Chapter VIII: 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.