Sex Crimes in the Fifties by Lisa Featherstone, Amanda Kaladelfos (review)

The history of sexuality is inextricably linked to the history of the control of sexual crimes. Scholars of the discipline have always relied on reports of the policing of illegal sexual activities, the evidence offered in court, the associated medical and psychiatric opinions over what constituted sexual aberrations or illegal sexual contact, and the treatments of sex offenders. Following in this rich tradition, Australian sexual history is greatly enriched by Lisa Featherstone and Amanda Kaladelfos’s excellent new survey of sex crimes during a particularly conservative period notorious for the mistreatment of minorities and the protection of narrow white masculine interests. The breadth of their work provides a solid overview of the sexual anxieties and values of the period as seen through court records.

The book focuses mainly on the hitherto unstudied collection of hundreds of transcriptions of sexual criminal trials (291) and sentencing hearings (183), which provide verbatim records from the criminal courts in New South Wales (NSW) between January 1950 and December 1959. We learn much about police, legal, medical, and popular attitudes toward sex from the authors’ examination of these sources, and the book lays solid foundations for future analyses of sexuality in post–World War II Australia. Marked by obsessions over what young women were doing with their bodies and what homosexuals were doing with each other, the 1950s saw arrests for sex crimes triple in NSW. Crimes involving penetration of the victim—rape, sodomy, and carnal knowledge—were treated most harshly, and the authors note that the majority were committed by white men on women, girls, and children; the authors devote a separate chapter to each. Other chapters look at sex crimes within the family and the involvement of migrants in sex crimes. While frequently mentioning Aboriginal involvement in sex crimes, either as victims or as perpetrators, the authors do not delve as deeply as they might have into this subject, since many of these crimes were less likely to be tried and thus left behind fewer archival traces—a fact that makes its own statement about racist attitudes during this period of Australian history. There are also chapters on homosexuality (illegal in NSW until 1984), on the testimonies of medical experts in court, and on forensic psychiatry. The authors make both qualitative and quantitative arguments, and Featherstone and Kaladelfos are at their best in the first few chapters, where they unpack evidence of sexual values in a masculinist culture against a backdrop of statistical criminology.

The crime most policed in 1950s Australia was carnal knowledge of underage girls, and there appears to have been something of a panic around making sure that girls did not become sexually active before they married. There was also intensified policing of gay sex, with a tripling of arrests for sodomy between 1951 and 1961. The authors note that only rape (ostensibly the most serious crime, carrying a death penalty for half of the period analyzed) failed to show a similar increase in arrests, most likely because the police were less interested in combatting rape of adult women. These figures paint a troubling picture of the sexual attitudes of straight white Australian males, the main defendants, who often blamed their crimes on drink or on their inability to resist the perceived enticements of their female victims, even if they were children, and whose court testimony often displayed horrid attitudes toward women and gays.

The trials controlled more than just sex. When a transgression led to an arrest, acceptable masculine and feminine behaviors were put on display. We see how the underage girls and women who alleged being raped were cross-examined to determine whether their ways of being in the world were seen to encourage the men who assaulted them: Were they wearing lipstick? Was their dress too short? Did they have enough sexual knowledge and language to be able to explain what had happened to them, or was their bodily ignorance proof...