LENOCINIO. – It is an intermediary activity serving another’s lust with a view to one’s own gain.
In doctrine, the notion of lenocinium as a crime is variously defined. Some find the reason for its punishability in the incitement to corruption and prostitution made with a profit motive; hence the need to repress it not so much on account of the harm and injury to modesty as because of the subjective dangerousness of the offender.
Carrara defines the protection afforded against lenocinium as safeguarding minors against the snares of corruption, and this not with regard to venality or habitual commission of the act, but in consideration of the necessity to defend the individual modesty of minors; thus not to protect public morals and the correlative right of society.
Liszt grounds the foundation of punishment in social interest, since it is necessary that sexual life be contained within certain limits for the defence of family order and the psycho-physical health of rising generations.
Manzini determines the object of penal protection, with respect to procuring offences, in the interest of the State aimed at guaranteeing the juridical goods of public morality and decency, insofar as these pertain to public modesty and sexual honour, against every form of parasitism of corruption, whether this consist in lenocinium in the proper sense or in the exploitation of prostitutes or in the so-called trafficking in women and minors.
One may therefore conclude that the figure of lenocinium, as a crime, subsists when, given the particular conditions arising from inexperience or weakness of character in which the passive subject finds himself or because of the particular nature of the means used, the act appears as injurious to public and private interests.
Already repressed in Roman law, lenocinium was punished, in the decrees of Paul IV and Sixtus V, with the death penalty; but practice mitigated the penalty, reducing it to exile or flogging. The Carolina criminal constitution punishes the pimp with relegation, the punishment of the pillory, the cutting off of the ears and other penalties.
The current Italian Penal Code regulates the matter of lenocinium in articles 531–540 and 544. The cases envisaged are: non-violent lenocinium of minors or of the deficient; non-violent familial lenocinium of a normal adult woman; violent lenocinium; exploitation of prostitutes; non-violent or fraudulent trafficking in women and minors; violent or fraudulent trafficking in women and minors.
The CIC also envisages the crime of lenocinium, but in the infliction of penalties it distinguishes the case in which it is perpetrated by lay persons or by clerics not in sacred orders or by clerics in sacred orders.
Canon 2357 §1, indeed, provides that lay persons condemned for lenocinium are ipso facto infamous, in addition to any other penalties (ferendae sententiae) which the Ordinary may deem to inflict.
Canon 2358, instead, concerns clerics in minor orders, to whom the obligation of celibacy has not yet been imposed. By force of this canon, they, in the case of any delict against chastity, besides the ferendae sententiae penalties in which they may have incurred, as lay persons, for the delicts contemplated by the preceding canon 2357, must be punished by the superior in proportion to the fault and even, if necessary, with dismissal from the clerical state, a dismissal which is a true and proper expulsion, to be carried out by a condemnatory sentence. The reason for such severity lies both in the demonstrated unsuitability, given the kind of crime committed, to assume with decorum the burden and office of sacred orders, and also in the particular holiness of life required by their state.
The severity is further accentuated when one considers canon 2359 §2, which envisages the delict of lenocinium committed by clerics in sacred orders, namely subdeacons, deacons and priests, whether secular or religious.
These, indeed, must be punished by suspension, juridical infamy, deprivation of office, of benefice and of any charge they may have in the Church, and in more serious cases, deposition. All these penalties are ferendae sententiae, to be inflicted by a condemnatory sentence.