Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (47 page)

Deliverance finally came that summer in the form of a massive publicity stunt known as the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” affair, which was orchestrated around a series of articles in the
Pall Mall Gazette
. The investigation—in which the
Gazette
’s editor, W. T. Stead, purchased a young girl in London and had her drugged and shipped off to France—caused such a popular outcry that Parliament had no choice but to take action. The main players of the “Maiden Tribute” affair were Josephine Butler, Salvation Army leader Catherine Booth, and Stead, who together formed a secret “commission” to investigate and expose London’s trade in young girls. Stead was the right man for the muckraking end of the job: He had been moved to antivice activism by a recent encounter with two girls, aged seven and four, who had been repeatedly raped in fashionable London brothels. Because the girls were so young, English law disregarded any testimony they might have given against their attackers, so the men were safe from prosecution. (The girls were left in a shelter.) Stead then resolved to use his paper to “damn, and damn, and damn!” sexual predators until something was done.

The commission developed a fat dossier on cases of abused girls, but it had nothing conclusive or sensational enough to break the deadlock in Parliament. It decided to stage its own heartrending sex crime and then relentlessly publicize it to stir maximum outrage. Stead became a white slaver himself, and a nasty one at that. Butler introduced Stead to a former procuress, Elizabeth Jarrett, whom he browbeat into finding a suitable thirteen-year-old virgin. Jarrett put the word out on the street, and before long she found little Eliza Armstrong, whose mother was willing to do business. Jarrett paid the mother, and the girl was delivered to a boardinghouse. There, Eliza was chloroformed and inspected by a crooked midwife to confirm that she was a virgin. Jarrett then took the girl to another house, where she was placed alone in a locked room. The door swung open and in walked Stead, disguised with a false moustache and enthusiastically playing the part of a lecherous old man. The drowsy girl cried out in terror, and Jarrett rushed in to “rescue” her. Again, Eliza was inspected for proof of virginity (this time to protect Stead’s own reputation), after which she was transported across the English Channel and delivered to the Paris chapter of the Salvation Army. The story had thus been made.

Neither Jarrett, Eliza, nor the girl’s mother knew they were being used by Stead and the commission, but honest dealing was the last thing on the newspaperman’s mind. He now had the goods to prove how easy it was to abduct, rape, and transport a girl to the Continent for further exploitation. On July 6–8, 1885, he published the three “Maiden Tribute” articles, using his own mistreatment of the girl (dubbed “Lily”) to expose London’s sexual “inferno” in the most shocking terms possible. By the publication of the third installment, riots erupted outside the
Gazette
’s London offices as people struggled to get copies. The paper’s staff had to press desks and cabinets against the doors to keep out the stampede. By the end of the month, and despite the arrests of newsboys for trafficking in obscenity and the refusal of many newsstands to sell the paper, it had become Britain’s journalistic sensation of the century. A later pamphlet version would sell 1.5 million copies.
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The “Maiden Tribute” series was not the only sexual-exploitation story in circulation, but it was the most masterfully stage-managed. Several days before the articles came out, Stead issued a “frank warning” to his readers, especially “all those who are squeamish ... prudish . . . and all those who live in a fool’s paradise of imaginary innocence . . . selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities,” to stay away from his paper. Nothing could have sparked a better buzz. Butler’s many antivice allies were also put on alert. “We want to make all possible use of the wave of indignation which will be aroused,” Butler wrote to her confederates, “so I ask you all to be ready ... I think the public will be greatly roused and we must take advantage of the awakened feeling.” This turned out to be an understatement. The “Maiden Tribute” stories not only “exposed” a cruel dimension of the sex trade, they also attacked English society generally—especially the men whose money and sexual proclivities financed the commerce in young flesh:

London’s lust annually uses up many thousands of women . . . If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to the passions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make. And if we must cast maidens . . . into the jaws of vice, let us at least see to it that they consent to their own immolation, and are not unwilling sacrifices procured by force or fraud.

In column after column of frenzied prose, Stead concocted a number of mistruths. First, his claim that “many thousands of women” were being “killed and done away with” in the white slave trade was untrue, and the abduction of “Lily” was not, as Stead had portrayed it, the result of a cruel mother “indifferent to anything but drink” (the mother later testified in court that she had believed she was providing Eliza with a job in domestic service). Most importantly, nowhere in the “Maiden Tribute” articles did Stead ever mention that it was he who hired a procuress to find the girl, drugged and repeatedly “inspected” Eliza, and terrorized her out of her wits. Rather, he allowed that he “can personally vouch for the accuracy of every fact in the narrative.”

