Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [212]
Mary Odem studied prosecutions for statutory rape in Alameda County, California. In the decade 1910—20, there were 112 prosecutions in this county, which had a population of roughly 250,000. Fourteen male defendants were between fifteen and nineteen years of age; thirty were between twenty and twenty-four. Over 70 percent of the young women admitted they were willing partners. When the age of consent went up to eighteen, there was a wave of prosecutions. Police and probation officers made some arrests on their own; but parents and other family members accounted for most of the prosecutions. Working-class and immigrant families “used the law as a way of regulating male sexual behavior.” One mother, for example, discovered (and read) a letter written by her darling daughter and learned she was sexually active. The mother beat the daughter, reported her to juvenile authorities, and had the boyfriend arrested for statutory rape. The brothers of another “victim” chased the boyfriend and threatened to shoot him after they found him in their sister’s bedroom .41
Today, most of this would hardly be criminal at all; there are plenty of people who decry young lust, but they do not call it rape. Up to half or three-quarters of the young male population would qualify for jail if such laws were vital and enforced. On the other hand, some “victims” were, in fact, awfully young; and the line between “real” rape—violent, unwanted sex—and the behaviors that touched off some of these cases is murky at best.
In the 1930s, Jacob and Rosamond Goldberg studied 1,400 young girls who were victims of “rape” (both kinds) in New York City. They had trouble drawing the line between consensual and forcible rape of young girls: “considerably more than one half of the girls were violated despite every effort on their part to escape.... Of those who were classified as giving their consent, many were ... too young to comprehend. ”42 This seems entirely plausible. The “statutory rape” cases came out of very different types of situation. In many instances, the “victim” was truly coerced or manipulated, or was too young to give intelligent consent. In others, she and her partner were both victims—victims of parents or of a prudish and repressive society.
The statutory rape laws rested on certain obvious assumptions about what women were like, what their sex lives were or ought to be, and about the value of modesty and chastity. Well into this century, Victorian standards remained the official line. Many people—perhaps most people—assumed the state had the right, if not the duty, to enforce this code, so that at least the surface of society conformed to the standards of decency. There was probably considerable local variation. Some towns and cities pursued public decency with a vengeance. Thus, in 1930, in nine suburban township courts in Franklin County, Ohio, as many as 38.3 percent of the criminal cases were for “indecent exposure,” and 8.7 percent for “parking without lights,” an offense “made up largely of cases of indiscreet young couples out to enjoy a warm summer evening, in quiet spots on little travelled roads.” Most justices of the peace and constables ignored “petting parties,” but others felt “impelled to search the byroads and hedges” looking for couples who displayed too much “ardor.”43
But all the while, behind the bushes, so to speak, the old standards were rotting away, probably even in Ohio. Culture and behavior were conspiring underground to create the “sexual revolution,” which would first weaken and then destroy the Victorian fabric of sexual order.
Degenerate Man
The first few decades of the twentieth century were the high-water mark of eugenics, the genetic theory of crime, and the pseudoscience of criminal anthropology.