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I was only eight years old;
And before I grew up and knew what it meant 
I had no words for it, except
That I was frightened and told my Mother.

EDGAR LEE MASTERS, "NELLIE CLARK." FROM THE SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

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In 1926, psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman examined a man who in other eras would be variously termed a sex fiend, a defiler, a child molester, or a serial pedophile. Karpman quotes at length the words of the subject, Kenneth Elton, who emerges as a rounded historical figure rather than the monster of media stereotypes. [*1] 

Born in Virginia in 1899, Elton claimed to have been raped by an adult woman, a neighbor, when he was seven, and this incident had a great influence on his later behavior. He began molesting younger girls when he was about fifteen. As often happens in such cases, there is disagreement about the ages of his victims: while authorities stressed his predilection for prepubescent children, Elton presented himself as merely a teenage boy with a taste for girls a little younger than himself. While working at an army camp during World War I, he associated with girls of thirteen or fourteen in preference to the "gold-digger" women frequented by 

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soldiers, figuring that the youngsters were probably disease-free. In 1914, however, he was charged with the attempted rape of a girl aged between seven and ten. Pronounced feebleminded, he was consigned to a state hospital for the insane, but doctors there determined that he was not medically insane. In 1922, after approaching a young girl on the street, he received a one-year jail sentence; in 1925, after being caught performing cunnilingus on a girl of nine, he was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Elton was puzzled by the tough official reaction, and he minimized his offenses as "a kind of masturbation, just to get the gun off."

Elton's fate in the 1920s differed from what would have occurred a century or two earlier: rather than being viewed as acts of moral evil or lust, his misconduct was seen as a medical condition that merited treatment in a mental institution. Intervention was needed to interrupt a pattern of compulsive, "perverted" behavior unlikely to respond to simple deterrence. 

The gravity with which his acts were viewed suggests that Elton was seen as merely one manifestation of a larger problem, one that had acquired the name sex crime. Although he had not yet physically harmed his victims, authorities were aware of the chance that his misbehavior might escalate, and their awareness was based on the medically oriented views that permeated the criminal-justice and mental health systems by the early twentieth century. 

The new positivist criminology was founded upon the radical principle that deviant acts were symptoms indicating underlying medical or biological flaws in the offender, conditions that demanded treatment or incapacitation. This approach undermined traditional ideas of personal responsibility and legal guilt and placed a new emphasis on defending the community from the persistent wrongdoer.

Elton's case occurred at a time when the correct response to sexual offenses was being widely debated. Although all acknowledged the need to protect children, there were sharp differences of approach between advocates of social reform, slum clearance, and antipoverty programs, on one hand, and those who favored forceful action by police and courts, on the other. And as in later years, those who saw the problem in terms of stranger molesters influenced policymakers far more than did activists concerned with "insider" abuse and incest. 

 

In so many ways, the Progressive Era provides a distant mirror to contemporary debates over child abuse, a problem formulated for the first time in its modem sense between about 1908 and 1922. In a foretaste of the 1970s and 1980s, feminists allied with therapists, social workers, and moral reformers in order to defend children, and

the new ideas were promulgated by a sensationalistic media. Also as in later years, the child-protection movement drew support from the bureaucracies of law enforcement and corrections, which gained new discretionary powers for controlling deviants.

Morality Laws 

Although criminal laws regulating sexual behavior have existed since the oldest civilizations, the rationale for such legislation has changed substantially over time. In America the earliest colonial law codes contained lengthy lists of sexual offenses meriting punishment, with fornication, adultery, bestiality, and homosexuality all drawing severe physical penalties. These acts were forbidden because they were regarded as grave sins, and this religious consensus was reflected in the law of civil society. [*2] Nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts of perversion and sex crime were superimposed on legal codes founded on the very different concepts of sin all immorality.

One recurrent problem in studying the early laws is that deviant sexual behavior inspired such horror that cases are rarely described in detail, making it difficult for someone today to determine the exact nature of the original offences: indictments in homosexuality cases, for example, sometimes refer only to "the crime not to be named among Christians." Although sodomy was universally condemned in the colonies and the early republic and could even deserved the death penalty, there was much disagreement about what it entailed. 

