Worldwide Trends in the Criminal Regulation of Sex, 1945-2005
David John Frank, University of California, Irvine
Bayliss Camp, California State University, Sacramento
Steven A. Boutcher, University of California, Irvine
January 2, 2008

Work on this paper was generously supported by grants to the first author from the Center for Global Peace and
Conflict Studies and the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. We would like
to thank Ann Hironaka, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, Evan Schofer, Mario Small, Dan Squires and
participants in the Stanford Comparative Workshop for assistance and advice. Direct correspondence to David John
Frank, Department of Sociology, 4107 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697 (frankd@uci.edu).
Abstract
Between 1945 and 2005, criminal laws regulating all sorts of sexual activities shifted all over the world.
The scopes of some laws sharply expanded, the scopes of other laws sharply contracted, and the scopes of
still other laws both expanded and contracted, extending criminal regulations over some kinds of persons
and activities and withdrawing them from others. Here, we argue that the many particular changes – in
specific countries, regarding specific activities – followed from a fundamental world-cultural shift in the
post-World War II period: the re-imagination and re-organization of “society” on individual rather than
corporate or collective bases. With original cross-national and longitudinal data on the criminal
regulation of rape, adultery, sodomy, and child-sexual abuse, we make our case. The various changes
coalesce to reveal striking global trends in the criminal regulation of sex. Laws aimed at protecting
corporate entities – especially the family and the nation – retreated on a worldwide basis, and laws aimed
at protecting individual entities widely advanced. The pattern suggests an intensifying global celebration
of free-standing personhood, the implications of which extend far beyond the realm of sexual activities.
1
Worldwide Trends in the Criminal Regulation of Sex, 1945-2005
During recent decades in countries around the world, criminal laws regulating sexual activities underwent
sea-changes of transformation. While the revisions accumulated rapidly, they nevertheless escaped
systematic analysis. What studies exist tend (a) to focus on specific kinds of sexual activity – e.g., rape or
sodomy – in isolation from others; and (b) to confine their attention to particular country contexts, mostly
in the West. Together, these two tendencies encourage analyses that emphasize the role of sector-specific
domestic actors (e.g., local women’s groups mobilized around rape-law reform) and that downplay
overarching shifts in the global-institutional environment in promoting regulatory revisions. Here, we
call attention to the latter, according to which the ongoing reconstitution of society around individuals in
the post-World War II period generated wholesale redefinitions of “sex,” facilitating worldwide sex-law
reforms. To explore this argument, we present original cross-national and longitudinal data on the
criminal regulation of rape, adultery, sodomy, and child-sexual abuse between 1945 and 2005. Across all
kinds of countries during these decades, we find striking contractions in the criminal regulation of
adultery and sodomy, together with striking expansions in the criminal regulation of rape and child-sexual
abuse. The patterns of contraction and expansion together with the substantive isomorphism of reforms
lend strong support to our world-cultural argument.
Background
Between 1945 and 2005, the criminal regulation of sexual activities formed an arena of intense sociolegal ferment. A wide variety of laws, in a wide variety of national contexts, changed fundamentally.
In New Zealand, for example, the Prostitution Reform Act shifted the main burden of criminal
sanctions from sex workers (usually female) onto those who exploit them (usually male). The 2003
legislation in particular legalized “commercial sexual services,” while safeguarding and protecting the
human rights of sex workers, defending their welfare and occupational health and safety, promoting
public health, and prohibiting the prostitution of persons under 18 (Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network
2
2005). Over recent years, similar revisions – embodying principles articulated in the 1985 World Charter
for Prostitutes’ Rights – transformed prostitution statutes in many countries around the world (Bernstein
2005).1
Meanwhile in Germany, greatly elaborated laws regulating child-pornography took effect. First
in West Germany, “[t]he reform of 1973 legalized, in principle, the distribution of pornography among
adults; however, the law contains numerous restrictions to prevent distribution to children and juveniles”
(Hörnle 2000: 640). Then in united Germany, legislation in 2004 sharpened the distinction between child
pornography and other forms of pornography, and it elevated the distribution, public offering,
transmission, procurement, and possession of child pornography from an “offence” to a more serious
“crime.” Now, any person who acquires child pornography for personal use or for non-commercial
distribution in Germany can be jailed for up to five years (raised from one year previously), and if the
images are intended for commercial distribution, the sentence can be extended to 10 years. Furthermore,
the revised law prohibits showing pornography to children to “groom” them for sexual actions (Heuck
2005). Around this same time in countries globally, analogous changes to child-pornography laws went
into effect – many of them adopted in the wake of the 1996 First World Congress against the Commercial
Sexual Exploitation of Children.2
1
The World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights, proclaimed at the first World Whores Congress in Amsterdam, 1985,
was organized by the now-defunct International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights. The charter demands the
decriminalization of adult prostitution; the enforcement of laws against fraud, coercion, violence, and child-sexual
abuse; and the protection of human rights; as well as improved access to health, legal, employment, and housing
services and anti-stigma education.
2
Germany was one of 122 countries at the First World Congress against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children to adopt the Stockholm Agenda for Action in 1996. As of 2007, the number of states committed to the
Agenda totals 161. The Stockholm Agenda challenges states, all sectors of society, and national, regional, and
international organizations to fight the commercial sexual exploitation of children. In particular, it calls on countries
to develop National Action Plans to implement the Agenda in the areas of coordination and cooperation, prevention,
protection, recovery and reintegration, and child participation. Germany proposed its National Action Plan in 2003.
3
In a few nation-states during the post-war period, even incest laws came under scrutiny. Over the
twentieth century, criminal sanctions against the so-called universal taboo varied widely cross-nationally.
For instance:
[I]ncest was not a crime at common law or at all [in England] until 1908. By the Punishment of
Incest Act of that year it became criminal for persons within the prohibited degrees of
consanguinity or affinity to have carnal knowledge. Prior to that time, the act was punishable
only by proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts (Thompson 1999: 161; see also Leeming 1996).
Thus in some countries between 1945 and 2005, there were no penalties at all for incest, while in others
such relations were punished with long prison terms and even death sentences. Recently, debates began
to center on the criminal regulation of incestuous relations between adult cousins and adult siblings.
Provided such couples bear no children – who may have slightly elevated vulnerabilities to birth defects –
such relations constitute private and consensual sexual activities, the criminalization of which – according
to civil libertarians – violates basic human rights. For instance during Australia’s penal-code review in
1996, the Model Criminal Code Officer’s Committee proposed decriminalizing “victimless” adult incest.
While the proposal was ultimately withdrawn, deliberation on the matter continues, not only in Australia
but also in the United States, South Africa, Germany, and in other countries.3
Altogether, anecdotal evidence along these lines suggests that between 1945 and 2005 there were
changes in all kinds of sex laws – on trafficking, sexual harassment, contraception, prostitution, abortion,
bestiality, pornography, incest, rape, adultery, sodomy, child-sexual abuse, and so on – across a wide
variety of national contexts. The critical question is obvious. What drove these striking developments?
Literature Review
3
Typical of the new incest laws is Serbia’s. According to Article 197 of the 2005 Criminal Code: An adult who
engages in sexual intercourse or an act of equal magnitude with an underage relative by blood, or an underage
sibling, shall be punished with imprisonment up to 3 years. Sex between consenting adult relatives is not thereby
regulated.
