Law Commons^™

Our law criminalizes a broad array of sexual, and sex-related, conduct. Among the offences that do this (or did until recently) are rape, sexual assault, coercion, human sex trafficking, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, sexual humiliation, voyeurism, public nudity and public indecency, sexual transmission of disease, selling and buying sexual services (prostitution), pimping and pandering, statutory rape and child molestation, abuse of position of trust, child grooming, creating and possessing child pornography, revenge porn, failure to register as a sex offender, fornication, sodomy, adultery, assault by sadomasochism, adult and child incest, bigamy, polygamy, miscegenation, bestiality, necrophilia, and sale of sex …

When an offender lies or uses other forms of deception to induce an adult victim into sex, the law normally does not treat that as rape, even when the victim would not have engaged in the act absent the deception. But when the offender himself is deceived into having sex with an underage victim, that is treated as statutory rape, even if, once again, the deception was a but-for cause of the sex. To put it another way, in the case of rape, the person who does the lying escapes liability, while in the case of statutory rape the person …

For retributivists, who believe that criminal sanctions should be used to punish only conduct that is blameworthy, the so-called mala prohibita offenses have always been a source of concern: When the conduct being criminalized is wrongful prior to and independent of its being illegal - as it is with presumptive mala in se offenses like murder and rape - the path to blameworthiness is relatively clear. But when the wrongfulness of the conduct depends on the very fact of its being illegal - as is said to be the case with presumptive mala prohibita offenses like fishing without a license …