Crime -- Great Britain; Criminal anthropology; Punishment -- Great Britain
Apart from the mother, there are districts of the city where girls hear
language and see sights that are not likely to have a good effect on them.
The girl is taught to repress herself more than the boy and is trained
towards secretiveness. The boy is rather given to flaunt his new-found
naughtiness and to be checked for it or to discover of how little account
it is. The girl may nurse it to her harm. It is a mistake to suppose that
because a man or woman never uses objectionable language, or repeats
objectionable stories, they have not left an impression when heard. As a
matter of fact, the female side of any lunatic asylum is generally more
remarkable than the male side for the foulness of the language of the
inmates and the filthiness of their ideas. Among the sane members of the
community the opposite is notoriously the case, but the insane are only
repeating words that have lodged in their mind when they were sane. The
same thing is true of female offenders; they outdo the men in the
profanity and indecency of their language, when they begin.
When as a result of their surroundings young girls take to imitating their
elders in vice they are much more dangerous than boys. Every surgeon in a
great city, if he is connected with the administration of the law, knows
that very young girls are sometimes made the subjects of horrible
assaults; but he also knows that other girls as young incite and provoke
assaults, and that some among them make the most terrible and detailed
charges against men on no foundation whatever but that of their own
imagination excited by what they have seen. When men are guilty of certain
offences under the Criminal Law Amendment Act there can be no defence of
their conduct; they have no excuse for taking advantage of young girls;
but it is sheer folly to ignore the fact that there are girls of school
age in some parts of the city who deliberately importune men. It is
terrible that it should be so, but they are only doing what they see their
elders do and there is no use disregarding the fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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