The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘THE SORT OF THING THAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO ANY MAN’
Concern about the sexual abuse of children rose from the cam
paign for the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts of the
1860s. The raising of the age of consent for sexual intercourse
to 16 years in 1885 resulted directly from revelations about
juvenile prostitution and the sexual exploitation of young girls.
The 1885 Act which raised the age of consent to 16 for sexual
intercourse, leaving it at 13 for indecent assault, was passed
after a House of Lords select committee reported in 1882 on the
law relating to the protection of young girls. The report stated
that juvenile prostitution was ‘increasing to an appalling extent’. 3
One witness in the report spoke of the effect that the increasing
demand for young girls was having—women prostitutes in the
West End of London now had to dress as little girls to get any
custom. 4 The 1885 legislation was spurred on by the exposure
by W.T.Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, of the white
slave traffic, based upon the fact that he easily purchased a 13-
year-old girl from her mother for the purpose of prostitution.
After 1885 feminists campaigned to close loopholes in the Act
and to gain further legislation on sexual abuse. Before we look
at details of the campaign for legislation we will look at the
wider campaign of which the demand for legislation was just
one part.
The male bias of the justice system
There was a massive effort to arouse public opinion to the male
bias of the male justice system, symbolised by the title quote
for this chapter, This is the sort of thing that might happen to
any man’, taken from a judge’s summing up of a sexual abuse
trial which caused feminist indignation in 1925. Feminists
complained that the offence of sexual abuse was not treated as
if it was at all serious and that sentences were completely
inadequate in comparison with the sentences given for sexual
abuse of boys, and minor offences against property. The leniency
of sentences and the clear bias of the male judges were backed
up by the covering up of offences by the police and the
connivance of men of influence in concealing offences.
At a 1914 conference on child assault, a Mrs Crosfield spoke
of the difficulties of gaining recognition from the authorities of
the seriousness of sexual abuse of girls: ‘When we as women
tried to meet it [the evil] we found that one of our chief obstacles
lay in the difficulty of convincing the clergy and even the
magistrates of the magnitude of the danger.’ 5 The handling of
cases by the judges and the remarks they made in summing up
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