This book demonstrates the real benefits that can arise from taking an interdisciplinary approach to historical research. Combining medical history, crime and penal history, law and public health history, Weston’s study provides a much welcome set of insights into the complicated realm of the policing, punishment, treatment and reform of sexual deviance in the twentieth century.
The book is composed of five core chapters, as follows. The first chapter focuses on the evolution of curative approaches to those imprisoned for sexual crimes. In the early twentieth century, the traditional tension between punishment (i.e. a more punitive penal experience) and reformation was, as Weston notes, ‘undergoing a profound change’ (p. 19). New paradigms of psychology, sociology and pathology framed the discussion about rehabilitation in the years before the Great War and into the interwar period. In the 1920s, the new Prison Commissioner Alexander Paterson was known for a progressive approach to improving the prison system and the ‘treatment’ of its inmates. Medical theories and treatments relating to sexual offenders were also part of this changing attitude and approach to penality. This chapter traces the emerging models of rehabilitation and reform in the first half of the twentieth century, demonstrating how the medicalisation of sexual offenders was increasingly influential. Not only did rehabilitation and reform of the prisoner become medically informed, but, in turn, medicine informed the legal and judicial representation of the prisoner. As Weston states, ‘The judiciary had a new method for explaining offenders or offences that seemed unusual or unexpected, for reducing the offender’s blameworthiness and severity of punishment, and for encouraging steps towards rehabilitation’ (p. 37).
Chapter two places contemporary studies of the sexual offender at its centre. According to Weston, specific research emerged in the 1920s; even Krafft-Ebing, whose textbook Psychopathia Sexualis was published in English as early as 1893, was not widely read until this period. From the twenties, research into sexual offences increased. This was partly a result of the growth of psychological approaches to crime, but also a result of an apparent rise in the reporting of sexual offences. Some of this needs to be considered in the context of post-World War One, and Clive Emsley and Jon Lawrence have written elsewhere about the fear of the damaged, returning soldier during the aftermath. As Weston points out, there may have been some gendered anxieties which led to increased reporting (p. 42), or the growing number of women police officers and police surgeons may have encouraged women and girls to come forward. A handful of doctors, including prison doctors, published on the sexual offender in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to an increase of medical interest in sexual deviance. This interest was overwhelmingly focused on male sexual offenders, whereas historically female offenders had tended to be associated with sexual deviance. Hence, women were convicted of offences relating to prostitution, incest and (very occasionally) sexual assault, but even when they were prosecuted for property crimes there was often an underlying assumption of sexual delinquency. Weston notes here that despite female involvement in what might be broadly called sexual offences, ‘they were all but entirely absent from studies and discussions surrounding the sexual offender’ (p. 52). She argues that female offenders were simply not visible in the same way that male offenders were, and consequently perceived as less of a problem. Moreover, while a few doctors made a link between prostitution and psychological problems, more often women’s sexual deviance was linked to immorality and misconduct. In contrast, even up to the 1960s and beyond, the focus of medical research and textbook studies was on the ‘perversions’ of the male offender.
Chapter three moves on to consider the explanations for sexual offences and the subsequent treatments, drawing again on the psychological and medical literature but also on the new field of psychiatry that was emerging in the early to mid-twentieth century. Weston argues that doctors were unable to establish a single explanation for sexual crime: sexual immaturity, childhood sexual development (based on Freud’s theories), juvenile delinquency, personality disorders and sadism were some of the many possible causes cited in the medical literature. This multiplicity of causes in turn led to a variety of treatments, as Weston concludes, ‘the desire to account for such a wide range of behaviour amongst so many different people and in so many different circumstances ensured that psychiatric theories and treatments both remained diverse’ (p. 78).
The final two chapters (four and five), consider the relationship between law and medicine in the context of sexual offending, with Weston concluding (in chapter five) that while forensic psychology gained a significant foothold in the criminal law, in terms of actual practice and treatment, it had its limits. Thus, as the prison doctor John Landers noted in 1938, ‘the psychological viewpoint was very helpful in understanding’ criminal conduct, but ‘was not equally helpful in suggesting a line of treatment’ (p. 120).
To conclude, there is much of value here. One small criticism relates to the coverage of the introduction. While a section grapples with the inherent difficulty of terminology and language when referring to sexual offending, a discussion about the nature of the sources and the ethical issues encountering doctors’ discussions of patients’ lives would have been of some value here. Nevertheless, this is an important book that deserves to be widely read by historians of crime, law, medicine and sexology, and more broadly those interested in the social history of the twentieth century.
