Worldwide Trends in the Criminal Regulation of Sex, 1945 to 2005

TLDR

From 1945 to 2005, nation‑states worldwide revised criminal laws on sexual activities, reflecting a post‑war shift toward individualistic societies that weakened collective‑entity protections and strengthened person‑oriented regulations. The authors analyzed unique cross‑national, longitudinal data on rape, adultery, sodomy, and child sexual abuse using negative‑binomial regression and country‑level event‑history models to test their propositions. The analyses show a sweeping revolution: laws protecting individuals expanded while those safeguarding collective entities contracted, driven by a global celebration of free‑standing personhood.

Abstract

Between 1945 and 2005, nation-states around the world revised their criminal laws on sexual activities. This global reform wave—across countries and domains of sexual activity—followed from the reconstitution of world models of society around individuals rather than corporate bodies. During the post-World War II period, this process rearranged the global cultural and organizational underpinnings of sex, eroding world-level support for criminal laws aimed at protecting collective entities—especially the family and the nation—and strengthening world support for laws aimed at protecting individualized persons. To make our case, we use unique cross-national and longitudinal data on the criminal regulation of rape, adultery, sodomy, and child sexual abuse. The data reveal striking counter-directional trends in sex-law reforms, which simultaneously elaborated regulations protecting individuals and dissolved laws protecting collective entities. World-level negative-binomial regression analyses and country-level event-history analyses confirm our main propositions. The findings demonstrate a sweeping revolution in criminal-sex laws, rooted in the intensified global celebration of free-standing personhood.