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

Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960. By Stephen Robertson (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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 an important site for medical expertise in the law; and the specific way in which children became the means by which this intervention took place.

At the same time, Robertson's close attention to the cases and his sometimes turgid prose makes this important transformation less clear (and its significance less apparent) than it should be. The book often leaves the reader either not convinced or confused about exactly what is going on at any particular juncture and how this fits into the larger historical development. Some of this is a natural result of the messy reality and the slow (and even contradictory) transformation of understanding that Robertson addresses. But, some of it results from Robertson's writing style and the several ambitions of the book which can and do trip up the reader unexpectedly. Thus, Robertson wants not only to make a contribution to this important matter of how legal understanding and juridical behavior are transformed in the twentieth century, but also to a number of other issues, and he is eager to score points in these matters: the nature of legal culture as opposed to law-making; the complex role of class and legal nullification by juries; the growing importance of age as a category of analysis; the changing views of the reliability of children's testimony. There are others as well. Sometimes, these matters confuse the important story Robertson has to tell and the reader loses the thread as Robertson takes his story into too many analytic cul de sacs. Sometimes, as in the conclusion which seems to be for another book, these other matters literally overwhelm the story. It is also too bad that Robertson does not grapple more effectively with the media and its role in framing and altering perceptions about children and childhood in the twentieth century. His reading of newspaper and journal stories is sometimes naive, and he does not invest media stories of childhood with the power that he provides to other cultural sources. It is also too bad that Robertson does not extend his understanding of crimes against children past the 1970s, when the real furor over sex crimes took over the media. Instead, the reader is led to imagine that the story ends quite neatly with the defeat of the psycho-sexual developmental model. Robertson does this by shifting his attention from the victims of abuse to the abusers who by then come sharply into view as pedophiles. In fact, the story of child sexual abuse is still very much alive, with some contemporary aspects repeating earlier experiences. One only has to read the signs on California buses which warn men, in Spanish, that having sex with a child under the age of eighteen is a crime, or read the New York Times coverage of the prosecution of a Nebraska husband (and father) of 22 accused of raping his 14 year old wife, who according to Nebraska law could neither marry nor consent. The subject is hardly settled. Nevertheless, both in its careful research and it its ability to illuminate the importance of sexual crimes against children during the period from 1880 to 1960, Robertson has made a fundamental contribution to the historiography. He has also demonstrated the central and strategic importance of childhood to twentieth century culture. I am hoping that this book will lay to rest the wasteful argument still heard among some historians that only the actual experience of children is worth studying historically. By examining how childhood is defined in law and social theory, acted upon by ordinary people, and expressed in the behavior of children, Robertson has demonstrated that childhood is a profoundly significant issue for historians.

Paula S. Fass

University of California, Berkeley