Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (review)

The beginning of this book, the 1880s, is a familiar starting point for historians of sexuality in the Anglo West. Flipping through Robertson's bibliography, readers will be struck by the number of studies of prostitution, juvenile justice, urban moral reform, and laws regulating sexuality that set the late nineteenth century as their analytical hook. But few—Chauncey's Gay New York being a notable exception—of these historical works stretch to the 1960s, more often territory traversed by sociologists. Fewer still study both males and females as well as heterosexual and homosexual encounters of a consensual or coercive nature. Thus, a work of this scope presents a bold challenge to established scholarly framings of modern sexual history. But Robertson's claim is not simply one of greater inclusiveness; rather, he contends that his study focuses attention on a much-neglected figure in the history of modern sexuality: the child.

Robertson approaches his subject not through childrearing manuals, medical texts, or popular literature but through legal records, primarily criminal court proceedings from the New York County district attorney's files. By examining at five-year intervals all cases involving alleged sexual crimes against persons legally defined as children, he unearthed approximately 1,500 files ranging from 1886 to 1955. "Whenever I opened a case file," he recounts in his introduction, "I felt a powerful urge to solve the puzzle, to reconcile the contradictions" (6). Ultimately, he chose to confront "inconsistencies and differing emphases" about innocence, harm, coercion, and complicity and to challenge historiographical claims that middle-class professionals had successfully modernized American attitudes toward sexuality by the mid-twentieth century. Robertson differs: "Modern ideas did not simply supersede older notions, pushing them from the minds of Americans; nor did they simply fall victim to existing beliefs, ignored once they were judged unpersuasive" (3). This is one of the book's refrains: what legislators and moral crusaders—even New York's powerful Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—orchestrated in their effort to set age-based definitions of criminal conduct failed to determine attitudes and practices among legal agents and working-class actors, who initiated proceedings on their own terms. Nevertheless, Robertson's long view and rich sources do reveal a slow and uneven shift between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries from a notion of childhood as a period of innocence and sexual violence as a form of physical injury to a concept of childhood as a phase of physiological and psychosexual development, one possibly derailed through sexual interference.

The book is divided into four roughly chronological phases: the age of innocence; the age of consent; the age of the child; and the age of the psychopath. The first half of the book covers territory that feminist scholars, historians of childhood, and historians of sexuality have studied for close to thirty years: the history of the child rescue movement, efforts to increase penalties for sexual offenses against children, and efforts to criminalize a wider range of adult sexual contact with children. Are there any fresh insights here? Curiously, for anyone not conversant with this literature it is difficult to discern, since few historiographical claims are asserted once past the introduction. Footnotes sometimes orient an observation: for instance, New York Society fieldworkers during the late nineteenth century concentrated on cases of neglect and those exhibiting an apparent need to regulate children's activities, a finding that accords with Linda Gordon's interpretation but differs from that of Elizabeth Pleck, who emphasizes the attention to cruelty (22). More often conclusions are presented without reference to established scholarship, so we learn that despite purity reformers' efforts to raise the age of consent for females to sixteen in 1887, criminal prosecutions only recognized children of "tender age" (generally under the age of ten) as fully innocent victims. Numerous studies of sexual violence prosecutions during...