Age of consent law and the making of modern childhood in New York City, 1886-1921

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2002 by Stephen Robertson

The concern to use the concept of the age of consent to extend the legal protection from sexual violence presently available to children to cover the teenage years had only a secondary place in the arguments offered by most reformers; it became more prominent, however, when the new laws were put into practice.

In New York, in 1886, purity reformers succeeded in having the age of consent increased to sixteen years; in 1895, reformers were able to raise it to eighteen years. (18) Responsibility for enforcing laws based on the increased age of consent lay with the NYSPCC, as the central role played by an officer of the Society in Rosa's case highlights. A private child protection agency incorporated by the State Legislature in 1874, this Society was instrumental not only in shaping criminal law relating to children, but also in administering and enforcing it. Its directors, together with those of the societies it inspired throughout the state, initiated legislative action and helped draft the amended laws and ne w legal categories relating to the age of consent that were adopted by the State Legislature. NYSPOC officers had powers of arrest and prosecution, custody of all children under the age of sixteen years involved in crimes, and responsibility for tasks ranging from investigation to the collection of fines. Judges also required the assent of NYSPCC officers before agreeing to plea-bargains or other outcomes brokered by assistant district attorneys. The Society's involvement in enforcing the increased age of consent wove the new law into a web of legal restrictions on behavior ranging from work, to entry to pool halls constructed by the NYSPCC around children. Those legal restrictions were intended to protect, and to separate from adults, working-class children whose parents failed to keep them within the home until they had completed puberty. (19) The Society concerned itself only with those under the age of sixteen years, arguing that by that age the onset of puberty would have occurred, bringing with it the p hysical strength and "higher intelligence and greater strength of will" that distinguished adults from children. When campaigns by other purity reformers succeeded in raising the age of consent to eighteen years, Elbridge Gerry, the NYSPCC President, complained that the age was now set beyond the time when "a girl became a woman." Not only would it be impossible to obtain any convictions in cases that involved the sixteen and seventeen year old girls, he lamented, but the effort to prosecute such cases would undermine the legitimacy of the law, making it more difficult to win convictions in cases involving girls under the age of sixteen. (20) Despite such concerns, the NYSPCC's continued commitment to law enforcement ensured that New York City courts had to deal with large numbers of prosecutions involving teenage complainants. So many statutory rape cases appeared in the courts in the first two decades of the twentieth century that this offense overshadowed all other forms of sexual violence. (21)