A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Why? The girl who has introduced the spermicide is the same girl who excited him so frantically a
few minutes earlier. But because she has ceased to resist, she has ‘normalised’ the situation. His
will has been allowed to relax, and this has produced a certain automatic reflex, like a hypnotic
command. He has ceased to be a man with a clear objective; her acceptance has transformed him
once again into ‘ambivalent man’.
We once again confront this basic fact about human beings: that they have a confident sense of
their own identity only when the will is firmly connected to its objective, like a water-skier to a
motor boat. As soon as that connection is broken as the sense of urgency disappears,
‘mechanicalness’ supervenes, and we become victims of doubt and ambivalence.
The connection may also be broken by sheer fatigue. Civilised life is as complicated as juggling a
dozen cups and saucers; in our frantic attempt not to break them, we often drive ourselves to the
point of sheer exhaustion. Crime is an attempt to solve the problem by smashing the cups and
saucers. That is, an attempt to reduce life to simplicity instead of trying to develop the self-control
to cope with its complexity.
There is, of course, a less harmful way of reducing life to simplicity. In imagination, juggling a
dozen cups and saucers becomes as easy as tossing a coin. In the past two thousand years, man has
deliberately developed his imagination as a counterbalance to his tendency to left-brain
obsessiveness. Imagination is a deliberate attempt to allow us to relax by short-circuiting reality. It
offers a unique combination of relaxation and fulfilment. It also serves the important purpose of
restoring our strength and courage. In short, it is an intoxicant. Samuel Richardson and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau discovered that when imagination is combined with sexual desire, the result is
twice as intoxicating. In Fanny Hill, John Cleland carried the process one stage farther, and
distilled a kind of raw alcohol. Victorian prohibition turned this form of bootlegging into a major
industry.
Sooner or later, the ‘imaginary’ sex crime was bound to be translated into reality. This began to
happen towards the middle of the nineteenth century. In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing
mentions that between 1851 and 1875, 22,017 cases of rape came before the courts in France, that
is to say, about nine hundred a year. He also mentions the astonishing fact that three-quarters of
these involved children. It is possible, of course, that sexual offences against children were more
frequently reported than those against adult women; even so, it seems clear that sexual violence in
the nineteenth century was directed more at children than at adults. It was a question of
‘forbiddenness’. In the streets of Victorian London or Paris, women were fairly easily available -
not just prostitutes but (as we can see from My Secret Life} shopgirls, factory girls, maidservants.
So the aura of ‘forbiddenness’ clung to children more than to adults. In the twentieth century,
increased prosperity meant that an increasing number of working-class girls ceased to be sexually
available; so the rape of adults increased.
What seems strange is that, in spite of this increase in the crime of rape, the Victorians were still
slow at recognising the sexual element in crimes involving sadism. On a Saturday afternoon in July
1867, three children were playing in a meadow near the town of Alton, Hampshire, when they were
approached by a young man named Frederick Baker. Baker was known to be subject to depressive
fits, and was the son of a man who had attacks of ‘acute mania’; but he was generally regarded
(according to the Illustrated Police News) as a ‘young man of great respectability’. Baker gave the
children a ha’penny each, and persuaded eight-year-old Fanny Adams to go for a walk. It was two
hours before the children told Fanny’s mother that she had gone off with Baker (whom they knew).