Pederasty
Pederasty refers to same-sex sexual relationships between an adult man and an adolescent boy; some authors also use the term to refer to same-sex female relationships with a similar age gap. Pederasty existed as a socially acknowledged and accepted practice in some premodern societies.
In most countries today, the local age of consent determines whether a person is considered legally competent to consent to sexual acts, and whether such contact is child sexual abuse or statutory rape. An adult engaging in sexual activity with a minor is considered abusive by authorities for a variety of reasons, including the age of the minor and the psychological and physical harm they may endure.
Etymology
Pederasty derives from the combination of with . Late Latin pæderasta was borrowed in the 16th century directly from Plato's classical Greek in The Symposium. The word first appeared in the English language during the Renaissance, as pæderastie, in the sense of sexual relations between men and boys.History
Ancient Greece
Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged romantic relationship between an adult male and a younger male, usually in his teens. This age difference between a socially powerful and socially less-powerful partner was characteristic of the Archaic and Classical periods, in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. The influence of pederasty on Greek culture of these periods was so pervasive that it has been called "the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens." The practice was viewed with concerns and disapproval by certain social groups.In the writings of Xenophon, Socrates says, "A man who sells his favours for a price to anyone who wants them is called a catamite; but if anyone forms a love-attachment with someone whom he knows to be truly good, we regard him as perfectly respectable." Each author may have used Socrates as a spokesman for their own viewpoints. Both Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's Socrates were against homosexual copulation in the context of pederasty and instead advocated for platonic relationships. The Socratic writings of the two authors were one of the main texts that led to Kenneth Dover's and Michel Foucault's understanding of pederasty as a matter of debate in Ancient Greece.
Some scholars locate its origin in initiation ritual, particularly rites of passage on Crete and in Sparta, where it was associated with entrance into military life and the religion of Zeus. It has no formal existence in the Homeric epics, and seems to have developed in the late 7th century BC as an aspect of Greek homosocial culture, which was characterized also by athletic and artistic nudity, delayed marriage for aristocrats, symposia, and the social seclusion of women.
Pederasty was both idealized and criticized in ancient literature and philosophy. The argument has recently been made that idealization was universal in the Archaic period; criticism began in Athens as part of the general Classical Athenian reassessment of Archaic culture.
Scholars have debated the role or extent of pederasty, which is likely to have varied according to local custom and individual inclination. Athenian law, for instance, recognized both consent and age as factors in regulating sexual behavior.
Enid Bloch argues that many Greek boys in these relationships may have been traumatized by knowing that they were violating social customs, since the "most shameful thing that could happen to any Greek male was penetration by another male." She further argues that vases showing "a boy standing perfectly still as a man reaches out for his genitals" indicate the boy may have been "psychologically immobilized, unable to move or run away." One vase shows a young man or boy running away from Eros, the Greek god of desire.
Ancient Rome
In Latin, mos Graeciae or mos Graecorum refers to a variety of behaviors the ancient Romans regarded as Greek, including but not confined to sexual practice. Ancient Roman society only tolerated same-sex intercourse within an inherently unequal relationship; male Roman citizens retained their masculinity as long as they took the active, penetrating role, and the appropriate male sexual partner was a prostitute or slave, who would nearly always be non-Roman. Adolescent male partners were known as catamites. In Archaic and classical Greece, paiderasteia had been a formal social relationship between freeborn males; taken out of context and refashioned as the luxury product of a conquered people, pederasty came to express roles based on domination and exploitation. Masters often gave enslaved males, and prostitutes sometimes assumed, Greek names regardless of their ethnic origin; the boys Martial loved had Greek names. The use of slaves defined Roman pederasty; sexual practices were "somehow 'Greek when they were directed at "freeborn boys openly courted in accordance with the Hellenic tradition of pederasty".Effeminacy or a lack of discipline in managing one's sexual attraction to another male threatened a man's "Roman-ness" and thus might receive disparagement as "Eastern" or "Greek". Fears that Greek models might "corrupt" traditional Roman social codes seem to have prompted a vaguely documented law that attempted to regulate aspects of homosexual relationships between freeborn males and to protect Roman youth from older men emulating Greek customs of pederasty.
