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Powell, "Legal Protection For Young Girls," Jan. 1886
Document 1: Aaron Powell, "Legal Protection For Young Girls,"
Philanthropist, 1 (January 1886), pp. 2-3.
Introduction
Dr. Aaron Macy Powell, an editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, published from
1840 to 1872, enthusiastically embraced the campaign to abolish prostitution and
vice in the 1870s. When the American Committee for the Prevention of Legalizing
Prostitution met in Washington, D.C. in 1877, Powell became a national leader of
the purity movement. He began publishing a journal in 1879, which in 1886
expanded into the Philanthropist, the official American social purity journal
published in New York City. Powell attempted to arouse public concern over the low
age of consent in the following editorial.
LEGAL PROTECTION FOR YOUNG GIRLS
____________________
The true function of government is the protection of the weak
against the strong. Among those most in the need of legal safeguards
are young girls, especially of the poor and dependent, and therefore
greatly exposed class. It is very largely from this class, particularly in
large cities, that the supply is furnished for well-to-do debauchees, who
demand, and are able to pay for, victims of their lust. The daughters of
the wealthy, and those of good and comfortable home environments,
are sometimes, though rarely, ensnared. The children of poverty or
misfortune are the ones chiefly preyed upon.
The time is at hand for a more careful and searching examination
of this subject than it has hitherto received. The moral sense of the
civilized world has greatly shocked a few months ago on being made
aware that until the recent adoption by Parliament of the Criminal Law
Amendment Bill[A], young girls of thirteen in Great Britain were legally
capable of giving "consent" to their own debauchery, and that there
was no legal redress against their despoilers. By the adoption of that
law, the "age of consent" was, under the irresistible pressure of an
aroused, indignant public opinion, raised to sixteen years, though the
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