Abstract
We can trace the legal and social treatment of sex offenders from the eighteenth century. The major problem in attempting to study sex offenses in the early republic is that the behaviors provoked such disgust that they often were not clearly identified and usually not described in detail. Instead, we find cryptic statements such as “A crime not to be named among Christians” (which could be anything) as well as (and still prevailing in some statutes) “The infamous crime against Nature.” Sodomy, for example, was on the books but not clearly described. Today it is defined as anal sex or oral copulation with no specification of who is doing what to whom. In colonial times sodomy referred to sexual penetration that would not end in procreation. This would include sex between men, sex with an underage child of either sex, or sex with animals.
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Laws, D.R. (2016). Early Historical Treatment of Social Deviance. In: Social Control of Sex Offenders. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39126-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39126-1_3
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