LAWS FOR PROTECTION OF WOMAN
The man that lays his hand upon a woman,
Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch,
Whom ’twere gross flattery to name a coward.
JOHN TOBIN, _The Honeymoon_, Act ii, Sc. 1.
Wherever there has been in the history of the world a community
governed by Law, you will find the Law endeavouring to protect Woman
from the machinations and allurements of Vice.
In the early ages these laws were made to oppose brute force and to
restrain violence. Later on, when civilization and better manners,
in alliance with Law, seemed to have gained some victory over mere
brutishness, there still remained the harder task of overcoming the
subtleties of fraud.
The complete protection of women and young girls from their own
foolishness and the wiles of deceitful men will only be attained in
Utopia, but at all events, in regard to youth, it is good to record
that a far higher standard of moral conduct is now demanded from both
Man and Woman than that which was current a hundred years ago, and
modern public opinion has encouraged the Law to seek wide powers and
enforce stern measures on those who go about seeking to ensnare the
young and ignorant.
In the civil codes of many countries seduction is an offence against
the Law, and no doubt this in itself is a great protection to Woman,
though it may lead to cases of blackmail and other evils. Crime is
often a matter of geography. Under the Indian Penal Code, Section 497,
for instance, we ourselves treat adultery as a crime punishable by
fine and imprisonment for five years; here in Britain adultery is a
non-criminal sin, like covetousness or gluttony, with which the police
have no concern.
It is necessary to understand the outlook of the English Common Law
in the matter of seduction, because it is, I believe, through the
modifications and amendment of that law that better protection for
Woman will be reached.
The Law is not wholly illogical. To constitute a public crime or
private injury in the eye of the Law, there must be something done in
the nature of a trespass, and it must be committed against the will of
the party who is injured. As old Blackstone puts it:
“Our English Law does not entertain quite such sublime ideas of the
honour of either sex as to lay the blame of a mutual fault upon one of
the transgressors only.”
The Law resents the idea of A consenting to a mutual act with B, and
afterwards claiming damages from him in relation to it.
The justice of reform lies in a little matter that Blackstone and the
pundits seem to have overlooked. The mutual act of A and B has not
mutual results, and since A has to bear the burden of her act in body,
mind, and reputation, B might well be asked to come forward with some
contribution from his pocket to lighten the result of a condition of
things for which he is at least equally responsible.
There was very little protection for Woman in the spacious days of
Merrie England. The bashful young maiden of any age above twelve had
absolute liberty to run away and get married to the most approximate
man in the street.
Naturally, it was the rich and well-to-do who suffered under such
a state of the Law, for there were plenty of gay young adventurers
and rascals, like Mr. Jingle, who were only too ready to woo the
unsuspecting heiress over the wall of the school garden.
But the Law soon gets busy to protect the rich, and one of the earliest
statutes passed to put an end to the abduction of heiresses was in the
reign of Henry VII. This was amended and enlarged in the days of Philip
and Mary by what my Lord Coke called “a good and profitable statute”
which strove to hinder maidens and women, children of gentlemen, being
cruelly allured by flattery, trifling gifts and false promises to
contract matrimony with light and unworthy personages.
Note that the crime is abducting a _wealthy_ girl; the offence was
really one against the property rather than the person. But it was a
serious affair; it was a felony punishable by death, and so it remained
until 1820, when it was reduced to a seven years matter.
There are many romantic stories of prosecutions and executions under
these Acts. The interest in them for us to-day is to remember that if
Woman is well-to-do, there is plenty of precedent for her protection
from seduction, and that if it was ever “good and profitable” that a
man should pay for seduction with his life, it might well be reasonable
to consider why he should not be called upon for pecuniary compensation
in every ordinary case.
The statutory history of the Law for protection of women is typically
English. Long before you have finished reading it your ears will weary
of the constant refrain, “Property! Property! Property!”
Peel discovered in 1828 that the crime of abduction extended only to
heiresses of land, and thought it really time that heiresses of wealth
in the public funds should also be protected. To no one does it seem to
have occurred that Woman herself was a form of national property better
worthy of protection than either funds or land.
It was in the reign of good Queen Victoria, the birth era and golden
age of social movement, that the matter of the better protection of
Woman came to the front. A society was formed called the Associate
Institution for Improving and Enforcing the Protection of Women. It
started work in the forties, and I take pride in remembering that its
first secretary was my father, John Humffreys Parry, then a leading
junior at the Bar.
Their work was not sensational. There were no highly-coloured tracts
about the White Slave Traffic, but there was a great deal of study and
publication of the actual legal position that existed, and drafting of
Bills, and bringing them before the Houses of Parliament.
When you remember that this Society brought forward the first Bill for
the Protection of Women and Children in 1844, and that until that date
Parliament had never even discussed the question from a social and
moral point of view, you must acknowledge our social indebtedness to
its labours.
Of course, the original Bill had to be withdrawn and new Bills were
brought forward by the Government, and at last one of these reached
the Statute Book in 1848, when the first step was taken by the English
Law to protect women and children from being lured into evil by fraud
and deceit. Since that day many new criminal laws have been passed
strengthening the hands of the police, and our code in this respect is
not one to be ashamed of.
