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

Stephen Robertson's Crimes Against Children is an important book, and a significant contribution to the history of children and childhood. Because it is also ambitious in its range and complex in its argument, it deserves to be read by an array of historians concerned with matters of culture, society and law. By examining in depth and detail changes in how sexual crimes against children were defined, popularly understood, and implemented by juries and judges in New York City from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, Robertson also makes a valuable contribution to the important intersection among law, sexuality, and psychiatry in the twentieth century. In seriously engaging this complex historical juncture, Robertson's book can be both extremely illuminating and occasionally frustrating.

Robertson argues that beginning in the 1880s, social reformers and reform organizations, especially the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, began vigorously to extend to older children (both female and male) its protective umbrella by appropriating the guiding nineteenth century visions of the innocence of children. In so doing, it sought to bring to court a variety of sexual offenders who were previously not legally culpable. This argument is not new, since several historians have demonstrated that the campaigns to raise the age of consent in the United States and elsewhere in the West changed the nature of rape prosecutions and our understanding of who was capable of giving sexual consent. But, Robertson's careful attention to the court records and the New York SPCC files reveals not only how frequent and varied these crimes were, but that the success of this initial campaign, in New York at least, was actually quite limited because juries, drawn from ordinary citizens, and even judges rarely approached the law in the categorical ways that reformers hoped to institutionalize through the passage of new laws. In what Robertson calls the actual legal culture, reforms were often stymied, as those who dispensed laws brought to their legal conclusions views about law and about childhood that drew on traditional and often local perspectives regarding gender, maturity, race, ethnicity and class as well attention to the specifics of the cases. Thus, juries made clear distinctions between statutory rape and violent rapes, and prosecutors accepted plea bargains that often included agreements by offenders to marry the victims of statutory rape. Law was not a simple or uniform instrument in the way it was practiced. The category of age, as a simple marker, did not eclipse other ways of understanding sexuality until the twentieth century, and even then in complex and ambiguous ways.

By the twentieth century, the new psychology of child development began to change views of childhood and adolescence as these intersected with new perspectives on matters of sexuality. As older views of adolescent (and even childhood) sexual innocence was replaced with a vision of progressive development, cultural and legal views changed also. In the 1920s this perspective was gaining ground, though its influence was still new and uncertain. But in the 1930s and, especially, by the 1950s, the dominance of a developmental model of sexuality intersected with matters of law, and the new psychology began to alter both legislation and legal culture in strategic ways. In many ways, this description reduces the complex and frequently knotty story that Robertson tells and which he illustrates with real cases and specific (and sometimes gruesome) details of violence against children. One of the great strengths of this book is the careful way in which Robertson approaches his subject, and the fact that his analysis is grounded in statistical patterns while the story is brought home through specific cases. Nevertheless this description certainly corresponds to the trajectory laid out in Crimes Against Children. And Robertson's documentation of this pattern is a signal contribution to our understanding of two profoundly important medico-legal matters: the way in which sexuality became...