ABSTRACT
In 1977, Michel Foucault received a phone call from a Commission for the Reform of Penal Law, asking his advice on changes that were under consideration regarding sex crime legislation. Foucault explains, the implication of his suggestion to punish only the violence in rape would be to place rape "outside the criminal law. In "Sexual Morality and the Law," as in his accounts of the Jouy-Adam case, Foucault expresses skepticism that adult-child sex causes any trauma in itself, once again suggesting that the sexual trauma associated with adult-child sex is constituted by psychiatry in order to expand its power. Foucault acknowledges that rape is primarily something that happens to women, he fails to incorporate an understanding of this gendered aspect of the crime into his proposal for legislative reform. It is the women who need to insist that rape should be treated as a sexual crime, while it is the men who provide reasons for punishing "only the violence."
