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 efforts of prosecutors to portray a teenage girl like Rosa Colletti as a passive child, whose ignorance rendered her a victim of sexual violence, ran into difficulties as soon as jurors saw the girl. A newspaper reporter expressed what jurors apparently felt when he described one girl as "a woman in appearance [although] a child in years," a description that stressed the incongruity between her appearance and her claim to childhood. (31) If physical immaturity alone did not make a girl or boy a child in the eyes of most New Yorkers, physical maturity did suggest to them the potential for sexual desire and a higher intelligence, qualities that they found difficult to reconcile with childhood. The fact that, in defining childhood, the law formally privileged age failed in practice to direct attention away from girls' bodies. This was particularly the case because, until the 1930s, most of the immigrant, working-class parents who appeared in New York City's courts could not produce either a birth certificate or some other evidence as to the age of their children. The absence of documentation resulted in a provision in the New York Penal Code that allowed the judge and jury to determine a girl's age by "personal inspection"--by looking at her, but in practice that clause only exacerbated prosecutors' problems. (32) NYSPOC officers used clothing and hairstyles to try to mark girls as children. To mask physical maturity, they dressed girls in the short dresses typically worn by children, and arranged their hair so that it hung down their backs. When, after calling a fifteen year old girl back to the witness stand so the jurors could form their own opinions of her age, one judge directed jurors' attention to her short dress and long hair, the defense attorney responded with a typical strategy. He questioned the girl as to whether, prior to being placed in the Society's care, she had worn a long dress, and had had her hair arranged on the top of her head. (33)

When teenage girls attempted to speak like children, defense attorneys aggressively challenged them. Relying on the presumption that intelligence came with physical maturity, attorneys insisted that girls like Rosa Colletti could use adult language; if they did not know what sexual intercourse was before the events of the case, their experience would have provided them with an understanding of it. In a case in 1916, for example, one attorney objected to fourteen year old Maria Stadler being allowed to testify in euphemistic language, and by whispering to the stenographer. "This girl is not a baby," the attorney complained. "This girl had a child. She knows what happened, where it happened, how it happened, and she ought to tell her story before the jury." When he cross-examined Maria, she testified that Nicolo Alberti, the man accused of raping her, had "put his private thing into my privates." The defense attorney then attempted to ask Maria what a "private thing" was, in order "to show this girl never used these words before," and to find out "where she got this language from," but the district attorney objected. Instead, at the judge's suggestion, the defense attorney asked her "if she knows any other name for it." "I can't say it no other way," Maria answered. She was then confronted with a transcript from an earlier paternity proceeding against Alberti, in which she had testified that he had "sexu al intercourse with me." Maria denied she had used this language. (34) Faced with the prospect of this type of attack, prosecutors increasingly encouraged teenage girls to use the phrase "sexual intercourse," rather than the more euphemistic language employed by younger girls.