4
Only recently have scholars in law and the social sciences taken up the question of sex-law reforms, and
to date most studies have addressed the issues narrowly, focusing on particular legal developments in
particular (mostly developed Western) nation-states. The spotlight has shined, for example, on criminal
sanctions against sodomy in the United States and South Africa (Werum and Winders 2001; Cock 2002;
Bernstein 2003); against sexual harassment in Israel, the United States, and France (Saguy 2000; Kamir
2003); and against prostitution in the United States, Curaçao, and Jamaica (Kempadoo 2004; Bernstein
2005). Many such accounts stress the centrality of grassroots social movements in promoting penal-code
reforms (e.g., Menon 1983; Kane 2003; Zippel 2005), and some others underscore the importance of
specific domestic cultural or political factors (e.g., Western-ness or democracy) (Adam 1999; Green
1999; Savelsberg 2004; Savelsberg and King 2005). Work along these lines has illuminated long-dark
questions at the intersections of sex and society.
Indeed, the prevailing case-study approach – found in both the functionalist and symbolic streams
of the literature – has many advantages, including practical ones related to data availability. But it has
disadvantages too. By design, case studies accentuate the peculiarities of particular kinds of sex laws and
particular domestic polities, and this typically means assuming (1) that changes in one kind of sex law are
not fundamentally related to changes in other kinds of sex laws; and (2) that changes in one country’s
criminal code are not fundamentally related to changes in other countries’ criminal codes.
Neither assumption is entirely tenable. First, it seems possible or even likely that the dominant
tendency to restrict analytical attention to isolated kinds of sex laws – regulating prostitution, for example
– exaggerates the independence of each regulatory subset and inhibits recognition of the full scope of sexlaw reforms. The work of Foucault (1978) and many others suggests that re-conceptions of “sex” writ
large provided an encompassing framework within which various sex laws were re-imagined between
1945 and 2005. What’s more, much public discourse draws together different sexual activities under
unifying umbrellas – tying pornography to rape, for example, or sodomy to child-sexual abuse. Even the
law itself tends to group the various sex regulations. For instance in the pre-1995 Argentine Código
5
Penal, the criminal law on adultery was specified in article 118, and the criminal laws on rape and childsexual abuse were articulated in article 119. Arguably, sex regulations form a coherent policy field.
Second, the literature’s propensity for examining legal developments within specific national
contexts precludes or at least limits the consideration of potentially decisive global determinants of
statutory change. Criminal codes “rest on universalistic and rationalistic cultural assumptions” (Boyle
and Meyer 1998: 213). They are original components of the modern nation-state apparatus – borne in the
bosom of colonialism (Benton 2002) and reformed in light of international standards (such that the
President of Belarus could declare his country’s new code “up-to-date” and “the best the world can offer”
– Svirko 2001). During the post-World War II era, an increasingly dense network of legal experts – often
working under the auspices of international non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations
(INGOs and IGOs) – sought to shape national regulations in all sorts of domestic contexts.4 Evidence
along these lines implies that nation-states globally over this period were held ever-more explicitly to
universalistic legal standards.
Given these considerations, we see substantial promise in moving up a level of analysis, to
explain all kinds of sex-law reforms in all kinds of nation-states. In particular, we contemplate the
possibility that broad developments in the criminal regulation of sex between 1945 and 2005 – across
activities and country contexts – originated in a baseline shift in the global-institutional environment. We
flesh out our reasoning before proceeding onto the empirical analysis below.
Argument
4
Relevant INGOs and IGOs include, e.g., the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice
Policy, the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, the Council of Europe (Council of Europe 2004),
and the European Union. According to its website (www.icclr.law.ubc.ca), for instance, the International Centre for
Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy seeks, “to contribute to international criminal justice policy
development through analysis, research and consultation, and to provide technical assistance to implement
international policy and standards.”
6
Our argument builds on the world-society branch of sociological institutionalism (Thomas, Meyer,
Ramirez, and Boli 1987; Boli and Thomas 1997; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, Ramirez 1997; Meyer and
Jepperson 2000; Jepperson 2002a). The perspective has shed light on many world social changes – from
the rise of science (Drori, Meyer, Ramirez, and Schofer 2003) and the expansion of education (e.g.,
McEneaney and Meyer 2000; Baker and LeTendre 2005; Schofer and Meyer 2005; Suarez and Ramirez
2007) to the perpetuation of civil war (Hironaka 2005) and the diffusion of environmental-protection
policies (Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000; Frank, Longhofer, and Schofer 2007).
The world-society perspective makes several key departures from conventional sociological
accounts of change. (1) It asserts that society ultimately is a cultural system rather than a functional or
action system, the defining qualities of which are meanings (or models or definitions or social
constructions) rather than needs or interests, which is oriented on rationalized rather than functional or
rational goals. (2) The perspective posits that over the whole course of Modernity and especially in the
post-World War II period the cultural system has grown increasingly universalistic and global rather than
particularistic and local-national. (3) It assumes that the contemporary world cultural system rests on the
bedrock of institutionalized ontology – a subset of meanings that are taken-for-granted and rule-like and
crystallized in organizational structures that constitutes actors, their action capacities, and their
interrelationships. (4) The perspective assumes that the world cultural system is forged more in the hands
of experts and professionals, seeking to develop universalistic standards, rather than local actors, seeking
to benefit from change. The general idea is that the local actors, needs, and interests that dominate
conventional sociological explanations are not “real” or given at all but rather that they derive from
exogenously supplied blueprints, scripts, building blocks, and models.
Guided accordingly here, we call attention to a deep-seated shift in the global-institutional frame,
which recast the fundamental building blocks of imagined “society” in the wake of World War II. This
core change, we argue, prompted world-level redefinitions of sex and global transformations in its
criminal regulation. Specifically, we propose that:
7
(a) The cauldron of World War II spurred the reconstitution of “society.” In reaction to the
genocidal excesses of Nazism, formerly dominant societal templates, grounded in collective entities such
as the nation and the family, were stigmatized and delegitimated. In their stead arose deeply
individualized models of society, promoted by the Allied victors (Borgwardt 2005). The new alternatives
installed autonomous persons – disembedded from corporate bodies and existentially equal across
corporate boundaries – as society’s ultimate motivators and beneficiaries (Frank and Meyer 2002). Of
course, individualization emerged much earlier than 1945, with Modernity itself, as embodied, for
instance, in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man (Berger 1970; Jepperson 2002b). The significance
of the war was that it intensified the long-term process and ushered Western individualism onto an
increasingly globalized stage.
Whole sectors of world social life thus were reconstituted. The process contributed, for instance,
to the rise and global diffusion of capitalism, organized around individualized wage labor and
consumption (e.g., Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002; Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006); the
worldwide spread of democracy, organized around individualized citizenship and voting behavior (e.g.,
Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997); and cross-national flows of mass education, organized around
individualized student achievement and participation (e.g., McEneaney 2003). During the post-war
period, it even grew commonplace to refer to persons generally as “individuals,” as though the two terms
naturally coincided (Donnelly 2002). This foundational shift in the global-institutional frame culminated
in the widespread recognition of universal human rights (Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004; Suarez and Ramirez
2007) – conceived as the equal and individualized birthright of every man and woman in the world
(Berkovitch 1999).
