Crimes Against Children
In the stories where a victim was actually specified, it was always a young boy. This is partially a product of the rising sensational press, which devoted more time to telling a full story (even if it is dramatized in the process). Editors of sensational newspapers focused more attention to promoting the young boys in sodomy cases as victims. Sodomy laws also began to focus primarily on crimes against children as new ideas concerning what constituted a healthy childhood began to proliferate after 1880.
While there is no age of consent relating to sodomy, the issue of coercion began to appear more frequently in cases. This often comprised of an older man in a position of authority abusing his role to take advantage of a young boy or younger man in his charge. In one of the oldest American cases of sodomy, a colonial man named Nicholas Sension took advantage of many of the servant boys under his influence. As many of these boys would have depended on Sension for basic necessities such as housing, it put them in a very difficult position in which they would have had a hard time refusing. Similar cases occured in workplaces as well, such as a captain taking advantage of a cabin boy and an older apprentice taking advantage of the two younger apprentices living with him.
It should be clarified that the age range of boys in these cases ranged primarily from 10 to 18, although there were also a handful of boys slightly younger or older than that.