“The Criminal Sexual Psychopath in Canada: Sex, Psychiatry and the Law at Mid-Century”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1948, Canadian parliamentarians unanimously voted in favour of adopting criminal sexual psychopath legislation. An American invention that combined the force of the law with the curative abilities of psychiatry, sexual psychopath laws were the product of faith in science, and especially "mental health," to solve social problems, combined with growing public anxiety about violent sexual assault, particularly against children. This mid-century medio-legal experiment has been well documented by American historians. Here, the Canadian response to the problem of "sexual deviancy" is examined, with particular reference to the Committee on the Sex Offender whose findings are representative of the range of "expert" opinion on this issue. Though the law itself was widely regarded as a failure, psychiatrists and other experts successfully claimed medical authority over certain types of sex offences, and popularized medical interpretations of sexual behaviour, including the pathologization of homosexuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".