(b) Hand-in-hand with society’s individualization, definitions of “sex” evolved, too – shifting
from an activity meant to maintain the collective order through sanctioned reproduction to an activity
intended to enhance individual satisfaction and self-expression. In the phrase of one observer, sex as
procreation fell to sex as recreation over the post-World War II decades (Gordan 1971).
8
Through the old corporate prism, legitimate sexual relations were those that strengthened
society’s collective bases and moral order (Lévi-Strauss 1969). The preferred (or sole legitimate) activity
consisted of contraceptive-free vaginal intercourse, and the preferred (or sole legitimate) participants
included husband and wife. Thus, “[t]he natural object of carnal intercourse is that there be the possibility
of conception of [a legitimate] human being” (Halim 1989: 1292) – a possibility flouted by “unnatural”
sexual activities such as, “self-abuse, sexual union between male and male, sexual intercourse with an
animal, connection with a dead woman, sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature with a woman,
and lewdness between woman and woman” (Lansdown 1960: 108-9). In short under collectivized
assumptions, legitimate sexual activities consisted solely of procreative relations, conducted within
established social parameters (set by marriage, race, religion, and so on).5 Other forms of sexual behavior
disrupted the collective order and violated the procreation imperative, and thus they were deemed deviant
and unnatural.
With individualization over the post-war era, much of this conceptual apparatus shifted.
Increasingly, sex came to be conceived through the prism of individual entities, and thus it acquired
expressive dimensions linked to the desires of freestanding persons (Giddens 1992). The primacy of
penile-vaginal intercourse declined, and all kinds of formerly stigmatized activities came to be counted as
“sex” (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994; Wosick-Correa 2007). Also, the preemptive
boundaries around the collective order diminished, allowing partial acceptance of sex beyond marriage
and also sex between religious and racial groups (Widmer, Treas, and Newcomb 1998; Rosenfeld 2007).
Most strikingly, perhaps, contraception became routine in sexual relations, undercutting the old priority of
5
See Beisel (1998) and Block (2006). The former illegitimacy of sexual relations – procreative or not – across
religious and racial lines is starkly evident in anti-miscegenation laws. It is also obvious in an English legal
textbook written around 1300, which states that, “those who have connection with Jews or Jewesses or are guilty of
bestiality or sodomy shall be buried alive in the ground” (Wintemute 1997). In our own era, the plummeting
legitimacy of wartime rape dramatically illustrates the diminishing equation of sex and corporate reproduction.
9
reproduction and asserting the individual’s new dominance.6 With individualization in short, “sex” got
reorganized around the cardinal rule of consent and the purposes of pleasure and self-expression.
Legitimate sex increasingly came to encompass all those activities that preserved individual autonomy
and sovereignty. Everything else fell under the label “nonconsensual.”
(c) Together, we argue, these individualizing processes catalyzed worldwide shifts in the criminal
regulation of sex between 1945 and 2005. The basic idea is that penal codes are symbolic systems
(Gusfield 1986; Edelman 1992), the authorized and legitimated contents of which derive from global
institutions (Boyle and Meyer 1998). In particular as the individual grew increasingly institutionalized in
global models of “society” and “sex” over the post-war period, penal-code provisions meant to defend
collective entities (especially families and nations) lost their global life supports and increasingly gave
way to alternative legal provisions aimed at protecting individuals (Ramirez 1987; Frank and McEneaney
1999; Hörnle 2000). The implications of this change extended across the whole range of sexual activities.
Old laws were abandoned; new laws were adopted; and existing laws were refashioned.
The shifting regulatory logic is particularly evident at the margins – among sex laws that preserve
corporate bodies at the expense of individuals and vice versa. The former dramatically include “crimes of
honor,” such as those committed by husbands who murder their adulteress wives and/or co-adulterers. To
an extreme extent, crimes of honor assert family sanctity over individual liberty, and until recently in
many countries they were exempted from punishment.7 Falling in the same category is marital rape,
which was legally impossible almost anywhere in the world until a generation ago. Articulating the old
corporatist rationale denying the possibility of “marital rape,” a judge in England stated that, “the
intercourse which takes place between husband and wife is not by virtue of any special consent on her
6
In the view of one observer, the spread of contraception marked, “one of the most dramatic social transformations
of the second half of the twentieth century” (Gakidou and Vayena 2007: e31). By 2005, more than 54 percent of the
world’s married and cohabiting women used them (United Nations 2006).
7
See Welchman (2007). For example until 1975, Article 324 of the French Penal Code specified: He who catches
his spouse, his female ascendant, female descendant or his sister in the act of adultery or illegitimate sexual relations
with a third party and commits unpremeditated homicide or injury may be exempted from liability.
10
part, but is mere submission to an obligation imposed on her by law. Consent is immaterial” (quoted in
Turner 1958: 791; see also Giddens 1992). Obviously now, such views have lost legitimacy.
At the other end of the spectrum are policies that uphold individual integrity regardless of any
burden they place on collective entities. Such policies are exemplified, for instance, in the abrogation of
former laws that regulated the sale and distribution of both contraceptives and pornography. Their
rescission during the post-war era encouraged forms of non-reproductive sexual behavior that once were
out of bounds, signaling the individual’s ascendance over the collective in the global logic of criminal sex
regulation.
All of this implies that individualization recast the “victim” at the heart of victimless crimes (and
the “moral” at the foundation of morality). While now it is commonplace to assume that crime “victims”
are necessarily individuals, it was not always so. In collectivized contexts, crime victims were at least as
likely to be corporate entities – the family, the public, the nation, etc. Thus for example, old violations of
public morals were seen to victimize, “society at large – the public itself – rather than any individual”
(Dehesa 2007: 49). Expressing a similar view, a 17th-century criminal lawyer for the Lutheran Church in
Germany warned vividly of the collective dangers of sodomy: “earthquakes, famine, plague, saracens,
floods, and very fat, insatiable burrowing mice” (Lee and Robertson 1973: 241). Clearly, the victim
invoked by such imageries was not a particular person but rather society in toto.8
In short, we argue that the world-level individualization of both “society” and “sex” facilitated a
global recalibration of sex regulations. Newly liberalized laws – often cast in terms of human rights and
organized around the paramount rule of consent – diffused rapidly worldwide.
(d) The mechanisms linking global-institutional changes to domestic penal reforms during these
decades were manifold (Merry 2006). Most centrally, we argue, they appeared as professionals and
experts – working for collective goods – rather than particularistic actors – pursuing sectarian interests.
8
A similar sentiment appeared in the Austrian Penal Code of 1787, which defined homosexuality as a “political”
rather than criminal felony. It fell among the former because, “[s]omebody who disparages humanity to such extent
as to decay in carnal desire with the same sex, is guilty of a political crime” (Rosenbloom 1996).
11
Professionals and experts (including academics) often ostentatiously distanced themselves from special
interests – instead offering generic packages of technical advice, best practices, and standardized
guidance (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2002). They included standard-builders and standard-bearers working
for international non-governmental or intergovernmental organizations, meeting at international
conferences, and generating international treaties and agreements. Precisely because they maintained
postures of disinterest, experts and professionals offered powerful mechanisms for the diffusion of
evolving world criminal-code templates (Meyer and Jepperson 2000).
