The sexual abuse of children was legal in Britain, well within living memory, which led people to tolerate it with equanimity
The abuse of children was regarded by many people until the 1980s as not being an especially serious matter. Much of it was not even illegal until the turn of the millennium.
Few crimes are regarded with such disapproval in modern Britain as the sexual
abuse of children. Yet until a few decades ago, this was a subject which was not
taken all that seriously, even by the victims themselves. It was especially the case
with boys. Indeed, much of the abuse carried out against children during the
twentieth century was not even against the law. Two instances of this will make the
matter clear.
These days, if a man exposes his penis to a child, we take the matter
pretty seriously and if it comes to light, then the police are more than likely
to become involved. It was not always so. Certainly during the 1950s, 1960s and even
the 1970s, this offence and others leading on from it were often
overlooked, even when children reported them. There were several reasons
for this, chief of which being that ‘flashing’, or exposing oneself to a child,
was not until 2003 classified as a sexual offence. Prosecutions were
instead made under two obscure pieces of nineteenth-century legislation.
One of these was the 1824 Vagrancy Act and the other the 1847 Town and
Police Clauses Act.
These laws were passed not to tackle sexually-motivated exposure of a
man’s genitals, but rather the inadvertent sight of them consequent upon
urination. Before public lavatories appeared in the middle of the nineteenth
century, any convenient alley-way or secluded corner was liable to be
used, principally by men, to empty their bladders. The idea that a Victorian
lady might thus catch a glimpse of a man’s exposed penis was felt to be
very shocking and laws were needed to discourage the habit. There are
still old signs fixed to the walls of London streets, bearing the legend,
‘Commit No Nuisance’. This was the quaint way of warning men not to
urinate in the area.
There were two consequences of this legal situation. The first was that
no real statistics are available for the prevalence of this offence: they were
buried among convictions for other trifling matters under the two acts, along with
convictions relating to public health, Sunday trading and so on. There is
no way of knowing which of the men who appeared in court and were
subsequently convicted under the Vagrancy Act had been exposing
themselves, unless a newspaper reporter happened to be present in the
court. Secondly, and more seriously, the charge against those accused of
indecent exposure quoted the law, which was that the man had exposed
himself to ‘a female’, it being only women who were thought liable to be
affected by such an experience. This meant that there was absolutely
nothing to hinder a man showing his penis to small boys if he wished.
Only girls were protected against this type of low-level abuse. Nor was
this the only problem, as the law stood at that time.
Common sense tells us that the younger the victim of the ‘flasher’, the
graver and more reprehensible the offence. What might be laughed off by
a young woman of 18 could be a most distressing experience for a girl of
six. In the 1950s, this was not at all how the matter was seen. Since the
essence of the offence was that a ‘female’ might be shocked or insulted
by the sight of a man’s genitals, the question was seriously debated that
there might be a lower age limit below which neither insult nor offence
could properly be said to exist. After all, it was argued, what possible harm
could be done to a girl of two if she glimpsed a man’s penis? The
significance of catching a fleeting glance of that part of the body would
be quite lost on such a young child. What about a four- or five-year-old?
The same grounds could perhaps be advanced for supposing that in such
cases too, no real harm was done and the girls concerned would not be in
the least shocked.
The law itself, of course, did not distinguish in this way between
different ages: it was a question of the judgement made by individual
magistrates when cases of this kind were brought before them. The result
was that the police too used some discrimination in deciding which cases
they could successfully prosecute and others which could be settled with
a quiet word to the man reported for ‘flashing’. This was all bound up
with the perception of indecent exposure as a relatively trivial, low-level
offence which was unlikely to lead to anything worse. There are to this
day two schools of thought about this. Some believe that ‘flashers’ are
essentially inadequate and harmless individuals who resort to this
behaviour because they are too timid to do anything worse. Then again,
there are some experts in the field who view indecent exposure as a
‘trigger’ offence, a warning that here is a disturbed person who might
commit other and more serious sexual crimes if not deterred.
That indecent exposure can lead to something worse is indisputable.
Such a case occurred in 1951 and the consequences were far-reaching:
arrests and convictions for the indecent assault of children dropping
sharply in the aftermath of what became known as the ‘Clitheroe Case’. For
the best part of a decade after the judgement, there was no realistic chance
of gaining a conviction for the indecent assault of children, provided always that the
children had been cajoled, bribed or otherwise persuaded
to engage in sexual activity.