Under common law, the offense involved sexual penetration that could not result in procreation, including intercourse between men, with animals, or with a prepubescent child of either sex. The specifications could be expanded, however, and in 1641 the Massachusetts Bay Colony faced a debate over a group of men who had sexually "abused," although not penetrated, two young sisters, Sara and Dorcas Humphrey. Some lawyers and divines argued that the behavior deserved the death penalty prescribed for sodomy, but the men escaped with a fine and whipping. [*3]

Older morality statutes survived into the twentieth century. In 1934, the state of New York undertook a rare prosecution of a man for adultery with a married woman, but other cities were more enthusiastic: charges for fornication and adultery were regular events in Chicago's special Morals Court through the 1920s, while Boston recorded 242 arrests for adultery as late as 1948. Sodomy remained the generic label for numerous consensual acts, heterosexual or homosexual, including oral or anal-genital contact

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as well as bestiality and necrophilia; the lack of definition provided some latitude, however, and early twentieth-century courts were not unanimous about whether fellatio was included. Until Illinois reformed its laws in 1961, all American jurisdictions enforced sodomy statutes, and penalties could be severe. 

In the 1940s, consensual sodomy with a person over eighteen years of age carried a maximum term of one year in New York but life imprisonment in Georgia and Nevada, and fifteen states provided maximum penalties of twenty years or more. Although male homosexuals usually bore the brunt of these savage penalties, they also applied to heterosexuals. In Wyoming and Indiana, sexual intercourse with a girl under twenty-one constituted fornication, which carried a penalty of several months in jail. If the man masturbated the girl but did not have sexual intercourse with her, then the charge was sodomy, with a maximum prison term of five years in Wyoming but fourteen years in Indiana. [*4] California provided a fifteen-year sentence for "oral perversion."

The survival of older legal principles caused confusion as the sex offender problem came to be formulated, since it was impossible to analyze general information about sex crimes, which included a vast range of behaviors, forcible and consensual, grave and trivial. In Massachusetts, crime statistics from 1915 began to include a category of offenses "against chastity, morality and decency," but these included prostitution and pimping as well as adultery, bigamy. abortion, obscenity, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. 

Modem academic studies have been bedeviled by the abundance of violators guilty of technical breaches of archaic and arcane laws, but all of whom were technically sex offenders. Also, it has been difficult to identify truly dangerous or predatory offenders who should be subject to special sanctions. Efforts to draft a sex psychopath statute in the 1940s or 1950s required a list of specific acts which the person should have committed, and these catalogs all too often included sex offenses that in fact involved no force or violence. 

"An offender charged with carnal abuse may be one who has: forcibly raped an adult female; who has kissed or fondled a minor female; or who has had voluntary or forced intercourse with a minor female." [*5] 

Even specifying that the individual should have committed a heinous or violent sex crime did not necessarily work, as indictments were phrased so as to make petty violations indistinguishable from extreme perversion.

These problems were acute in the area of offenses against children, as it was many years before medical and psychiatric professionals realized that

an effective taxonomy of offenders would have to go well beyond existing legal categories. Through the sex crime panic of the mid-twentieth century, most writers stubbornly refused to recognize that many rapes and "offenses against children" in fact involved the statutory violation of laws based upon widely varying notions of the age of sexual consent. Although legally classified alongside an authentic molester like Kenneth Elton, many "child rapists" were boys or young men who had had consensual intercourse with teenage girls of roughly their own age.

The American colonies fol1owed the common law principle that, before a certain age, a girl was too young to give valid consent to sexual activity. Most jurisdictions defined sexual intercourse with a girl younger than ten as rape or carnal abuse, while sexual interference short of intercourse would generally be classified as indecent liberties, "Iewd and lascivious acts." 

Offenses were felonies if committed against children below the age of ten, but acts with slightly older girls were commonly misdemeanors. In 1885, the great majority of states stil1 maintained the English age limit of ten years, while four enforced an age of twelve, but a widely popular social movement succeeded in raising these limits substantially over the next few years. 

In New York, for instance, a statute of 1787 established the age of sexual consent at ten years so that intercourse with a younger child constituted capital rape; the age of consent was raised from ten to sixteen in 1887 and to eighteen in 1895, at which it remained throughout the first half of the twentieth century. [*6] 

By 1895, twenty-two states enforced as age of consent either sixteen or eighteen years, while ten more elected for fourteen years. Paradoxically, the average age at which youngsters experienced puberty felt steadily from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, so that there was an increasing gap between biological maturity and the legal age for intercourse. By the early twentieth century, that interval was often five years or more, which hugely increased the potential for legal conflict.