One set of experts and professionals operating at the global-domestic interface was non-sector
specific – promoting sex-law reforms in the name of broad goals such as progress, modernization,
rationalization, and secularization (Dehesa 2007). Most penal-reform commissions, for example, fell
among this set. They worked to overhaul criminal laws generally, not just sex laws, and indeed the latter
were often low on their agendas. Thus when U.S. states began to adopt the American Law Institute’s
Model Penal Code of 1955 – decriminalizing sodomy in the process – they typically did so absent any
compelling commitment to gay rights.9 U.S. legal experts proposed the Model Penal Code as an efficient
means of Modern and secular state administration, and states deferred to their general professional
expertise (Bernstein 2003; Kane 2007). D’Emilio (1997) describes the reform process accordingly:
In the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, virtually all [sodomy-law] repeals came through a rewriting
of a state’s entire penal code. In other words, sodomy law reform was hidden beneath an
avalanche of changes in the criminal law and was not the focus of public controversy.
In processes such as these, the mechanisms promoting sex-law reforms were located within larger
projects of modernization, secularization, rationalization, and progress.
A second set of experts and professionals tying world-cultural changes to domestic penal-code
reforms was sector specific, targeting sex laws as such – and often particular kinds of sex laws.
Nevertheless, they too invoked highly generalized discursive frameworks, nearly always summoning the
9
Some drafters of the Model Penal Code advocated the controversial notions that homosexuality was an illness and
that sodomy was a victimless crime. Of course as discussed above, “victimless”-ness is a cultural variable.
12
language of human rights. The universalistic features of such frameworks justified reformers’ publicgoods claims. ECPAT International, for example, worked during the recent period to eliminate the
commercial sexual exploitation of children (ECPAT stands for End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography
and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes). Its mission was, “to encourage the world community
to ensure that children everywhere enjoy their fundamental rights free from all forms of commercial
sexual exploitation” (emphases added). At the same time, the United Nations AIDS Commission issued
International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights, declaring that:
States should review and reform criminal laws and correctional systems to ensure that they are
consistent with international human rights obligations….Criminal laws prohibiting sexual acts
(including adultery, sodomy, fornication and commercial sexual encounters) between consenting
adults in private should be reviewed, with the aim of repeal (Joint United Nations Programme on
HIV/AIDS 2006: 123, emphases added).
In these kinds of processes, the mechanisms underlying sex-law reforms were legitimated by
universalistic discursive frames, most often involving human rights.10
Experts and professionals of both varieties operated nationally and globally between 1945 and
2005, and mechanisms from the two levels often intersected, as when local associations provided
domestic receptor sites for global reform messages (Frank and McEneaney 1999). In the present context,
it seems that world-level experts and professionals offered especially potent mechanisms for sex-law
reforms because from the outset they oriented their activities around nation-states and penal codes
generally, addressing the world as a whole with standardized reform proposals, often hammered out in
international conferences (like the Fourth World Conference for Women in Beijing) and codified in
international treaties (like the Convention on the Rights of the Child). Experts and professionals, we
10
Along these lines, Dehesa (2007: 4) highlights, “modernist narratives of human rights, universalism, and progress
in shaping statecraft: narratives to which LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] activists and their allies in
both Brazil and Mexico have appealed on repeated occasions in framing their demands.”
13
suggest, anchor some of the most important “concrete processes that lie under the phenomenon we call
globalization” (Fourcade and Savelsberg 2006: 515).
Empirical Implications
If the arguments above have merit, then in all kinds of countries between 1945 and 2005 we should
observe all kinds of sex-law reforms along individualized lines. The changes should be strongly
isomorphic in substance.
More particularly, we should observe contractions in sex laws oriented primarily on preserving
corporate entities – i.e., those criminalizing violations of the procreation imperative and disruptions of the
collective order. Simultaneously, we should observe expansions in sex laws aimed centrally at preserving
individual entities – i.e., those criminalizing violations of individual liberty and the cardinal rule of
consent. Both sets of changes should occur worldwide, more or less concurrently, and the laws
themselves should be highly stylized, reflecting their global origins. We operationalize these ideas before
moving on to the analyses below.
Research Design, Data, and Methods
To demonstrate that the re-composition of “society” and the re-definition of “sex” in the post-war period
catalyzed worldwide changes in penal provisions, we assembled an original cross-national dataset
containing criminal regulations on rape, adultery, sodomy, and child-sexual abuse for the period 1945 to
2005. We sought data on all four laws over the whole 60-year timeframe for all 194 of the nation-states
in existence during the period.11 Our efforts were organized to allow us to test three main contentions: (a)
that the core reform processes were global, affecting all sorts of countries; (b) that the core reform
11
The exact number of countries in the world depends on one’s accounting rules. We included all independent
nation-states in existence 1945 to 2005 – e.g., East Germany and West Germany between 1945 and 1989 and then
Germany between 1990 and 2005. The year 1945 marks the end of World War II and the founding of the United
Nations, both of which sped up long-term processes of individualization and globalization.
14
processes were institutional, reshaping the whole “sexual” terrain; and (c) that various sex-law
amendments manifested the fundamental logic of liberalization, removing protections from families and
other collective bodies and raising protections around individuals.
As indicators of corporatist sex laws, we chose adultery and sodomy statutes. The former
criminalize sexual intercourse between married persons and non-spouse others. For example before 1971,
Article 502 of Austria’s Penal Code read:
A married person who commits adultery, as well as an unmarried person with whom adultery is
committed, becomes guilty of a petty misdemeanor and shall be punished by arrest of 1 to 6
months. However, the punishment of the woman shall be more severe if by the commission of
the adultery doubts can be raised in regard to the legitimacy of a subsequent birth.
For their part, sodomy laws penalize “unnatural carnal connections,” which most commonly include anal
intercourse (sometimes homosexual only, sometimes homo- and heterosexual). For example in 2005,
Article 377 of India’s Penal Code stated:
Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, or
animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description
for a term which may extend to 10 years, and shall also be liable to fine. Penetration is sufficient
to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.
Both activities are problematic mainly on collective grounds. Adultery threatens the family and the
collective order with the specter of illegitimate children, and sodomy outright negates the procreation
imperative. The case against both was clearly articulated in 1999 by the South Africa Law Reform
Commission:
The reasons usually advanced for criminalizing sodomy are: it denies the basic purpose of the
sexual relationship, viz. procreation; [and] it subverts the institution of the family….Further, if
15
concern for the family is the reason for criminalizing sodomy, then adultery ought also to be a
crime (South Africa Department of Justice 1999: 124).12
In contrast to the crimes of rape and child-sexual abuse described below, individual consent is irrelevant
in adultery and sodomy cases. For example under Singapore’s sodomy law, it is, “immaterial whether the
act took place in public or private, or whether there was consent between the males involved. The law as
it stands in Singapore does not embrace any ‘consenting adults’ defense” (D’Souza 2001: 567). We
expect both adultery and sodomy laws to contract worldwide during the post-war era.
As indicators of individualist laws, we selected rape and child-sexual abuse provisions. The
former criminalize non-consensual sexual activities between adults. For instance in 2005, Article 503 of
the Lebanon Penal Code read:
Anyone who forces a person to a sexual act outside marriage, with violence or threats will be
punished with at least 5 years of hard labor. The punishment will be not less than 7 years if the
victim has not attained 15 years of age.