In the middle of May 1951, four little girls, ranging in age from six to nine, were
playing by a deserted riverbank in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe. A man
appeared and began urinating into the river. This was evidently no more than a
pretext for getting out his penis, because he then called over one of the girls, who
was nine, and asked her to touch his penis. She did so. By good fortune, she was not
afraid to tell somebody what had happened and the man was subsequently arrested
and charged with indecently assaulting the child. He appeared at the local
magistrates court on 24 May 1951 and the case was dismissed. The police then
appealed against this decision and on 17 October 1951, the matter eventually ended
up being heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard.
There was no doubt at all about the facts, as they had been presented.
The only question to decide was whether or not what had happened to the
little girl that May had been an assault. The court ruled that it had not. The
three judges sitting that day were unanimous in their belief that an assault
must be accompanied by hostile action of one kind or another, whether
words, gestures or physical contact. In this case; nothing of the sort had
happened. The man had simply asked the girl to touch him and she had
done so willingly. The implications of this judgement, Fairclough v
Whipp, were profound for children throughout the rest of the 1950s. In
effect, the highest court in the land had ruled that molesting children was
perfectly legal, as long as you could persuade them to touch you, rather
than the other way round.
Modern readers might feel shocked to learn that a ruling like the one
above could be made, but the law as it stood made such a decision
inevitable. The Clitheroe Case was by no means the worst example of how
this legal loophole left the police powerless to act against even the most disgusting
offences against children. Consider a case two years later, DPP
v Rogers, 1953. An 11-year-old girl was sitting in a downstairs room with
her father. He came over and sat next to her, putting his arm around her
shoulders. Then he led her upstairs to his bedroom; where he got her to
masturbate him. Today, we find it almost inconceivable that such a course
of action would turn out to be quite within the law, as it stood.
Nevertheless, the father, although arrested, was acquitted when the case
came to court, the precedent in the Fairclough v Whipp case being binding
upon lower courts.
Anybody hoping to understand sexual abuse of children during the
1960s and 1970s, whether by famous singers and disc jockeys or merely
within a normal family setting, will be quite unable to make sense of what
was going on at the time, unless they are aware of the background and
legal judgements such as those outlined above. Throughout the whole of the
1950s, adults were free to abuse children as the mood took them, always
providing of course that they did so without violence or threats. The law
simply could not touch such awful behaviour. It was not until the passage
of the Indecency with Children Act, which came into force on 2 July 1960,
that it became possible to prosecute adults for inviting children to touch
them indecently. The Indecency with Children Act of 1960 was the first
gender-neutral legislation in Britain designed to deal with cases of sexual
abuse of children. Up until then, such offences had been strictly
demarcated into those against girls and others against boys.
As has been seen, one of the commonest forms of low-level abuse, the crime of
indecent exposure, did not even count when carried out against male children. The
difficulty about researching statistics and figures for the sexual abuse of boys is that
it was enormously widespread and very little of it was recorded. It is impossible to
say whether it was more common than the
abuse of girls, but it was definitely regarded in a different light. In some
settings, schools and scout groups spring to mind, paedophile abuse of
boys was, if not accepted, then without doubt expected. The schoolmaster
and scout leader with an unhealthy interest in little boys may be
stereotypical figures but they are rooted firmly in historical fact. Both
existed for many years and were simply a known but regrettable feature
of schools and youth groups. Such men, for men they almost invariably
were, were regarded as pathetic, but not particularly wicked. Often they
were figures of fun, rather than objects of hatred
It seems strange to believe that the systematic abuse of young boys
could ever have been thought of in this country as amusing, but it is
nevertheless true. The late Arthur Marshall, broadcaster and newspaper
columnist, most famous for his appearances on the television programme
Call My Bluff, was well known as a humorous writer. In 1974 he published
a book called Girls will be Girls, a miscellany of his writings for various
magazines and newspapers. Included in the book were sketches of his
childhood at a well-known boarding school. These too were written for
laughs, with farcical accounts of the tribulations facing a sensitive boy at
a school renowned for its sporting prowess. It is here that he writes that:
Preparatory schools at that time seemed each to have its quota of
unmarried masters who were still waiting for Miss Right . . . Some
of them were by nature looking about for Miss Right rather less
vigorously than others. Dedicated paedophiles stalked the linoleumcovered
corridors and, sensing a non-frosty reception, pounced. No
boy who wasn’t actually repellent could consider himself safe from
an amorous mauling among the rows of pendent mackintoshes.
