The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘THE SORT OF THING THAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO ANY MAN’
The Reverend Thomas G.Cree backed up the Bishop dutifully:
As you, My Lord, said, each of these children is really a
leper. She is a source of the most awful danger to all the
children with whom she is brought into contact. In the few
homes we have for these cases, children have to be watched
carefully night and day. It is never safe to leave them together,
because their minds are so full of evil thoughts that they will
talk about these things and spread them…. Another case I
know of—a school where one child had been criminally
assaulted, no steps were taken to isolate the child and it
spread the complaint in that school to a terrible extent. 33
The women at the conference contradicted these cruel attitudes.
Mrs Nott-Bower said that she and her fellow guardians had not
had to deal with any corruption emanating from children who
had been abused. She seemed to wish to assert some conformity
to the views of the members of the cloth by admitting that
‘corruption’ could be a problem in ‘children who have been the
victims of corrupt practices for months and years’. 34 Mrs Goslett
argued even more strongly against the ‘corruption’ idea:
I would like to plead against calling these children lepers.
They are not lepers. They have been injured; they may even
talk of the injury; but we grown-up people have such a
different outlook from the little child. A little child who has
been hurt sometimes does not even know what has been done
to her, and we dare not class her with the girls who have
participated in the wrong willingly, or at least consciously. 35
Mrs Goslett in the last few words, like Mrs Nott-Bower above,
remains ambivalent. The idea that girls could be corrupting or
‘evil’ clearly contradicted the experience that these women had
had of working with girls. None the less they were unable to
separate themselves completely, despite their brave efforts, from
the prevailing ideology of the church. They clung to the idea
that if the girl was ‘willing’ or had been abused over a long
period, then she could be a source of danger.
The idea that abused children could be a danger to other
children lingers on throughout the period. An AMSH report in
1916 described a detention home into which the victims of sexual
assault were placed, ‘but the supervision appeared to be very
inadequate. Child victims of criminal assault are sent here
pending trial, and mix freely with the other children, who thereby
run the risk of contamination.’ 36 In 1925 the report of the
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