The Dark Mirror of Rape Law: Bestiality, Insemination, Oppression—Lessons from the Grim Animal Reality

Abstract

Professor Stuart P. Green's book, Criminalizing Sex—A Unified Liberal Theory, sets an unprecedented observation on sex offenses.1 It makes a unique journey, looking at diverse offenses and attempting to find normative coherency in existing doctrines. Both doctrinally and normatively, Green analyzes the criminalization of fourteen acts, some of them enjoy massive scholarly attention, and some rarely discussed. Among the latter is the offense of bestiality, on which I will focus. Is it worthy of criminalization in a liberal democracy? Green conceives bestiality as a form of “aconsensual sex,” because animals are not a moral agent who’s consent we need to seek, and because we do not ascribe animals with sexual autonomy. He is unsure about bestiality’s mental harms to animals, but acknowledges its’ physical harms. Green finds that directly criminalizing bestiality, in order to protect animals from physical harm, makes no normative sense in a legal regime that allows people to systematically abuse, hurt, and kill animals in diverse wide contexts. Nevertheless, he argues that we should indirectly criminalize bestiality, under the general offense of animal cruelty; bestiality has no social and cultural benefits, and some protection to animal welfare is better than none.