Child-sexual abuse laws, meanwhile, penalize non-violent carnal connections between adults and
children. For example, Article 216 of the 2005 Panamanian Penal Code specified:
Whoever sexually accesses a person of either sex, using their genitals or other parts of their body,
or introducing other objects into the genitals, mouth, or anus of the victim, shall be punished with
imprisonment of 3 to 10 years in the following cases:
1. When violence or intimidation is used;
2. When the victim is deprived of reason or good judgment, or when, as a result of physical or
mental illness or for any other reason, the victim is unable to resist; and
12
In the same vein, a Filipino legislator articulated the raison d’être of adultery laws: “to prevent the entry of
illegitimate descendants to the bloodline to preserve the line of succession….[M]arital infidelity is an ill that reflects
a lack of virtue and value which endangers the family as a foundation of our country’s moral fiber” (Villanueva
2004).
16
3. When the victim is detained or seized and trusting of the culprit to transport him or her from
one place to another.
4. When the victim has not completed 14 years, even if none of the previous circumstances
apply.
Both rape and child-sexual abuse are problematic primarily on individual grounds. The former explicitly
violates the rule of consent, and the latter abuses the child’s inability to make free and reasoned decisions.
In contrast to the crimes of adultery and sodomy, procreation is a non-issue in rape and child-sexual abuse
cases. The latter acts are criminal regardless of whether any child results. We expect worldwide
expansions in both kinds of laws over the period in question.
Of course, we are not claiming that rape and child-sexual abuse are unproblematic in
collectivized contexts. In fact, they are problematic, but as much because they are non-marital as nonconsensual. They are sometimes treated as sub-types of adultery or fornication.13 Neither are we
claiming that adultery and sodomy are untroubled in individualized contexts. There is much publicopinion data to suggest otherwise (see Widmer, Treas, and Newcomb 1998). Nevertheless, they are
largely deemed to be private matters, to be confronted by the individuals personally involved.
Because the terms “adultery,” “sodomy,” etc., are not used uniformly across country contexts, we
developed our own working definitions of the terms. We mean for “adultery” to refer to consensual
heterosexual intercourse between married persons and non-spouse others; for “sodomy” to describe
consensual homosexual intercourse between adults; for “rape” to indicate nonconsensual heterosexual
intercourse between adults; and for “child-sexual abuse” to refer to nonviolent heterosexual intercourse
between adults and minor children. These working definitions guided our data-collection efforts as we
moved through different national milieus.
13
Thus neither the Bible nor the Qur’an directly addresses rape or child-sexual abuse. The emphasis is on adultery
(and to a lesser extent sodomy). “Since sexuality is sacred in the realm of marriage, sexuality outside of marriage
becomes an unholy action that destroys the essence of marriage, and therefore destroys the family life” (quoted in
Norman 2005: 2).
17
The raw data for our analyses come directly from the penal codes in force between 1945 and
2005 in all independent countries worldwide. Only a few countries followed the U.S. in organizing penal
laws sub-nationally, and for these, we used the code of the most populous sub-national entity (e.g.,
California for the U.S.). A tiny number of countries do not have codified criminal laws, and these we had
to exclude.
To assemble the penal codes, we combed the Library of Congress and searched the libraries of
many universities (including Harvard’s, Chicago’s, Stanford’s, UCLA’s, etc.). We furthermore scoured
online databases, where many current criminal codes now can be found. From each available penal code,
we selected and where necessary translated each law on rape, adultery, sodomy, and child-sexual abuse as
it appeared and evolved on the books over time. This task was simplified by the facts that sex laws
usually appeared together in criminal codes (under headings such as “Moral Offenses” or “Sexual
Offenses”) and that most codes were written in one of the major colonial languages – English, French, or
Spanish.14 We entered the relevant laws verbatim into a master data-file.
In the end, some penal-code data remain missing for some countries, and most penal-code data
remain missing for others. But the resulting dataset is nevertheless unique in breadth and depth. In Table
1, we summarize our data coverage for the world’s 194 independent countries 1945-2005. For more than
half the nation-states – 102 to be exact – we achieved full coverage, defined as data on rape, adultery,
sodomy, and child-sexual abuse laws for at least 75 percent of the designated time period (which means at
least 45 years of the 60-year period, unless the country gained independence after 1945). For another 43
countries, we achieved substantial coverage, meaning data on all four laws for 40 to 74 percent of the
pertinent years. For the remaining 49 countries, our coverage remained incomplete, meaning we found
data on all four sex laws for no more than 39 percent of the eligible time spell.15 The countries in the last
14
The countries most likely to flout the last rule are old and European – Denmark, for example, and Russia.
Translators allowed us to incorporate most of these cases.
15
Even for countries with incomplete data coverage, we often found the most crucial information – marking penal-
code reforms. Statutory changes are public matters, and thus they are likely to enter public records.
18
category are disproportionately small, poor, and peripheral. Such countries seldom have the wherewithal
to attempt penal-code creativity, and our experience indicates they are highly likely to follow standard
legislative models.
[Table 1 about here]
We know of no comparable cross-national and longitudinal datasets, containing criminal laws of
any kind, and scholarly folk wisdom suggests they would be difficult, or impossible, to assemble. It turns
out, however, that – as seminal components of the Modern nation-state apparatus – criminal laws tend to
be carefully documented, widely distributed, and publicly available (Boli-Bennett and Meyer 1978;
Meyer et al. 1997; Boyle and Meyer 1998). Thus we were able to amass a broad enough evidentiary base
to test claims about the global dimensions of sex-law reforms.
To measure the “contractions” and “expansions” discussed above, we coded changes in each
law’s scope over time. Scope refers to the actions and the actors – both offenders and victims – covered
under the law. Contraction occurs when the scope of a law shrinks upon reform – criminalizing a
narrower range of offenders, protecting a narrower range of victims, or penalizing a narrower range of
actions. (Concretely here, contraction often entails the outright abrogation of a law.) Expansion occurs
under the opposite circumstances.16
For example in the immediate context, expansion took place when a rape law underwent gender
neutralization (such that men gained protections alongside women) or when its marital-exclusion clause was
excised (such that husbands lost categorical exemptions from prosecution). Likewise, expansion occurred
when a rape law was re-written to penalize unwanted sexual penetration of any kind (instead of penilevaginal intercourse only).
16
Grattet, Jenness, and Curry (1998) refer to these changes as “domain” contractions and expansions. In future
analyses, we plan to consider changes along the law’s punishment dimension as well. Punishments and scopes
typically rose and fell in concert, but the congruence was less perfect than we had anticipated. The early part of our
time period coincided with the therapeutic/rehabilitation movement in the treatment of criminal offenders, which
entailed widespread rollbacks in punishments, even for crimes expanding in scope. See Murphy (1995).
19
Notice that our data include only those criminal laws that explicitly address adultery, rape,
sodomy, and child-sexual abuse as described above. This means we did not count other criminal laws
that might implicitly regulate the same sexual activities – e.g., laws against public indecency and
disorderly conduct. It also means we did not consider changes beyond the penal code – in family laws,
civil laws, or penal-procedure laws, etc. Finally, it means we focused exclusively on formal laws as they
appeared on the books, not laws in action. The latter may be only loosely coupled to the former (Meyer
and Rowan 1977; Fourcade and Savelsberg 2006).
