The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘THE SORT OF THING THAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO ANY MAN’
fight to improve pay, conditions of service and powers, and to
increase their numbers continued to be a feminist concern
throughout the 1920s, and 1930s. The early policewomen had
no powers of arrest. The Baird Committee saw their functions
as follows: investigations under the Children’s Act, and Immoral
Traffic Acts, inspection of common lodging houses, supervision
of parks and open spaces, visiting of licensed premises,
prevention of offences by prostitutes and any work in connection
with offences by or against women and children. In connection
with the sexual abuse of children they were to take statements
from children, look after them in the police station, accompany
them to court. They were envisaged as having an active part to
play in the supervision of parks and open spaces to prevent
assaults on children. In the 1920s, feminist journals and women’s
organisations were pressing for special reserves for children in
parks, to which adult men would not be admitted. 27 Another
similar project for which feminists pressed and which they
eventually acquired, was reserved railway carriages for women
and girls with the same object of preventing sexual assault.
Attitudes to the abused child
Much of the contemporary literature on the subject of sexual
abuse of children contains a victimological perspective, which
places responsibility to a greater or lesser extent upon the child
as having participated in, or precipitated the abuse, as acting
seductively or looking seductive. In the period 1880–1930 this
kind of approach, used by some judges and the press, was
strongly criticised by the women reformers. 28 Psychoanalytical
assumptions about the child’s desire for sexual contact with
adults had not as yet affected those concerned with the issue.
The period saw a movement away from the early Victorian
approach of regarding the abused child as ‘fallen’ and in need
of strict reformatory treatment. The campaigners around sexual
abuse saw the child as exploited and in need of sensitive and
sympathetic help. However the traditional male Victorian view
of women and sexuality lingered on and was used by judges,
MPs and the clergy when they wished to excuse the behaviour
of adult male offenders against children. This view was that
women could be divided into good and bad, pure and ‘fallen’,
innocent or guilty according to whether they had had sexual
connection outside marriage. This dichotomy was used to protect
adult men from any responsibility for their sexual use of women
and girls. The women who ‘fell’ were guilty and thereafter
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