The new principle of higher ages of consent did not win instant acceptance. Even after 1900, five southern states still set the age of consent at ten years, while several other jurisdictions maintained limits of twelve or thirteen; incredibly, Delaware's stood at seven years. In 1910, the United States recorded some fifteen thousand married girls who admitted to being fifteen or younger, but because overstating ages on marriage licenses was so commonplace a practice, this figure probably represents but a fraction of actual cases. 

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But the process of raising the age of consent continued in the next decades, leading to more than a few conflicts between law and practice. In 1934, for example, Tennessee law set the age of consent at twenty-one years, and a Tennessee court convicted a man of statutory rape for having sex with a twenty-year-old woman who had been previously married. [*7] Some states took account of the man's age in each case, but most did not, even if he was younger than the girl. And while incest was prohibited in nearly every state, this offense was strictly defined as intercourse with penetration; other sexual acts could not be prosecuted under this law.

At mid-century, legal writers delighted in pointing out such anomalies as unreconstructed survivals of older social attitudes, but even today there is little agreement about the age of consent. In the United States, forty-one states enforce ages between sixteen and eighteen, but the remaining nine permit sexual activity by younger girls, in some cases as young as twelve or thirteen. (The Canadian age of consent is fourteen years.) States with higher ages will invariably have the larger numbers of violators of the law and thus apparently the highest concentration of sex offenders against children. [*8] Age limits for adolescent boys having sex with men represent a murky legal area, but the issue may soon become urgent if states legalize same-sex marriage: if the same age limits are provided for both sexes, then the marriage of young teenage boys would be notionally legal in some states, however unacceptable to public opinion.

The moral rhetoric for regulating heterosexual behavior was reinforced by the pragmatic motive of preventing illegitimacy and reducing the burden on the public welfare system. The harm from which a young victim was to be protected was neither physical nor psychological but economic, because loss of virginity damaged a girl's marriage-ability; protection was extended as much to the girl's family as to her own prospects. 

 

In Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), the father of eight-year-old Nellie Clark sets out to kin her molester because, with her virginity compromised, she is no longer marriageable within the community; although she later succeeds in marrying an outsider who is unaware of the incident, he abandons her when he discovers her true history. If a victimized girl were of legal age, her family would often try to force her to marry her molester, reinforcing their demand by violence or threats of ostracism. State laws reflected this "damaged goods" approach when they qualified the simple age limit by caveats about the girl's character. 

 

In mid-twentieth-century Pennsylvania, sex with a girl below the age of consent led to a reduced charge of

fornication rather than rape if she was "not of good repute or was known to be previously unchaste." 
In North Carolina, sex with a girl between twelve and sixteen was rape only if she was a virgin, while in West Virginia, sex with a girl under sixteen was rape only if she was "of previous chaste character." In 1961, a sixty-year-old West Virginia man admitted to having committed sexual acts with a nine-year-old girl, but he was acquitted of statutory rape when the girl admitted to having previously had intercourse with a teenage boy. [*9]

Defense of family honor was accompanied by concern about racial boundaries, and racial anxieties proved central in the enforcement of sex laws. Sexual incidents have often ignited racial violence in the United States, and the notion that white girls were threatened by black men was stoked by fictional works like the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Of the 4,259 lynchings that occurred throughout the United States between 1880 and 1920, rape, attempted rape, or molestation were the justifications cited in one-quarter of cases. Sex charges broadly defined accounted for roughly twenty-five lynchings each year in this period, and from the 1890s onward, 90 percent of all lynching victims were African Americans. [*10] Whether by the action of the state or the mob, the death penalty was a frequent sanction for serious sex crime in these years.

Inventing the Pervert 

Before the late nineteenth century, crimes involving sex were a commonplace part of the work of the justice system, but there was no sense of the sex criminal as a distinct or especially menacing category of malefactor. In colonial times, terms like sodomy or carnal abuse were reserved for actual behaviors rather than for inner tendencies, although the most scrupulous might speak of improper longings as "sodomy of the heart." In common usage, a sodomite was a person who did specific things rather than one predisposed to do so, just as a thief was one who stole and not just someone battling temptations to steal. 