Of course even under conditions of extreme loose coupling, laws on the books still: (1) maintain
enforcement threats and social control, (2) inform policy debates (as in the discussion of gays in the U.S.
military), and (3) contribute cognitive and normative materials to the overall social regulation of sex
(Posner 1994).17 Furthermore, at least one recent cross-national study reveals a strong positive
association between official sex-law reforms and their everyday outcomes in practice (Frank, Hardinge,
and Wosick-Correa 2007). On these grounds, we believe that official sex laws are important objects of
study in their own right.
Results
An initial look at our results appears in Figures 1-4. For each of the four kinds of laws under
investigation, the figures compare the worldwide cumulative numbers of scope expansions and scope
contractions over the 1945 to 2005 time period.
[Figures 1-4 about here]
Immediately, the figures demonstrate the striking global aspect of sex-law reforms. Changes
during the post-war period unfolded along common lines across many countries, and they provoked
17
For example, Fleischmann and Hardman (2004: 422) report that the Insurance Commissioner for the state of
Georgia refused to implement a domestic-partners benefit plan for Atlanta city employees in 1996, “arguing that it
would encourage illegal sexual relationships.” Sodomy, at the time, was still illegal in Georgia. Likewise,
Bernstein (2003: 354) argues that sodomy laws – even poorly implemented – provide a “legal cornerstone that
justifies discriminatory treatment of lesbians and gay men.”
20
relatively little statutory resistance. Thus, we find that among the 98 sodomy reforms, fully 80 (or 82
percent) entailed scope contractions in the law (Figure 1); that among the 50 adultery reforms, 34 (or 68
percent) involved scope contractions in the law (Figure 2); that of the 140 child-sex abuse amendments,
119 of them (or 85 percent) expanded the scope of the laws (Figure 3); and that of the 122 rape-law
amendments, a remarkable 119 of them (or 98 percent) expanded the scope of the laws (Figure 4). The
global trends are pronounced, suggesting that the data represent a world-level sex-law-reform process
rather than an aggregation of locally motivated changes.
Also, the figures show that change swept through the four kinds of sex laws more or less
concurrently. Thus, we observe that the median sodomy-law contraction occurred in 1992, and that the
equivalent adultery-law contraction took place in 1987. The median child-sex abuse and rape-law
expansions both came to pass in 1995. The four reform waves followed closely on the heels of one
another – suggesting common antecedents of reform. The fact that the median sodomy and adultery
reforms occurred slightly before the median child-sex abuse and rape reforms is partly a coding artifact.
Sodomy and adultery laws both tended to contract during the period, and insofar as contraction meant
abrogation, reform obviated the possibility of further reform. Child-sex abuse and rape laws, by contrast,
both tended to expand during the post-war era, and expansion set the stage for further reform. In general,
the evidence here lends credence to our contention that various kinds of sex laws occupied a common
policy field, with common determinants of change.
Figures 1-4 furthermore establish that the core reform trends moved in opposite directions – with
two contracting and two expanding – as expected. Specifically over the period, sodomy and adultery
were decreasingly criminalized on a global basis, while rape and child-sex abuse were increasingly so.
This pattern is the one predicted by our global-individualization argument. It shows that states did not
21
“get out of the bedroom” during the post-war decades, as some have suggested. Rather, they moved from
the bedroom’s collectivized corner to its individualized corner.18
Next in Tables 2-5, we present a more detailed look at our results. For each of the four laws in
question, the tables specify exactly what changes occurred when in which countries.
[Tables 2-5 about here]
A first main point to be drawn from Tables 2-5 concerns the worldwide range of sex-law reforms.
The data detail the global reach of the reform process. In particular, we see that the 98 sodomy-law
reforms altered policies in 71 different countries (Table 2); that the 50 adultery amendments changed
regulations in 46 nation-states (Table 3); that the 140 child-sex-abuse revisions transformed statutes in 90
diverse countries (Table 4); and that the 122 rape-law changes affected legal provisions in 77 nationstates (Table 5). On a sheer numerical basis, the extensivity of the transformations is remarkable. Many,
many countries were involved.
The fact that fewer countries adopted sodomy and adultery reforms (71 and 46) relative to the
number adopting child-sex abuse and rape reforms (90 and 77) is not unto itself meaningful. Fewer
countries had sodomy and adultery laws to begin with, at the start of our study period in 1945. And given
a global environment encouraging decriminalization, few new laws came into effect. Thus, only those
countries that had sodomy and adultery laws at the outset were likely to register reforms.
The uneven distribution of sodomy and adultery laws, it turns out, is a legacy of colonial history.
To illustrate, sodomy was punishable in France before the Revolution with burning at the stake (Tatchell
1992). In 1791, however – buoyed by Enlightenment ideals of rationality, individuality, privacy, and
secularism – the French National Assembly abolished the old prohibition, arguing in part that, “[l]iberty
consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else” (Declaration of the Rights of Man
18
Thus as Foucault (1978) argues, contemporary discourse on sexuality is no more or less repressed, no more or less
liberated than the discourse it superseded. It is repressed and liberated along different dimensions.
22
1789). On this unprecedented platform, individualism made its first stand in the sex law, and sodomy –
conducted in private between consenting adults – was decriminalized accordingly.19
The impact of the French amendment was greatly intensified by two subsequent developments.
First, the Napoleonic Wars carried versions of the French Penal Code to Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Spain, and Portugal. Then colonial expansion transported the Napoleonic Code to dozens of colonies
(later countries) around the world. All of these entities received a penal-code template that lacked any
sodomy prohibition.20
The enduring strength of this colonial legacy is documented in Table 6. It lists the nation-states
that had no sodomy laws to reform during the 1945 to 2005 timeframe – a total of 53. Eleven of these
were European, and all of them decriminalized sodomy before our start date in 1945 (6 of the 11 did so
during the Napoleonic Wars). Another 31 were former colonies of Napoleonic Code countries, and
overwhelmingly they never criminalized sodomy at any point in history. The remaining 11 countries
were mostly Asian, and only 3 of them were colonized by Great Britain – the wellspring of most of the
world’s sodomy laws. Thus, we observe that sodomy laws were scarce among the former colonies of
France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1945. For some analogous reasons, adultery
laws were rare among the former colonies of Great Britain.
[Table 6 about here]
The point here is twofold. First hearkening back to our discussion above, it is clear that the
cumulative numbers of reforms and reformers are not quite commensurable across the four types of sex
law. The two laws experiencing widespread contraction during the post-war period were less prevalent in
the first place, being strongly tied to colonial legacies, and they were also more likely to be stricken from
the books once the study period began. Second and more broadly, this discussion suggests the extent to
19
While most Enlightenment philosophers continued to see sodomy as a contemptible vice, they did not believe that
penal laws should punish private behaviors, no matter how despicable.
20
We were initially surprised to find that so few Roman Catholic countries criminalized sodomy 1945-2005. Such
laws appeared mainly in Protestant countries, having spread through British colonial networks.
23
which domestic sex laws (and domestic penal codes generally) instantiate global models – in this case
carried by the colonial powers – instead of representing local values, interests, or power structures.
