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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative
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April, 2007
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Book Review

Canada and the United States



Stephen Robertson. Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960. (Studies in Legal History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Society for Legal History. 2005. Pp. xii, 337. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.

Age matters, and from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, it mattered more and more to the complainants, prosecutors, and jurors of the New York City courts. This is the message of Stephen Robertson's meticulously researched book, which explains how sexual assaults against children and adolescents came to be addressed separately from sexual assaults against adults in American legal culture. Yet his is not a simple story about a dawning acknowledgment of the wrongs done to children; Robertson has written a nuanced account of the law's blending of old and new ideas about childhood and the unintended consequences of some of the legal steps taken to protect the young and punish those found guilty of sexually assaulting children. By exploring how age shaped the ways Americans viewed sexual violence, this book offers a fresh look at the histories of modern sexuality, legal culture, and twentieth-century psychiatry. . . .

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