Abstract
To this point I have argued that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discipline of psychiatry had successfully medicalized and demonized the “sexual psychopath” as surely a mentally ill and possibly dangerous person. Attempts to treat this condition had been piecemeal and yielded variable outcomes. There was, as yet, no systematic attempt to confine and ultimately treat sexual psychopaths on a large scale. A series of initiating events occurred in the late 1930s which spawned a movement that lasted for over the next 40 years. This was the era of the sexual psychopath laws.
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Laws, D.R. (2016). The Sexual Psychopath/Predator Laws: Legal Construction of Deviance. In: Social Control of Sex Offenders. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39126-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39126-1_5
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