ABSTRACT
To the superficial observer, it might appear questionable whether in an analysis of crime specifically related to the task of social reconstruction sexual crime should be included. Is not, it might be argued, one of the chief characteristics of the sexual offender a narrowly individualistic attitude which can but little be affected by changes in the social and economic structure of society ? In fact, nothing would be more erroneous, however, than such an attempt to remove the problem of sexual crime from the sociological sphere and to regard it as the exclusive domain of the psychologist and psychiatrist. It is a commonplace, strongly confirmed by the study of primitive communities, that the very conception of sexual crime depends on the views about sexual behaviour generally held in a given society. The better understanding and the more lenient treatment of sexual offenders are due not only to the progress made by the modern psychology of sex, but at least as much to the profound changes which, to some extent independent of it, the daily conduct of so-called normal men and women has undergone in the course of the present century. Soviet Russia is not the only country to demonstrate the intimate connection between sexual habits and social outlook, although probably nowhere else such a violent zig-zag course might have been possible within the brief period of twenty years. 1