Doubtless the Law can be strengthened for the protection of young
girls, but it must be done without excitement and after the most
careful discussion of wise men and women cognisant of the facts and
difficulties of the matter and untrammelled by preconceived social and
religious creeds. The test of any amendments of the Law would seem to
be these. Do they strike at the liberty of Woman? Do they treat Man and
Woman with equality? Do they tend to place innocent or foolish persons
at the mercy of the blackmailer?
The average Man in the Street will probably do more good in attacking
the smaller matters which, after all, are at the root of the trouble.
The economic position of Woman is undoubtedly at the bottom of a great
deal of the trouble. With good wages, a better education and a brighter
social life, many girls would never fall into the class of company that
ultimately leads to disaster. The best of good work is done by those
who have time and capacity to run clubs for working girls and keep them
bright, cheerful and free from unnecessary limitations.
The housing question is another matter where the average citizen can
bring his influence to bear, and this is a vital matter in social
morals as it is in nearly all the affairs of life. With bad overcrowded
houses no home life is possible, and the want of home life of necessity
drives the younger generation into the miscellaneous society of the
streets.
The English Sunday with its half empty churches, its absence of all
rational entertainment and amusement bringing about the enforced
idleness of young people without home, club or any centre of decent
social companionship, has a great deal to answer for. Idleness and
opportunity whet Satan’s appetite for mischief, and except for the rich
our Sunday, especially in the big towns, is not so much a day of rest
as a day of idleness.
These are matters where social ideals will have to be reformed before
any change in the law can usefully be made, but it would be easy to
amend our law relating to seduction without upsetting any old world
moral susceptibilities.
As I have already pointed out, a woman has no right of action against
her seducer, but there is a right of action arising out of seduction.
It is the right of the father of the girl to an action for what is
called “loss of service.”
The Law does not give the father any right because he is a father, but
because he is a master, and his daughter is his servant, and he has
lost material service for which he can have money compensation.
Poor Mr. Grinnell, at Gloucester Assizes in 1844, got a verdict of
£200 against his daughter’s seducer, but they brought him up to London
on Appeal, and he found it was of no use to him, for his counsel had
omitted to claim what was not true, that his daughter was his servant,
and they had set out what was true, that he had expended money and
incurred debts in his daughter’s sickness--she was only fourteen, poor
child--and that she had been and still was unable to work and earn
her living. But all this was useless without some proof of “service,”
though little or nothing of service is sufficient to win a verdict.
Indeed, a learned lawyer has said in relation to this very case
that the Law gives a right of action to a rich man whose daughter
occasionally makes his tea, but leaves without redress the poor man
whose child is sent unprotected to earn her bread amongst strangers.
Such is the Gamble of the Law.
The peculiar incompetence and stupidity of the Law is manifest in cases
where a girl is seduced by her own master. Here she is often returned
on her father’s hands, and he has no remedy unless he can prove to the
satisfaction of a jury that the master in giving the girl employment
intended from the first to seduce her. Even then he must also satisfy
the jury that he had in some way or other lost his daughter’s services,
which, if she is a girl going from one place to another, is hard to do.
Looking at the matter dispassionately, what ought to be done?
We are not to-day, I think, much overpowered by the Blackstonian
argument that if A and B do a mutual Act, B should not be made to pay
money to A in compensation for the results of it.
That principle has been knocked on the head by the Workmen’s
Compensation Act. B, the employer, is made to pay A, the workman,
compensation for injuries sustained by him which are in no way due to
B’s wrongdoing. It has been settled that it is public policy to make B
pay.
If we recognize that it is public policy to make a seducer pay
compensation to the woman seduced, if we put seduction of a woman on a
similar legal basis to an accident arising out of and in the course of
the employment of a man, it would be easy to frame a scheme of social
justice dealing sensibly with the matter.
The two objects to be kept in view should be first to provide care and
attention for the woman, and ultimately to place her in work and beyond
temptation of other evil--this point is very important, as, for want
of a second chance, many women go but too easily from bad to worse.
Secondly, the form of action should be so arranged that it could not
be used against a man for the purpose of blackmail.
I should, therefore, abolish the action by the father, and give an
action direct to the girl to be used if she be under twenty-one in
conjunction with her father or other next friend. The action should be
brought in the County Court.
The utmost sum to be recoverable should be £150, and whatever was
recovered should be paid into court and administered for the benefit
of the Woman and the child by the Court. The right to alimony for the
child, now recoverable by affiliation order, should still remain, and a
duty should be cast upon the County Court to collect this money--often
a difficult task--and administer it.
Furthermore, we should adopt a provision which is working well in New
South Wales, where in the interests of the next generation a man who
has made no provision for the expenses of the birth of his child can be
brought before the Court and made to deposit a sum of not more than £20
for preliminary expenses.
In all affiliation cases the provision of a lump sum in Court where
attainable would be a great safeguard to the woman and child.
These perhaps are not heroic measures, but I believe they contain a
practical business proposition worthy of consideration.
The Bishop of Exeter, speaking in 1844 on this subject in the House of
Lords, eloquently declared that “Of all the followers of Satan--of all
the ministers of Satan--there were none so thoroughly satanical as the
seducer,” and then went on to regret that it was impossible to frame
laws to reach him.
For my part, I throw no stones at seducers or any other brother
sinners, but as a practical man I do really believe that a short
Statute on the lines I have indicated would cause the seducer even more
discouragement and annoyance than all the episcopal censures in the
world.