Theologian Edith Humphrey commented that "the Graeco-Roman 'ideal' regarding homosexuality entailed erotic love, not of children, but of young males of the same age that a young woman would be given in marriage, and that frequently the more mature male was only slightly older than the partner."
Medieval and Renaissance Europe
The Roman Emperor Justinian I, upon converting to Christianity, banned all forms of homosexual intercourse within the Roman Empire, regardless of age. The shift in these cultural attitudes transpired into literature; Eratosthenes Scholastikos, a 6th century Greek author writing shortly after the empire's Christianization, wrote "Let males be for others; I can love only women, whose love lasts a long time. There is no beauty in pubescent youths: I loathe that hateful hair that begins to grow too soon." in an epigram numbered 277 in the Greek Anthology. Nevertheless, various covert forms of pederasty persisted in Europe following his edict.In 1323, a court sentenced a French subdeacon named Arnold of Verniolle to lifetime incarceration with a diet of bread and water. Historical records document over 3,000 convictions for sodomy in Florence from 1432 to 1502; almost all of these relationships involved pederasty. Hilarius, a Latin language poet of English origin studying in France in the early 12th century, authored several poems discussing homoerotic admiration of adolescent boys. Numerous works of medieval Jewish poetry, the majority authored in al-Andalus during the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain, detail similar themes of admiring the beauty of adolescent males.
Africa
Among the Zande people of Congo, there was a social institution similar to pederasty in Ancient Greece. E. E. Evans-Pritchard also recorded that male Azande warriors routinely took on boy-wives between the ages of twelve and twenty, who helped with household tasks and participated in intercrural sex with their older husbands. The practice had died out by the early 20th century, after Europeans had gained control of African countries, but was recounted to Evans-Pritchard by the elders with whom he spoke.Anthropologists Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe reported that women in Lesotho engaged in socially sanctioned "long term, erotic relationships", named motsoalle. Often, a motsoalle relationship was acknowledged publicly with a ritual feast and with the community fully aware of the women's commitment to one another. Motsoalle relationships commonly existed among school girls where it functioned like a type of "puppy love" or mentorship. As Lesotho became more modernized, those communities were exposed to Western culture and thus homophobia. Anthropologist K. Limakatsuo Kendall hypothesizes that as Western ideas spread, the idea that women could be sexual with one another, coupled with homophobia, began to erase the motsoalle relationships. By the 1980s, the ritual feasts that were once celebrated by the community for motsoalles had vanished. Today, motsoalle relationships have largely disappeared.
The Nyakyusa people of Tanzania have traditionally approved of pederastic relationships between an adult man and a boy, along with homosexual relationships between two boys. However, precolonial Nyakyusa culture prohibited rape and consensual homosexual relationships between two adult men, punishing offenders with fines.
Men who worked in some gold mines in South Africa would form sexual relationships with younger males, despite same-sex relationships being illegal under the apartheid regime. Boys in mines performed household chores and served as men's "wives" or sexual partners for extended periods of time.
Australia
Precolonial era
The Warlpiri people traditionally designated all initiated boys as the "boy-wife" of their future father-in-law in their traditional system of arranged marriages. Initiation traditionally occurs between the ages of 9 to 12; the subsequent form of pederasty involved anal intercourse, with a boy's anus equated to a girl's vagina. Various aboriginal tribes of Central Australia, including the Warlpiri people, also traditionally allow children to sexually experiment with both same and opposite gender children before marriage.18th-20th centuries
Pederasty, along with consensual same-sex intercourse among adult men, often occurred among convicts sent to Australia during the 18th and 19th centuries. Same-sex couples often engaged in legally unrecognized marriages. Boys and young men often sold themselves into prostitution to gain better provisions and living conditions. English convicts tended to engage in same-sex intercourse at a higher rate than Irish convicts.During World War II, American servicemen housed at local YMCAs and other forms of makeshift barracks in Australia often engaged in sexual intercourse with local men and boys who used these facilities for their original purposes.