By Aya Gruber  

Sex crimes are the worst crimes. People generally believe that sexual assault is graver than nonsexual assault, uninvited sexual compliments are worse than nonsexual insults, and sex work is different from work. Criminal codes typically create a dedicated category for sex offenses, uniting under its umbrella conduct ranging from violent attacks to consensual commercial transactions. This exceptionalist treatment of sex as categorically different rarely elicits discussion, much less debate. Sex exceptionalism, however, is neither natural nor neutral, and its political history should give us pause. This Article is the first to trace, catalog, and analyze sex exceptionalism in criminal law in the United States. Through a genealogical examination of sex-crime law from the late eighteenth century to today, it makes several novel contributions to the debate over how criminal law should regulate sex. First, this Article casts doubt on the conventional account that rape law’s history is solely one of sexist tolerance, an account that undergirds contemporary calls for broader criminal regulations and higher sentences. In fact, early law established rape as the most heinous crime and a fate worse than death, but it did so to preserve female chastity, marital morality, and racial supremacy. Sex-crime laws were not uniformly underenforced but rather selectively enforced—a tool used to entrench hierarchies and further oppressive regimes from slavery to social purity. Second, this Article employs this history to suggest that it is past time to critically examine whether sex crimes should be exceptional. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the enlightened liberal position was that rape law should be less exceptional and harmonized with the law governing “ordinary” assault 

Stanford Law Review, Vol. 75, 2023

Sexual assault is epidemic in the United States. Recent media reports, public outrage, and activism have been focused on the institutional settings in which these assaults occur. Colleges and universities, as well as the military and athletic programs, have come under increasing scrutiny as settings that not only fail to deter, but possibly foster rape.

viewpoints, 16p.

By J. H. Bogart

A woman awakens surrounded by four men who remove her from her bed and take her to another room.1 Despite protests and physical resistance, the men engage in a series of sexual acts with her. She files a complaint and the men are charged, tried, and convicted.2 They appeal, claiming they believed she was agreeable to their actions.3 They had been told by her husband that she had unusual tastes in sexual matters, and liked simulated gang rape. Because they had thought she was willing, they had not intended to rape her and therefore should not have been convicted.4 A young woman of limited cognitive capacities and an intense desire for acceptance seeks the approval and friendship of her male peers.5 The teenage boys induce her to join them in a basement where they asked her to perform sexual acts with them. No threats were made or implied. The teenage boys claim she was a happy participant.6

39p.

By Sahar Jalili

Rape is a crime globally condemned yet; it's one of the most controversial crimes at the time. What this research did was to gather the information of countries rape law in their penal code from all over the world and create a pattern of how countries on a global scale criminalize rape and how far they have changed in the past century. The goal was to produce a rape criminalization map of the world to show which elements are playing the main factors and which factors are missing, how close countries define rape and how different their reactions are. The method that was adopted was the principal components analysis. This system allowed the researcher to compare twenty-nine countries plus seven the US states based on fifty- one elements of the crime of rape.

Pennsylvania State University, Penn State Law, 317p.