This account relates of course to events in Arthur Marshall’s own
boyhood, perhaps fifty years earlier, but it is quite extraordinary that he
should have been able to write in a book published in the 1970s so lightheartedly
about systematic abuse of this kind. The reason was of course
that paedophile teachers and scoutmasters were just as common when he
was writing in 1974 as they had been during his schooldays in 1924.
People knew that they existed and were abusing children on a regular
basis. It was just one of those things and if a famous humourist like Arthur
Marshall could see the funny side of being abused like that, well then,
maybe we should too! This too is indicative of the attitudes to paedophile
abuse forty or fifty years ago.
Another fascinating glimpse into the mindset of those days, indicating
the widespread acceptance of the sexual abuse of children in the years at
which we are looking, was provided a few years ago by the renowned and
controversial biologist Richard Dawkins. He revealed that he had been
abused by a teacher when he was at school in the 1950s. The language
that Dawkins used to describe this awful experience is telling, indicating
a similar attitude to that displayed by Arthur Marshall towards the sexual
molestation to which he was routinely subjected. Richard Dawkins relates
that he was pulled onto the lap of a male teacher, who then pushed his
hand inside the boy’s shorts and fondled his genitals. Incredibly, sixty
years later, the victim of this abuse refuses to condemn the perpetrator,
even now minimizing the action by describing it as ‘mild touching up’.
These two accounts typify the attitude of many people until relatively
recently to the abuse of schoolboys by scoutmasters, teachers, youth club
leaders and others. It was felt to be, if not normal, then certainly unsurprising. Even
the victims often put up with what was being done to
them, viewing it perhaps as just another of those tiresome rites of passage
which children and adolescents had to endure. Mercifully, this has now
changed, but unless one understands the endemic sexual abuse in the
decades following the end of the Second World War, then it will be
altogether impossible to make sense of the attitude towards their abuse of
people like Richard Dawkins. That kind of thing was the subject of jokes,
rather than outrage.
To show how some sexually-motivated activity which targeted children
was not taken at all seriously, even by the victims, we turn to accounts
from the 1970s. Here is Arthur Marshall again, describing a visit to some
public lavatories during a school trip to a cricket match:
Our first concern, after the hour’s drive, was to make for the lavatory,
an open-air and rather whiffy square construction of brick,
conveniently close. As we hastened in, a solitary figure drew all eyes.
In a corner, and facing outwards, an aged and decrepit clergyman was
standing, smiling encouragement and wildly waggling. At our fairly
tender years this was a startling spectacle and one hardly knew where
to look. Where not to look was plain to all. Subsequent visits found
him, hope on hope ever, still there and at it.
Although this ‘humorous’ account was written in the 1970s about
something which took place back in the 1920s, such attitudes were still
very strong throughout the formative years of the baby boomers. Low-level
sexual abuse of this kind was just something which happened to
schoolchildren and there was no point in making a fuss about it.
As we know, exposing one’s penis to little boys in this way was not
even against the law when the baby boomers were growing up. Inevitably,
this immunity from the law led inexorably to some men going even
further, confident in the knowledge that their actions would probably not
even be regarded as a criminal offence. From showing their penis to a boy,
it was only a short step to masturbating in his presence. A boy sitting alone
in a cinema might find a man coming and sitting next to him, who, as soon
as the lights went down, would take out his penis and begin playing with
himself. Very few boys would have even thought of telling their parents
about such a thing in those days. There would, in any case, have been little point,
because it was simply not against the law at that time.
The fact that so much of the abuse being inflicted on children was within the law
caused many people to adopt a somewhat more relaxed attitude towards it than is
perhaps common today. This accounts for the way in which people like Richard
Dawkins dismiss it as being trivial, a perspective shared by many older people who
grew up in the times at which we have been looking.
The irony is that nowadays the pendulum has swung so far the other way that people take children seriously when they ought not to, i.e. transgenderism
Sadly, any man will today scrupulously avoid having anything to do with any child lest an accusatory finger be pointed. Last week, I passed a small girl crying whilst out on my bike. I blush with shame to confess that I rode past without stopping to enquire about the cause of her distress.