A second main point to be drawn from Tables 2-5 is that the noise that does appear in the global
trend-lines – the unexpected scope expansions in climates of contraction and vice-versa – in many cases
looks like individualization upon examination. Our initial coding scheme was too crude to capture the
subtleties. For example, we saw above that there was more resistance to the dominant adultery trend than
to any of the other three. 34 of the adultery-law reforms involved scope contractions, as predicted, but 16
involved scope expansions. Obviously, we did not anticipate the latter. Upon examining the reforms in
substance, however, one sees (in Table 3) that most of the unexpected scope expansions occurred when
husbands were made subject to the same laws that already applied to their wives. The old corporatist (and
patriarchal) ideology legitimated categorical distinctions between husbands and wives and justified
harsher restrictions on adulteress wives on grounds of potential illegitimacy. The new individualist logic
carried no such justification, and as it arose, the law’s inequality grew problematic. Thus, the tendency
toward equalization in adultery laws – expanding their scope contrary to our original expectations – in
fact followed the logic of individualization.
A similar argument applies to the subordinate child-sex abuse trend-line, which suggests a fair bit
of “resistance” to the dominant scope-expanding trend. The wrinkle in this domain was age of consent.
When the age of consent was lowered – as it was in 18 cases between 1945 and 2005 – the scope of the
law contracted, contrary to our expectations. But the age of consent declined as models of individual
personhood spread deeper into the province of childhood. To the extent that this process re-classified
some (older) children as “individuals” – granting them ultimate authority and responsibility for their lives
– justifications for child-sex abuse protections declined. Some laws shrunk in scope. Thus in Germany,
the revised child-sex abuse law assumes that juveniles need, “to evolve gradually into sexual beings,”
such that “sexual contacts can not be totally prohibited” (Hörnle 2000: 665). The logic is
individualization. These contractions were unanticipated, but it turns out they represented an alternative
outcome of the individualization process.
24
Finally a third main point to be drawn from Tables 2-5 is that between 1945 and 2005 sex-law
reforms were highly stylized across country contexts, showing great similarity in substance. Thus in all
kinds of nation-states we observe not only a strongly shared tendency to liberalize the law, whether by
contraction or expansion. We also observe distinct and limited modes of liberalization. Only a few
reform recipes were legitimated. In regards to sodomy laws, we find just two modes of individualization:
decriminalization in 49 cases and lowering the homosexual age of consent in 31. Vis-à-vis adultery, we
find only one main path toward that end, in the 34 instances of decriminalization, and one alternative
path, in the 13 instances of equalization. Meanwhile in relation to child-sex abuse laws, we discover three
main individualizing tracks: one removing distinctions between various kinds of sexual penetration (in
37 cases), another increasing the age of consent (in 34), and a third neutralizing gender to protect boys as
well as girls (in 26 cases). A fourth and less common track neutralized distinctions between chaste and
unchaste girls (in 9 of the cases). Finally, we find just three models for rape-law liberalization: one that
removed the distinction between various kinds of sexual penetration, in 56 of the cases, a second that
neutralized gender to protect men as well as women, in 24 cases, and a third that lifted the marital
exclusion clause to protect spouses, in 23 of the cases. The fact that so many reforms in so many different
countries can be summarized so schematically is significant. It implies that during this period there were
a discrete and limited number of legitimated reform templates available on a very widespread basis
(purveyed in part by INGOs and IGOs).21
Lastly we consider Table 7, which presents additional evidence on the theme of individualization.
During the post-World War II period, sex crimes were reclassified in the penal codes of many countries
around the world. The section headings were re-written. At the start of our analysis in 1945, most
countries in the world categorized sex crimes under offenses against morality, the family, good customs,
honor, chastity, and so on. The emphasis on collective order was pronounced. By the end of our analysis
21
For example in 2006, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children collaborated with the
International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) to produce a report on, “Child Pornography: Model Legislation
and Global Review” (available at www.icmec.org).
25
in 2005, most countries in the world had re-classified sex crimes to fall under offenses against liberty,
self-determination, physical integrity, and so on. The individual emphasis was pronounced. We show ten
examples of reclassification in Table 7. Such evidence further validates our emphasis on
individualization in the world cultural system as a central precursor to global sex-law reforms.
[Table 7 about here]
Altogether, the findings presented here are consistent with our global-institutional storyline.
Moreover, they are inconsistent with some other common views in the literature. First, the notion that
sex-law reforms were driven largely by grassroots social movements is not well supported. Changes in
some realms – e.g., sodomy – took off well before any corresponding social movement gained political
viability. And changes in other realms – e.g., adultery – never acquired much movement support.22 The
point is not that grassroots social movements played no role in sex-law reforms. In some countries,
around some causes, they obviously did. The point is that grassroots social movements were just one of
many mechanisms promoting reforms around the world over the post-war period, and perhaps not the
most decisive one.23
Second, our findings are inconsistent with the notion that changes in the realm of sex law were
particular to (or driven by) certain kinds of countries, with certain kinds of socio-political characteristics –
such as those in the Western cultural orbit or those with developed democracies. In fact, all kinds of
countries were involved. Thus, the lead reformers 1945-2005 were literally all over the map. For
example, the first five countries to decriminalize sodomy during the period were Portugal (for the second
time in its history), Thailand, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Mongolia. And the first five countries to
expand the scopes of their rape laws were the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Somalia, Laos, and Iraq.
22
In the late 1990s, the women’s movement finally targeted adultery laws, mainly for their unequal treatment of
women and men. For obvious reasons, however, adultery never became a banner cause of the movement, and
regardless most adultery reforms occurred before women’s organizations joined the fray.
23
Our findings suggest that social movements that tap into favored cultural frames are more likely to succeed, and
that success in turn is likely to further increase the favorability of the frame, increasing the likelihood of adoption
even without direct social movement support. See Benford and Snow (2000) and Binder (2000).
26
In neither of these cases (nor in the cases of adultery and child-sex abuse) were the trend leaders
especially Western, democratic, economically developed, etc. The reform movement was global; early
movers were not globally dominant players.
Given cross-national evidence along these lines, one may speculate that the sex-law reform
literature’s general predilection for actor-centric causation is sustained as much by selection bias as
empirical evidence. Within the case-study format, it is easy to focus on the noisier quarters of
contestation in the Western core and ignore the quiet zones of reform in the West or the global periphery.
Many sex-law reforms came to pass without ever having had powerful local proponents. Thus, for
instance, an observer of child-pornography-law revisions in Germany noted that:
There exist some NGOs in Germany that are specialized or have set priorities on this
issue…but…it is mainly the state that has started initiatives…not NGOs….[T]he harmonization
of legislation and law enforcement on a European level…play[s] a very important role (Heuck
2005: 5-6).
In this example – and in others – formulas for reform emanated mainly from generalized others.
Interested actors may be less crucial to the sex-law reform process than the existing literature makes out.
Discussion and Conclusion
The arguments developed here have broad implications, some of which we articulate here. They suggest
lines of future research.
First, our story is not just about rape, adultery, sodomy, and child-sexual abuse laws. It appears
that global individualization spurred all kinds of collateral changes in sex laws. Consider, for example,
the incest reforms discussed at the start of the paper. With individualization, criminal sanctions against
private, consensual, adult-adult incest grew increasingly difficult to defend, even as adult-child incest
grew increasingly problematic. Thus, incest laws came under heightened scrutiny and opened to reform.
