Crimes Against Innocence: How American Prosecutors Theorize Vulnerability in Child Sexual Abuse Cases

• In Event: 033 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Children, Youth and Violence 1

Abstract

This paper lies at the intersection of sociological inquiry into law and society, criminology, and sexual victimization. I take sexual violence as a case through which to investigate how gendered vulnerability is understood and refracted through legal institutions. Specifically, I investigate prosecutorial decision-making logics in cases of child sexual abuse. Little is known about exactly how prosecutors deal with such cases. Data for this paper are comprised of in-depth interviews with 42 trial-level prosecutors who investigate, charge, negotiate plea bargains, and try criminal cases involving child sexual victims. I draw on the law and society tradition of scholarship to investigate how legal actors implement laws on the books in local contexts. By investigating law in action in relation to sexual assault allegations, we begin to see a more thorough picture of how youth, vulnerability, and sexuality are interpolated in legal structures and processes. Findings indicate that cultural understandings of authentic sexual vulnerability are tenuous, contested, and contingent on the age and gender of the victim, especially in relation to that of the defendant. Time emerges as a crucial variable in child sexual abuse cases, as there is a limited window in which a complainant is imagined as truly innocent. As the victim nears or passes the age of sexual maturity, even when they remain under their state’s legal age of consent, the state of their vulnerability becomes less self-evident. Results from this study will enhance our knowledge about gender, justice, and the prosecution of sexual assault cases more broadly.

Author

• Jamie L Small, University of Dayton