After the late 1880s, American psychiatry and medicine were transformed by new perceptions of "sexual perversion," that is, a tendency to commit sexual acts that could not lead to procreation. Unlike the older notion of sodomy, perversion remained perversion, whether or not it was acted upon. This essentialist view caused a critical shift in the notion of sex crime and required new forms of official intervention. [*11]

The framing of sex crime was part of a general reshaping of Western 

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thought in the late nineteenth century, what Michel Foucault called a new episteme, a new means of assessing truth and knowledge. The dominant knowledge-system comprised ideas of evolutionary science, industrial progress, scientific racism, eugenics, and imperialism, and the accompanying social ideology found legitimacy by stereotyping and excluding the social categories that contradicted or defied these values. 

In the United States, the excluded shadow of progress included not just racial minorities but also criminal biological types and degenerates, homicidal sex fiends, and perverts, whose insidious effects on racial progress were symbolized by rampant venereal diseases, which became a pervasive nightmare for social reformers. And the new perspective, although convincingly dressed in the language of scientism, proved thoroughly compatible with contemporary notions of moral reform and sexual purity, which it was often employed to justify.

Among the varieties of perversion that came under scrutiny in America were pedophilia and homosexuality (the English term homosexual dates from 1892). Confirming the magnitude of the pervert danger was the evidence produced by Progressives and muckrakers about the vice districts of American cities, where gay and pederastic subcultures were apparent to any investigator. 

Case studies from these years sound quite familiar to a later audience: the "noted pederast" in Philadelphia who had given syphilis to a dozen of his victims; the "religious hypocrite" who "ruined a number of boys." 

In 1881, a Missouri case involving sodomy between an adult man and a thirteen-year-old boy was noted with the reproach that "this is a case which, however frequently committed, is rarely brought to the knowledge of the police." At the end of the century, social reformers venturing into the vice underworlds of American cities found evidence of child prostitution involving both girls and boys. 

In 1892, the Reverend Charles Parkhurst encountered a brothel where effeminate boy prostitutes engaged in "the worst vice that New York holds." Stephen Crane began a novel on the career of a boy of this type, a manuscript entitled "Flowers of Asphalt," before accepting his friends' advice that the topic made the work unsuitable for publication, even in a society growing used to literary muckraking. A vice investigation in Philadelphia in 1912 reported "the corruption of hundreds of young boys for the use of perverts. 'Numbers of boys in knee pants are commercializing themselves openly on our streets for the practice of perversion.' 

This use of boys from eight to fourteen has developed in the last five years to an appalling extent." In 1925, an account of Chicago's vice

Gibb's key insight was that molestation was a common crime, one that extended beyond the familiar image of men raping or seducing underage girls. Although Gibb had found "little or nothing in the medico-legal literature pertaining directly to the crime of indecent assault upon children," he concluded that the acts occurred "much more frequently than is generally supposed," were "usually committed in secret and without witnesses, ... and could be perpetrated by adult men against boys and by women against children of either sex. The NYSPCC noted "numerous instances" in which children were permitted or compelled to "perform an act of manustrupation" upon an adult man or woman. 

Gibb personally investigated an 1892 assault in which two men performed cunnilingus upon a girl of eleven. Assaults were perpetrated by "men who are insane, old men beyond the age of virility, men under the influence of liquor, and those suffering from some form of perversion of the sexual instinct which may be akin to insanity": this "pervert" category included men with an interest in cunnilingus or mutual manustrapation." In their consequences these abusive acts varied enormously from case to case, often causing no harm "beyond the moral" but sometimes inflicting damage so extreme as to lead to dead. [*16]

Gibb cataloged the common forms of molestation, including cases in which children either performed masturbation or oral sex upon adults or were the recipients; this was a significant departure from the medical assumption of the day, which held that if a girl's hymen was found to be intact, she could not have been abused. Gibb struck a modem note when he advised doctors to be thorough in their physical examination of victims, observing symptoms of unusual genital abuse (including mutilation by foreign objects) and looking for evidence of discharges or sexually transmitted diseases. Less modern was his insistence that examinations be given without warning, so that false accusers would not have time to fake symptoms.