Likewise, recent reforms in prostitution laws followed the logic of individualism. They generally
lightened sanctions on transactions between consenting individual adults while intensifying regulations
27
against non-consensual relations, especially those involving children. Even some laws on bestiality were
refashioned along individualized lines. In Sweden, Norway, and Germany, for example, outright
prohibitions against human-animal sexual contacts were replaced by animal-cruelty statutes. So long as
bestiality is conducted without cruelty, it no longer constitutes a crime in these countries. Evidence in
this vein suggests that all kinds of sex laws were reformulated along individualist lines in the post-World
War II period.
Second, our story is not just about criminal regulations. The argument articulated here suggests
the transformation of all kinds of sex regulations, not just the criminal (Foucault 1978). After all,
criminal law is only one aspect of social regulation, and not always the most important one (Rosenbloom
1996).24 “Every society regulates sexual conduct to a greater or a lesser degree. Some of this regulation
takes the form of social rules which have no legal effect; some of it is of a legal nature” (Frimpong and
Smith 1992: 91). Thus for instance, recent developments around sex in the realms of medicine, religion,
and public opinion may embody the logic of global individualization. Already some evidence suggests
that the sexual self – a regulatory system in its own right – has been radically individualized, with
sometimes troubling consequences (Adam 2005).25 More research is needed in all these areas.
Third, our story is not just about sex regulations. Ultimately, it is an argument about ongoing
world-cultural change. The intensifying celebration of free-standing personhood (Frank and Meyer 2002)
has repercussions in every domain of society, far beyond the realm of sexuality. Indeed, few stitches in
the word’s social fabric stand exempt from its influence. This promises to be a rich vein of research.
24
Thus Zuhur (2005: 49) writes: “Certain Muslim spokespersons equate homosexuality with feminism, and see any
vestiges of either as part of a grand conspiracy on the part of the West to attack the family system…In many
instances, the West is gravely criticized for decriminalizing homosexuality and the effects of such social attitudes
are probably far more influential in the repression of alternative sexual identities than are the penal codes.”
25
Adam analyzes interview data from more than 100 gay and bisexual men who have abdicated the practice of safe
sex. They justify their choices in the language of “informed consent, contractual interaction, free market choice, and
responsibility” (2005: 333).
28
Several limitations of the present study also suggest lines of future research. First, the analysis
here only glancingly addresses cross-national variations, in resisting global trends and in the timing of
adoption (Bernstein 2003; Kane 2007). Some Muslim countries, for instance, seem to have actively
resisted the worldwide sex-law reform movement, or at least have been slow to conform. Such crossnational variations need to be studied in earnest. Second, the present study does not adequately explore
the mechanisms promoting regulatory reform (Fourcade and Savelsberg 2006). There are several
important issues here, including what mechanisms offer the most effective means of spreading sex-law
reforms at both the world and national levels. Third, the paper at hand does not consider the
implementation of reforms. The understanding of laws in practice is an essential companion to our
analysis of laws on the books. In future work, we hope to address all of these issues directly. Indeed, we
have an ongoing project that seeks to do so.
What seems clear at this juncture is that recent transformations in the criminal regulation of sex
arose from a basic shift in the ontological framework of world society. Individualization disembedded
persons from families, nations, and other corporate bodies over the post-war period and it re-rendered
them as autonomous actors, recasting the imagined foundations of “society.” The process delegitimated
old definitions and criminal regulations of “sex,” which hinged on the collective order and the procreation
imperative, and it legitimated new definitions of sex, which prioritized individual liberty and the rule of
consent. The process unleashed a global wave of sex-law reforms, which flowed to the corners of Earth.
29
Figure 1: Five-Year Moving Avereage of Sodomy-Law Reforms
Worldwide, 1945-2005
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
Scope Contractions
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
1945
Scope Expansions
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
30
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
Figure 2: Five-Year Moving Average of Adultery Law Reforms
Worldwide, 1945-2005
2
1.5
Scope Contractions
1
0.5
Scope Expansions
0
1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
31
Figure 3: Five-Year Moving Average of Child-Sexual Abuse
Reforms Worldwide, 1945-2005
7
6
5
4
Scope Expansions
3
2
1
Scope Contractions
0
1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
32
Figure 4: Five-Year Moving Average of Rape-Law Reforms
Worldwide, 1945-2005
7
6
5
4
Scope Expansions
3
2
1
Scope Contractions
0
1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
33
Table 1: Case Coverage for World’s 194 Nation-States, 1945-2005
(Percentage Eligible Years with Penal-Code Data on Sex Laws)
full coverage
(75-100%), n=102
Algeria
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belgium
Benin
Bolivia
Botswana
Brazil
Brunei
Burma
Burundi
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech Rep
Dominican Rep
Ecuador
Egypt
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Fiji Islands
Finland
France
Germany
Germany, East
Germany, West
Ghana
Guatemala
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
Iceland
India
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Kenya
South Korea
Lebanon
Liberia
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Mali
Malta
Mexico
Micronesia
Morocco
New Zealand
Niger
Nigeria
Pakistan
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
St. Lucia
Samoa (Western)
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Africa
Spain
Swaziland
Switzerland
Syria
Thailand
Turkey
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
UK
USA
Uruguay
Vanuatu
Venezuela
Zambia
substantial coverage
(40-74%), n=43
Albania
Bahamas
Belarus
Belize
Bosnia
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Cameroon
Central African Rep
China
Congo DR
Cote d’Ivoire
Czechoslovakia
Denmark
El Salvador
Gabon
Georgia
Greece
Hungary
Kazakhstan
Macedonia
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mongolia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Norway
Palau
Russia/USSR
Rwanda
Serbia and Montenegro
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Togo
Tonga
Uzbekistan
North Vietnam/Vietnam
South Vietnam
Yugoslavia
Zimbabwe
34
incomplete coverage
(0-39%), n=49
Afghanistan
Angola
Armenia
Bahrain
Bhutan
Cambodia
Cape Verde
Chad
Comoros
Congo
Djibouti
Dominica
Gambia
Grenada
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Indonesia
Jordan
Kiribati
North Korea
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lesotho
Libya
Lithuania
Maldives
Moldova
Monaco
Mozambique
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Oman
Qatar
Saint Kitts
Saint Vincent
San Marino
Sao Tome
Slovakia
Slovenia
Sudan
Suriname
Trinidad
Tunisia
Turkmenistan
United Arab Emirates
North Yemen/Yemen
Table 7: Ten Examples of the Reclassification of Sex Crimes in Penal Codes 1945-2005
country
old classification
year
Canada
Poland
West Germany
Panama
South Africa
France
Finland
Philippines
Argentina
Bolivia
Crimes against Morality
1953
Crimes of Lasciviousness
1969
Crimes against Morality
1969
Crimes against Good Customs & the Family 1982
Immorality Act
1988
Moral Offenses
1994
Offenses against Morality
1996
Crimes against Chastity
1996
Crimes against Honor
1999
Crimes against Good Customs
1999
35
new classification
Sexual Offenses
Offenses against Liberty
Crimes against Sexual Self-Determination
Crimes against Modesty and Sexual Liberty
Sexual Offenses Act
Offenses against Physical Integrity
Sexual Offenses
Crimes against Persons
Crimes against Sexual Integrity
Crimes against Sexual Liberty
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