The age of consent - a warning from history - The work of Josephine Butler

The Christian faith of Josephine Butler led her into a sustained struggle on moral issues in the public arena. By the end of her life in 1906 she had helped achieve a sea change in legal protection for vulnerable young people and women, demonstrating the transforming power of consistent campaigning.

Josephine keenly felt the dilemma of how a good God could allow the depth of suffering that she saw outside her own privileged class. The dilemma turned into a crisis when her beloved daughter, Eva, fell from a banister at the top of the hall stairs on to the stone floor. She died shortly afterwards.

Trust in his unfailing love

A devastated Josephine went through a long drought of the soul. She recorded that she eventually came, by degrees and by the mercy of God, into a ‘firmer trust in his unfailing love’.

Josephine now prayed that she could help ‘people more unhappy than myself’. She visited the local workhouse and soon she and her husband were welcoming some of the most deprived women into their home. Before long the Butlers were providing a refuge for up to 13 women at a time.

One of the women was Mary, a former prostitute who was dying of consumption. She told Josephine’s husband that she now knew what Jesus was like. When asked how this could be, she replied that it was because the Butlers had treated her as if she were their own daughter, as if she had done nothing wrong; truly she had seen Jesus.

From carer to campaigner

From being a compassionate carer, Josephine became a robust campaigner. She saw that many women caught in prostitution had been dragged down by public policy, which tolerated and regulated vice. She felt deep anger about the Contagious Diseases Act, passed in 1864, which was intended to provide a ‘clean supply’ of hygienic prostitutes for men to use. The Act punished women who were used by men, but left men unpunished.

She was also appalled that adults could sexually exploit young girls from as young as 13 years of age. The word of the adult was always given more weight than the word of the child, so the child had little hope of justice in court.

In 1870, when Josephine was in her early 40s, she became leader of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. This soon turned into a highly effective campaigning organisation focused exclusively on a small number of moral issues.

Variety of tactics

Josephine used a wide range of campaigning tactics, many of them novel for the time. Her organisation summarised and publicised key arguments, distributed a weekly newsletter, held hundreds of public meetings, wrote pamphlets and handbills, presented petitions, and organised a national day of fasting and prayer. Josephine also successfully used the tactic of putting up single-issue candidates in parliamentary by-elections.

Josephine’s meetings would sometimes attract fierce opposition, whipped up by those who stood to lose their ‘craft’ of procuring girls and supplying young prostitutes. At one meeting opponents scattered cayenne pepper on the floor so that it became difficult to speak. There was sometimes violence and Josephine had, on occasion, to be whisked away from mobs that would gladly have caused her great harm.

Some Christians also opposed Josephine’s campaigns. They thought that the issues were simply too sordid for ‘respectable’ people to debate or even mention. But Josephine believed that her campaign was a way to love her neighbour as herself and she persevered, year after discouraging year.

Age of consent raised

After 11 years Josephine finally saw some fruit in her campaign to raise the age of consent. A House of Lords committee was set up to look into the sexual exploitation of young girls. One expert witness told the committee that juvenile prostitution prevailed in ‘no city in Europe to so large an extent’ as it did in London, and, crucially, said that this was because ‘there is no provision in the law for the protection of girls over 13 unless they are abducted’.

The House of Lords committee recommended that the age of consent should be raised to 16. A proposal to that effect was included in a Criminal Law Amendment Bill. But when the Bill reached the House of Commons it was shelved. MPs just didn’t seem to care.

Josephine did not give up. She joined forces with William Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, and with Bramwell and Florence Booth of the Salvation Army. Together they formed a ‘Secret Commission’ to develop a media campaign that would pile pressure on the authorities.

Horrifying the public

Stead decided to horrify the public with proof that a young girl really could be procured, sold on and taken abroad to enforced prostitution. He arranged for the purchase of a 13-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, for £1 from her mother who lived in a slum with her five other children. The mother promptly spent the money on drink. A further £4 was paid to a go-between who had acted as the procurer.

Eliza was smuggled to Paris, unharmed, and Stead had his proof that under British law a 13-year-old girl could be procured and trafficked to the Continent for just £5. A dramatised account of the event was printed in Stead’s Gazette. The story was so popular that copies were being sold for 12 times their cover price, and the revelations led to demonstrations across the country.

By ‘chance’

The public campaign was given another lift by the case of a notorious high-class brothel keeper called Mrs. Jeffries. By chance, a letter addressed to her was mis-delivered to another Mrs. Jeffries who lived nearby. The letter revealed that the King of Belgium was sourcing young British virgins — later estimated at a rate of 100 girls a year. It was an extreme example of a deeply disturbing ‘white slave trade’.

Shift of opinion

The mainstream press, formerly hostile to Josephine, was now starting to take her side. The shift in opinion had earlier been revealed in the suspension of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1883, which led to the end of state regulation of prostitution and outlawed former tolerance zones.

Stead maintained momentum on the age of consent by printing further evidence, including a conversation with an MP who offered to supply virgins at £25 each, telling him, ‘It is nonsense to say it is rape; it is merely the delivery as per contract of her asset virginity in return for cash down’.

In 1885 the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was resurrected with a proposed age of consent of 16. It also proposed to make it a criminal offence to procure girls for prostitution by threats, fraud or administering drugs. Householders were to be punished for permitting under age sex on their premises and courts were to gain the power to remove an under age girl from her legal guardians if they condoned her seduction.

As the Bill came before the House of Commons, Josephine commented: ‘I never saw anything like the excitement in the streets and in the House of Commons… How wonderfully the protection of girls Bill passed last night on top of this wave of popular anger!’

The Bill passed successfully into law and, by raising the age of consent to 16, transformed the legal landscape. It is relatively easy to convict adults who force themselves on children if the question is simply: was the child below 16 or not? It is vastly harder to convict if the question is about the level of consent, especially if the adults have been grooming the children or still have power over them.

Josephine was also an influential campaigner in Europe. Christians and many others caught the vision for protecting young people from older adults against whom they had little power or opportunity to say no. A number of countries touched by the campaign have ages of consent of around 16, whereas others kept to the lower ages common in previous centuries. For example until 1999 Spain’s age of consent was just 12.

Josephine’s hard-won victory, the result of the activism that was illuminated by her Christian faith, has shaped society’s long-held view that sexual activity is not for children.

Relevant today

But today there are again voices that speak for watering down the law. Peter Tatchell, a homosexual campaigner, has repeatedly called for the age of consent to be lowered. In 2008 the Scottish Government proposed to legalise oral sex and certain other types of sexual activity for children aged 13 and up, though they later backed down. Christians need to remain vigilant.

This article is a precis of the Christian Institute’s booklet The age of consent: a warning from history — the work of Josephine Butler.

You can read more about Josephine Butler in the booklet, which is available as a free download from http://www.christian.org.uk. Simply type ‘The age of consent: a warning from history’ into the search box at the top of the web page.

The age of consent - a warning from history

The work of Josephine Butler