The problem of dealing with the prevention of immorality has been
a big one. The Women Patrols and the Women Police have been used in
London in Waterloo Road (which had a bad reputation) and in parks,
etc. The G.R. Volunteer Corps of men who meet the soldier arriving in
London at the stations do a very good work.
In the Army and Navy excellent leaflets and booklets were issued
dealing with the question in a very straightforward and admirable way.
The Council for Moral and Social Hygiene and the National Council for
Combating Venereal Diseases has been doing a great work. The latter,
which is a body set up as a result of the Government Commission on
Venereal Diseases, had done a great deal of educational work and has
set up an organization over the country. The Commission recommended
much fuller facilities for free treatment for those suffering from
these diseases in every town and district.
A Criminal Law Amendment Bill has been brought in and it improves
our existing law in many ways and strengthens it. There has been much
controversy about certain of its provisions, some dealing with power
to send young girls to homes. There is a very strong feeling among
many of our social workers that Rescue Work in our country altogether
needs overhauling and change, and new experiments are being tried.
Wars have almost invariably in the past meant an enormous increase in
venereal diseases on the return of the army in the civil population.
Armies lose large numbers of men by them, and every person must feel
it is their plain duty to leave no means untried and no measures
unused that could help.
The woman who lives by her immoral earnings is, like the man who is
immoral and uncontrolled, a serious danger and menace to her country
and to generations yet unborn.
The problems that arise from the existence of these two groups are
the business of all men and women. The problems are those of providing
decent and wholesome recreation and surroundings, of helping men and
women to meet under right conditions, of giving the right kind of
information and guidance to the soldier and the girl, of realizing
what drink does in this traffic, and the fundamental task of working
to create better social, economic and moral conditions.
There is no need nor is it desirable to have masses of people
suffer unnecessary misery by a knowledge of the exact nature of this
disease--which leads sometimes to morbidity and often to a frenzied
desire to do something at once, before they really know anything about
the question and what has been done.
There are three questions that ought to be answered in the affirmative
before any legislation or preventive treatment is decided on.
Will the proposed action apply equally to men and to women, to rich
and to poor?
Will it tend to increase and not undermine the powers of self-control?
Will it improve morals in the nation and elevate them?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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