author. Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes will be of interest to feminist philosophers, Continental philosophers, Women's and Gender Studies scholars, social and political theorists, as well as social scientists and social justice activists.

Sex Crimes and Sex Offenders

Sex Crimes and Sex Offenders
Author: Donna Vandiver
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317385241

Sex Crimes and Sex Offenders: Research and Realities provides an overview of social scientific theory and research on sex crimes and sex offenders. Most other books on the market are focused on a single issue—such as treatment, rape, pedophilia, theory, etc. This book is unique in that it covers the most current theory and research along with individual cases of sex crimes (e.g., Kobe Bryant, Jerry Sandusky, and other case studies), effectively linking theory and research with the realities of sex crimes and sex offenders as well as their victims. Vandiver, Braithwaite, and Stafford are careful to dispel myths and to focus on the heterogeneity of sex crimes and sex offenders, and not on any one issue or population or theory. Instead, they weave a framework using a full range of theoretical concepts and research data to integrate their discussions of crimes, offenders, victims, treatments, and policy implications. The result is a valuable resource for students and early-stage researchers investigating sex crimes or offenders.

Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles

Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles
Author: Chrysanthi S. Leon
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2011-08-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0814753264

From sex fiend laws to Jessica's Law, every state regularly passes popular tough-on-crime legislation, often written after highly-publicized cases have made the gruesome rounds through the media. Chrysanthi Leon shows that, while the singular notion of the sexual bogeyman has been used to justify these harsh policies, not all sex offenders are the same and such 'one size fits all' policies are well-intentioned but badly implemented. Leon argues for much-needed changes to the criminal justice system, ultimately showing that when policies intended for the worst offenders take over, all of us suffer.

When Rape was Legal

When Rape was Legal
Author: Rachel A. Feinstein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351809180

When Rape was Legal is the first book to solely focus on the widespread rape perpetrated against enslaved black women by white men in the United States. The routine practice of sexual violence against enslaved black women by white men, the motivations for this rape, and the legal context that enabled this violence are all explored and scrutinized. Enlightening analysis found that rape was not merely a result of sexual desire and opportunity, or simply a form of punishment and racial domination, but instead encompassed all of these dimensions as part of the identity of white masculinity. This provocative text highlights the significant role that white women played in enabling sexual violence against enslaved black women through a variety of responses and, at times, through their lack of response to the actions of the white men in their lives. Significantly, this book finds that sexual violence against enslaved black women was a widespread form of oppression used to perform white masculinity and reinforce an intersectional hierarchy. Additionally, white women played a vital role by enabling this sexual violence and perpetuating the subordination of themselves and those subordinate to them.

Respectability on Trial

Respectability on Trial
Author: Brian Donovan
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-09-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438461968

Providing a front row seat at critical courtroom battles over seduction, pimping, rape, and sodomy in early twentieth-century New York City, Brian Donovan uses verbatim trial transcripts to understand the city's history during the so-called "first sexual revolution." By tracing the revolutionary and repressive dimensions of this time period, Donovan reveals how conflicting ideas about sex and gender shaped the city's criminal justice system. He unearths stories of sexual violence and legal injustice that contradict the image of early twentieth-century America as a time of sexual revolution and progress. Police and courts often served the interests of the upper classes, men, and racial and ethnic majorities, but the trial transcripts included here reveal the considerable extent to which members of working-class and immigrant communities used the machinery of law enforcement for their own ends. Many previous books have fully documented and analyzed the sensational trials of turn-of-the-century New York City, but none have paid such close attention to the courtroom experiences of common city dwellers.

The Boundaries of Eros

The Boundaries of Eros
Author: Guido Ruggiero
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1989
Genre: Families
ISBN: 0195056965

Using the records of several Venetian courts that dealt with sex crimes, Ruggiero traces the evolution of both licit and illicit sexuality during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, providing insight into Venetian society and, ultimately, the Renaissance itself.

Crimes Unspoken

Crimes Unspoken
Author: Miriam Gebhardt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2016-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1509511237

The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.