The Legal Irrelevance of Sexual Specifics

In many European countries, sodomy statutes institutionalized the scrutiny of homosexual acts. Magistrates’ reliance on forensic experts to explain sexual deviance in terms of criminal responsibility stimulated the emergence of a medical concept of homosexuality. Belgian courts, however, displayed no such ‘will to know’ about the nature of ‘perversion.’ A comparison of German and Belgian legal logics pertaining to indecency demonstrates how the former was preoccupied with a perpetrator’s motives, while the latter deliberately ignored them. German courts often had recourse to medical expertise to understand what drove (homo)sexual offenders, whereas the Belgian judiciary preferred to omit these hard-to-prove intricacies by stubbornly sticking to the facts of the matter. Belgian trials pertaining to homosexual acts of public indecency were therefore mostly bereft of any special interest in the psychological significance of the acts in question. Unlike elsewhere, they did not stimulate forensic physicians to account for such ‘unnatural acts’ in terms of a medico-psychiatric ‘condition.’