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Sex Crimes and Criminal Sexuality: Legislating and Policing Community Boundaries in Nebraska, 1880-1980
Trump, Brian Michael
Trump, Brian Michael
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Abstract
This dissertation analyzes sex crime prosecutions in Nebraska between 1880 and 1980, focusing specifically on cases of rape, sodomy, and sexual psychopathy. Beginning with the dramatic increase in white settlement and growing rates of incarceration for sexual offenses across the state in 1880s and concluding with the attempts by the Nebraska Legislature to rewrite sex crime statutes in the 1970s, this hundred-year period was marked not only by dramatic social and political change at the national level, but also locally in communities across Nebraska. During this century of dramatic change, I argue that sex crime prosecutions both highlighted and reinforced local hierarchies of race, class, gender, and mobility. In turn, these hierarchies constituted what I refer to as “community boundaries,” the distinctions that local authorities and members of the public drew between insiders and outsiders, between those who belonged and those were outside or at the margins of society. As crimes that highlight and reveal anxieties surrounding sexuality, violence, and community safety, I argue that the trial outcomes and newspaper coverage of these cases across Nebraska provide clear insight into these ideologies of local belonging, highlighting who in the community was viewed as worthy or deserving of legal protection from sexual violence, and whom communities viewed as sexual threats that they needed protection from.
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2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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American history, Sexuality, Gender studies, Nebraska, Rape, Sex crimes, Sexual psychopath, Sexual violence, Sodomy