The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has given national consciousness to the problematic treatment of sexual assault in Australia's past. Yet we still have little knowledge of the policing, prosecution and punishment of sexual crimes in the past.

This book examines this history by investigating Australia in the 1950s. The 1950s has remained a decade with a nostalgic reputation for upholding the sanctity of the nuclear family.

Fewer remember that it was this same decade that saw the sharpest rise in Australian history of arrests...