Dirty Old Men

I have commented on this blog before that, despite the seemingly soaring crime rate in our country and the talk that one often hears about the declining morality of the present generation, I think incidents of serious crime (i.e. crime directly resulting in harm to another person) are not that much more prevalent than in the so-called good old days. Yes, young people nowadays are probably exposed to and perhaps acquiesce to more temptations at a younger age than youth did when I was growing up, and society has more sophisticated ways of killing people in mass numbers than we used to. But I'm talking about the total number of incidents of crime, not the total number of victims, and I'm talking only about violent crime or crime that results in serious physical and/or emotional damage to another human being. By that standard, I don't think there's that much difference between now and then.
For instance (and I think I've cited this example before), when I was writing my Wicked Springfield book, I did an informal comparison of the number of murders that took place there during the 1880s and the number of murders that occur in present-day Springfield. What I found was that, if you allow for increased population, there's not a lot of difference. Specifically, I found that there were about ten murders in Springfield during the decade of the 1880s, and there were ten murders in Springfield for the most recent year for which statistics were available at the time I was writing the book (around 2011 or 2012). If you consider that the population of Springfield is about ten times as great as it was in the 1880s, that works out to a similar murder rate for both time periods.
More recently, I've been looking at another kind of crime against persons: rape and statutory rape. This time, I haven't actually conducted a comparison, even an informal one, but I've glanced through enough old newspapers to know that rape and statutory rape were not at all uncommon in the 1880s and early 1900s, although they were often called by another name. When a woman was raped, newspapers often reported the incident by saying she had been "outraged" or some similar term. Statutory rape was often called "criminal intimacy," a broad term that also subsumed less serious offenses like adultery and premarital sexual intercourse.
A quick glance through early-day Springfield, Missouri, newspapers reveals a large number of incidents of "criminal intimacy" involving girls or young women being raped or sexually exploited by much older men, often their fathers or father figures. And the following list represents just the few incidents I've chosen to highlight. There are many others.
In 1894 a Springfield dance instructor named Professor James was charged with incest with his 15-year-old daughter. The professor often traveled to give his dance lessons, and his daughter began accompanying him after she became an accomplished dancer herself and was old enough to help out with the lessons. In the fall of 1893, the father allegedly coerced his daughter into sexual intercourse during an overnight trip to Arkansas, and the criminal relations continued on a more or less regular basis thereafter. Finally, the girl told her mother what was going on in May of 1894, and James was arrested and charged with criminal intimacy. He denied the allegation, and I don't know whether he was ever convicted of a crime or not.
In February of 1897, a single, 15-year-old girl living just north of Springfield gave birth to a baby. Investigation revealed that she also had given birth to a baby two years earlier when she was only 13. The girl's mother had died a number of years earlier, and the girl had been placed in the custody of Rufus Sharon and his wife. Rufus was charged with impregnating the girl on both occasions. Apparently his wife knew about the criminal relations between Rufus and the girl but did not report her husband to authorities.
In 1897, 17-year-old Mrs. Pearl Huffman (whose husband had recently been sent to prison for bigamy) and her 64-year-old great uncle John McGill were arrested for "lewd conduct" on a complaint from McGill's neighbor. McGill was subsequently charged with criminal intimacy. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, while Pearl was released from the lewd conduct charge because she was unable to pay a fine.
In 1899, 16-year-old Mattie Hansford left her foster parents, a doctor and his wife, and went to the home of another doctor, M.C. Wyatt and his wife, complaining that her foster parents had mistreated her and asking to stay with the Wyatts. Dr. Wyatt had recently treated Mattie for an illness, and apparently they had developed a relationship that went well beyond that of doctor-patient. Wyatt and his wife took the girl in, and a few months later, Wyatt was charged with criminal intimacy with her.
As I say, there are numerous other examples, but this is enough to give you an idea that rape and especially statutory rape were not uncommon in the good old days.