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

In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans' intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children.

Robertson describes how the nineteenth-century approach to childhood as a single phase of innocence began to shift at the end of the century to incl...