Gibb's observations would often be echoed by social investigators and moral crusaders, who cited sexual abuse as one of the evils arising from cat astrophic poverty, poor education, and slum housing. Criminologist Henry Boies complained in 1893 that children "sporting promiscuously" in the streets, "where every foul nighthawk seeks its prey, lose the lovely innocence of childhood before they reach their teens." In 1913, an observer attacking the "inhuman herding in the tenements" remarked that "cases growing out of the defilement of innocent children by lodgers are common in the Children's Court," with attendant problems of pregnancy and  

that false accusations were "exceedingly common" and often motivated by revenge. European accounts skeptical of the reliability of child witnesses were popularized in the United States between 1909 and 1913. Children's mendacity was enshrined in the standard text on criminal evidence, John Henry Wigmore's Principles of Judicial Proof. The battery of authorities quoted all agreed that the "habit of lying" was prevalent among young children, that girls were far less reliable than boys; and that children were not concerned with any "peddling exactitude about matters of fact": "They walk in a vain show, and among mists and rainbows." Psychiatric evidence proved that "one form taken by [girls'] complexes is that of contriving false charges of sexual offenses by men." [*23]

The view that children were prone to lying or fantasizing about sexual episodes found support among Freud's American disciples. In 1915, William Healy's classic work The Individual Delinquent included a case study of "Ressie," a nine-and-a-half-year-old who had accused her father and brother of sexually abusing her, a charge that seemed to be confirmed by her genital inflammation. Further examination, says Healy, showed that the girl had produced the symptoms herself, and she features in the text as a model of compulsive lying. 

Healy's study of pathological lying and false accusation, which was published the same year, describes several cases in which children reported abuse by strangers and family members, including one where a boy complained of "pervert sex practices" by a stepfather. Most of the "false sex accusations" involved girls, often reacting to "menstrual disturbance." [*24]

Significantly, Healy did not deny the reality of sex abuse or incest as such: cases described as false involve some in which no abuse was believed to have occurred but also instances of clear violation by a party other than the one charged. He believed, for example, that something grossly improper had happened to Ressie, even though her specific charges were untrue. But the immediate effect of Healy's work was to undermine the credibility of young witnesses. Although these conclusions directly contradict modem assumptions, the issue of molestation became linked to the reliability of children's testimony in a debate that was more intense than in any other period before the 1980s.

Fiends

Whether in the form of homosexuality, pedophilia, incest, or pederasty, perversion appeared to be commonplace. If anyone were so liberal as to

States, where cases in the 1890s were associated with the legendary series of crimes. When newspapers reported during the next two decades that "Jack the Ripper" had killed and mutilated women in Cincinnati and Atlanta, they may have been suggesting that the same man who committed the atrocities in London was to blame for these crimes as well. [*27]

Recurrent media imagery of fiends and demons reflected the extreme and irrational character of the acts committed, but the archaic nature of the terms further suggested that offenders were throwbacks to an earlier and more savage era. Holmes the archfiend, like the medieval Bluebeard, with whom he was often compared, operated from a "castle," and his proximity to the World's Fair permitted his sexual atrocities to be presented as a grotesquely subversive parody of the enlightenment and science being celebrated by the rest of the nation.

Contemporary pamphlets used medieval and demonic terminology to describe the lives "sacrificed to the monstrous ogre's insatiable appetite." Although originating as metaphor, atavistic imagery found a powerful echo in the emerging criminological theory of Cesare Lombroso and his American followers, who similarly saw serious crime as the work of evolutionary throwbacks who defied the progress of the race. [*28]

Recorded serial murders and sex killings accelerated in the early twentieth century, reaching a crescendo between 1908 and 1916. The apparent growth may reflect changes in media reporting or police detection, but an actual rise in crimes is plausible, given the new opportunities provided by the growing number of rootless immigrants and city dwellers, who often lacked the social networks necessary for drawing attention to disappearances. 

