In 1832, indecent assault on a child was the subject of a specific legislation and was qualified as “indecent assault without violence” ; it sanctionned any sexual intercourse between an adult and a child under the age of 11 (13 from 1863 and later 15 from 1945 on). The notion of consent therefore became ineffective as the legislator estimated that a child could not produce a consent worthy of the name.
However there was a wide gap between the law and its practice. That practice was haunted all through the 19 ^th and 20 ^th centuries by the recurrent question of the eventual consent of the victim to his/her attacker and also by genuine investigations into the child’s morals. These questions would later get a kind of scientific density in the early 1930’s together with the growing importance of psychiatry standing in the field of social speech and of law practice.