The Queen's Daughters in IndiaBushnell, Katharine C. (Katharine Caroline)
History
The Queen's Daughters in India
Bushnell, Katharine C. (Katharine Caroline)
Prostitution -- India; Women -- India -- Conduct of life; Women -- India -- Social conditions
But compulsion cannot be secured without the aid of the police and the
magistrate, and it is most difficult to follow up women, prove their
identity, hale them to examination and to Lock Hospital without being
able to keep them located in one tolerated quarter or house where they
may be found--hence _segregation_ is introduced; and this is also done
to keep women with whom association is supposed to be safe--because
under constant medical and police surveillance--separate from those
with whom it is supposed to be a risk to associate.
Now we discover that the compulsory periodical examination of women
of impure life, when carried out in actual operation, creates a
necessity for all the essential features of every C. D. Act that has
ever been known, namely: _Compulsory examination_; _Registration_;
_Lock Hospitals_; _Fines and Imprisonments_; _Police Surveillance_;
_Segregation_.
Yet another thing is needful for the operation of this law requiring
compulsory periodical examination, namely, measures for extending the
operation of the law, so that, as new women are likely to become a
source of contamination, they also may be brought under its operation,
and for the practical and easy operation of the measure, compelled to
take up their residence in segregated quarters. _This is the special
field of activity in the operation of the law_, and is a deadly menace
to the most ordinary liberties of women. People will loudly advocate
that "something must be done" to confine the houses of ill-fame to
certain quarters of a city, without the slightest care as to how it
is done, so long as they need not become intimately acquainted with a
disagreeable subject; they will advocate measures of the most deadly
consequences to others more defenceless than themselves, and to the
ultimate moral tone of the very society in which they move, and yet
heartlessly refuse to consider the responsibility that rests upon them
for their conduct. "Something must be done," they say, and the police
force must attend to the details; they are too loathsome even to be
considered, yet they refuse to understand that these very loathsome
details which they require the police to work out _must utterly ruin
the character of the police_ into whose hands they have betrayed all
the decent rights of womanhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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