The New York Times reported seventeen serial murder cases for just the five-year period 1911-15, including separate series of murders in CoIorado, Alabama, North Dakota, and Washington; in 1911 and 1912 alone, attacks on families in five Midwestern states claimed perhaps thirty victims. Between 1910 and 1912, Atlanta was brought to near hysteria following the "Ripper" murders of about forty women, which explains the savage public reaction when Leo Frank was accused of the sex murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in 1913. In a trial pervaded by anti-Semitic rhetoric, Frank was presented as a "lascivious pervert" with a long record of annoying women, and he was lynched two years later. [*29]

New perceptions of sex killers are indicated by the response to the murders of two children, ages four and five, in New York City in 1915, probably the most intensively covered metropolitan story of that year. A Jack the

in English in 1880). The influential Penitentiary Congress, which met in Cincinnati in 1870, was told that "a criminal is a man who has suffered under a disease evinced by the perpetration of a crime"; concepts of blame, responsibility, and punishment were outmoded. If accepted, the medical analogy would transform the whole practice of courts and prisons. Criminologist Enrico Ferri wrote in 1884, 

"As the sick person is kept in the hospital just as long a time as is necessary for his cure, and as the insane patient remains in the asylum all of his life until cured and leaves it when he is cured, so it should be with the delinquent." 

The main criteria of the new criminology were dangerousness and social defense, and the most unregenerate of criminals might never be released at all: "We would quarantine a man with smallpox; we do not wait until he has spread infection." [*36] The positivist model applied with particular force to aberrant classes like perverts, psychopaths, and compulsive sex criminals.

Positivist and bio-criminological ideas were introduced in the United States at exactly the same time that Europeans were formulating their ideas about perversion. In fact, the continuous history of American criminology dates from 1893, the same year that the translation of Krafft-Ebing's work appeared, and these theories were popularized by numerous scholarly and professional studies over the next quarter century. In 1909, John Henry Wigmore was the moving force behind the new American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, whose pioneering journal dates from the following year. Between 1911 and 1916, key European works on the new discipline reached an American audience in the volumes of the institute's Modem Crimilnl Science series, which included translations of Ferri and Lombroso. [*37]

Between 1905 and 1915, most American states legislated some form of positivist penology, with a degree of indeterminate sentencing for all offenders. In most cases, this meant that ordinary criminals received open-ended sentences, such as "from five to ten years," but fully discretionary provisions were reserved for sentencing disturbed and dangerous offenders who fell short of the legal classification of insanity. 

 

In 1911, Massachusetts's Briggs Act against defective delinquents was one of the most aggressively positivist statutes of this era: thoroughly revamped and fully implemented in 1921, it became the basis for all later sexual psychopath laws. The act targeted habitual offenders, although in some cases a serious first offense could qualify for inclusion, and sexual misdeeds were particularly likely to be covered. Prosecutors and other officers from the correctional

into this curious shadow-world of law and therapy were poorly defined and capricious, leaving vast discretion for the agencies assigning the damaging label of defective delinquent. 

Although some protection against arbitrary imprisonment was provided by the involvement of medical professionals (usually two doctors), the horrible experience of the civil commitment system over the previous two centuries showed that physicians were all too willing to sign commitment papers for the convenience of authorities or the profit of the patient's relatives. Why should doctors be any more responsible when dealing with requests from police, prosecutors, or judges? 

With the study of defective states in its infancy, medical knowledge was inadequate to the task of confidently diagnosing conditions that would be treated with long-term incarceration. And although justified by humanitarian rhetoric, the therapeutic procedures were just as subject to abuse as their penal counterparts, and the defectives lacked even the meager due-process protections available to criminals.

Sterilization

The perils of legislating social defense were also evident in the other solution for combating defectives and psychopaths - namely eugenic statutes.

Since the 1870s, biological theorists had postulated that criminals and other deviants represented a kind of inferior type -- an "imperfect, knotty, knurly, worm-eaten fruit of the race" -- that might be rooted out through sterilization and selective breeding, and the word eugenics was coined in 1885. Perversion, like alcoholism. crime, epilepsy, and insanity, was a byproduct of the "genetic rubbish" polluting the social gene pool and would stubbornly resist conventional legal solutions. 

In 1893, Dr. F. E. Daniel argued that castration was the appropriate treatment for perverts: "rape, sodomy, bestiality, pederasty and habitual masturbation"  should involve the loss of all rights, including the right of procreation. Reacting to the New York Ripper murders, the "East Side Mother" urged that all perverts should be rounded up: 

"When eugenics is understood by the common people, when the press popularizes morality, immorality will be a very long way towards being ended." [*40]

Laws permitting the sterilization of the unfit had been regularly proposed by American states since the 1890s, but measures passed with increasing frequency in the new century. Indiana enacted the first such statute in 1907, targeting "Confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles," and eleven more states followed suit between 1909 and 1913.

of the menace and of the complex constituencies that combined to favor the new legal responses.

