2016/12/08 by David John Frank, Dana M. Moss · 33 citations
Social Sciences · #Adultery #African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues #Biology #Criminal law #Criminology #Demographic economics #Dominance (genetics) #Economics #Gender Politics and Representation #Homosexuality #Imprisonment #Law #Neutrality #Political science #Prison #Sex work and related issues #Sociology #Sodomy
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/sow096
published in Social Forces (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2016/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
This paper analyzes cross-national and longitudinal variations in criminal laws regulating sexual activities. We blend historical and sociological institutionalisms to argue that criminal sex laws embody exogenous models, supplied by colonial and imperial powers and evolving world society. To test our ideas, we apply logit-panel and pooled-time-series models to original data from more than 150 countries on four aspects of sex laws, 1965 to 2005: (1) maximum prison terms for rape, (2) ages of sexual consent, (3) the existence of sodomy prohibitions, and (4) gender neutrality in adultery regulations. Our analyses confirm the importance of exogenous factors and show that endogenous factors—including the dominance of Islam and the status of women in society—play lesser roles in explaining formal content differences. In supplementary analyses, we explore counterpoint variations, that is, sex-law reforms that flout global standards, illustrated here by sodomy-law expansions during the period. We find exogenous imprints even in these cases.