The most obvious activists were the psychiatrists, who by the early twentieth century were evolving into a far more substantial and ambitious section of the broader medical community. No longer the despised asylum keepers of early Victorian times, doctors of the mind were now alienists who were receptive to the insights of European thinkers and who aspired to preventing insanity in addition to treating it. 

A movement to instill principles of mental hygiene into society at large was initiated by Adolf Meyer who worked closely with William Healy and other pioneers in both criminology and social work. [*44] 

For Progressive reformers, any effort at social reform had to include psychiatric and eugenic concerns. Similar ideas were disseminated by the academic lawyers and sociologists then in the process of forming the nascent profession of criminology, which found its public voice in Wigmore's American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Positivist reformers gained the crucial support of women's organizations, which were then at their height of mobilization in support of the twin causes of woman suffrage and temperance and which were closely linked to the child-saving societies. Since the 1870s, women's and temperance groups had supported discretionary penology as a move toward greater humanity in the justice system, and the concepts of social defense and social hygiene were presented in terms of protecting women and children against sexually depraved men. 

In the new century, these groups generally supported defective-delinquent laws and eugenic measures. The sIogan "Votes for Women" was occasionally followed by "and Chastity for Men," an objective with obvious appeal for religious reformers. In the 1890s, the Women's Christian Temperance Union made the campaign for a higher age of consent one of its principal causes, and activists even used the legal age in a given state as an index of women's rights and status in that jurisdiction. 

Prominent in this movement were Charlton Edholm, Helen H. Gardener, and Frances E. Willard, all leading advocates of women's rights, and Edholm described woman suffrage as the only way to combat the organized traffic in young virgins "and its principal cause, the gin-mill." The interlinked movements against forced prostitution, white slavery, and venereal disease culminated in the federal Mann Act of 1910. [*45]

The theme of sexual danger was trumpeted by the mass media, whose attitudes toward what was fit to print had been transformed by the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers during the 1890s. Affecting the role of tribune of

authoritarian elements within the child-protection movement came to the fore, and the mechanisms of "the cruelty" were increasingly viewed as middle-class busybodyism. [*47] 

Despite the Goldbergs' achievement, the number of journal articles dealing frankly with the abuse histories of poor or delinquent children declined sharply after the early 1920s, suggesting that both social activism and research had lost their attraction. 

Sensational sex crimes also lost their earlier power to fascinate when the media found more excitement in Prohibition gangsterism and the wave of bank robberies and kidnappings in the early 1930s, while, at least in major cities, homosexual underworlds were far more visible and more accepted than ever before. A kind of gay chic marked New York society in this era, a trend that created a broader tolerance for sexual unorthodoxy. The police usually realized that little public sympathy was to be gained by too sharp a repression of sexual deviancy, and arrest rates for minor violations fell to historic lows. In 1929, the number of prosecutions for offenses "against chastity, morality and decency" in Massachusetts represented the second lowest annual rate per capita since 1911. [*48]

Although it is risky to argue from silence, a gauge of attitudes toward sex offenses is offered by the 1931 report of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, appointed by Attorney General George W. Wickersham. Drawing on the work of the leading criminologists and sociologists of the day, the Wickersham commission examined in enormous detail all the pressing problems of the criminal-justice system, including prohibition enforcement, juvenile delinquency, plea bargaining, racial discrimination, police corruption and brutality, and the state of corrections and parole. 

Barring a few illustrative cases involving rape, however, this comprehensive report said virtually nothing about sex crime, even though the section on crime causation was contributed by Morris Ploscowe, an authority on legal aspects of sexuality. [*49] 

It is inconceivable that a detailed analysis of sexual offenses would not have been included in any comparable study of crime undertaken in 1915 (or 1950 or 1985), and the omission is difficult to explain unless fears about perverts were at a low ebb. If sex offenses were not exactly being ignored, then at least they were not being constructed as a serious problem.

Eugenic sterilization and the defective-delinquent laws represented a first wave of emergency measures intended to combat the perceived menace from compulsive sexual criminals "on the borderland of insanity." In fact,