Stead’s fraud was discovered, but not before a stunned Parliament was goaded into action. On July 9, just one day after the stories were published, a bill to raise the age of consent was reintroduced. By July 30, the Salvation Army had delivered a petition to the House of Commons in the form of a 2.5-mile-long scroll bearing three hundred and ninety-three thousand signatures. Lest anyone fail to pay attention, the document was brought to the Commons in a carriage drawn by white horses, accompanied by a fifty-piece brass band and hundreds of Salvation Army officers. In a matter of days, the law changed. Under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, the age of consent was raised to sixteen. A number of penalties for indecent assault were also put into place, and for the first time it became illegal to procure
any
woman, regardless of age, for the purposes of prostitution.

Stead’s crusade and especially his methods earned him no shortage of enemies. Before long he would stand trial under the very abduction laws he had helped to bring about. Eliza Armstrong was still missing when the “Maiden Tribute” articles came out. Her mother soon made the connection between her daughter and the ill-fated “Lily,” and asked local authorities to help find her daughter. The whole scheme unraveled quickly, and Eliza was returned to her parents about two months after her abduction. Stead was quickly transformed from master reformer to public scoundrel, as hostile crowds surged around his home and the courthouse, hanging wax effigies of him from trees. Jeering mobs also hurled abuse at his wife. Stead’s defense—that he had taken Eliza based only on pure motives—was dismissed by the court as irrelevant. He served three months in jail.

The judge who sentenced Stead said he was a “disgrace to journalism” for releasing a deluge of “filth which I fear tainted the minds of the children you were so anxious to protect.” Maybe so, but after the affair died down Stead reemerged as a worldwide hero, especially to antivice reformers in the United States. In the decade following the “Maiden Tribute” scandal, thirty-five U.S. state legislatures raised their age of consent. (California raised its own to sixteen in 1897.) However, the justice handed out in court is very different from that written in the statehouse. Regardless of the new laws on the books, both judges and juries had a hard time accepting that men should be penalized for having sex with girls, especially when they saw signs that the girls either “wanted it” or were looking to make money off a lawsuit.
⁴

BY THE EARLY twentieth century, New York law stated that men who had sex with girls under eighteen should be sentenced to a maximum of ten years’ jail time, regardless of whether the girls had consented. This “zero tolerance” message from the legislature was clear enough, but the courts did not want to let girls off that easily. In 1933, an appellate panel ruled that underage girls could still be found at fault if there was a suspicion that they had wanted the sex to take place. In the case that led to this decision, a fifteen-year-old girl had convinced a jury to award her $3,000 against a bus driver who had raped her while she was a passenger. The higher court threw the case out. To the appellate judges, it was one thing to jail men for taking girls by force, and quite another to “reward” girls for “enticing” men and then suing them. If that was allowed, they said, “we should unwarily put it in the power of the female sex to become seducers in their turn.”
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Translation: All girls are potential “seducers,” and if a man feels he has been enticed, the girl will be made to pay the price.

North Dakota’s courts went even further, holding in 1932 that an underage girl could still be charged with criminal fornication even in cases of statutory rape. The case in question involved a roll in the hay between an underage farm girl and a neighbor boy. The girl became pregnant, but the baby died a week after being born. The girl’s father sued the boy’s father for the costs of the pregnancy and the “lost services” of his daughter while she was laid up. Again, the case was thrown out. According to the North Dakota Supreme Court, “she is guilty of violating the law even though she be under the age of consent . . . It is not possible to regard her as legally innocent.”
⁶
In Depression-era North Dakota, then, one could be a rape victim and a criminal delinquent at the same time.

It was impossible for many to accept that females would not have wanted sex with the men who took them, or at least would not want to profit from it. Back in England, during the same summer of 1885 when Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” articles caused such a fuss, a nine-year-old errand girl testified in court that she had been forcibly raped by a middle-aged man. Using an old courtroom tactic, the defendant’s attorney directed the inquiry away from the man’s actions and toward the little girl’s moral character. The judge threw the case out after the girl admitted in court “that she had been complained of for her forward manners.” The judge observed that the charge “was one of those which might be made with the most terrible facility against men by little girls of unclean imagination.” So much for protecting society’s most vulnerable citizens.

Courts were often no more sympathetic to boys who had been sexually assaulted, especially when class issues were involved. A guilty verdict was certain to damage a respectable man’s reputation, which was seen as a far worse result than the ruin of a common child. In 1870, a wealthy gentleman was accused of indecently assaulting a fifteen-year-old boy, who claimed that the man had plied him with wine, taken sexual liberties, and then paid the boy to keep his mouth shut. For the case to go away, the defendant merely had to ask the court: “Good God, do you intend to take me on the boy’s statement?” Ten years later, a barrister’s clerk (a position of some status then) was charged with sexually assaulting a common boy who lived in a lodging house. After a string of lawyers lined up in court in support of the clerk, the jury found in his favor. Jurors even extended their sympathies to the man in his time of distress.
⁷

AN INDIAN CHALLENGE

The debate over the age of consent roiling England was built on the assumption that underage victims of sexual assault were “daughters of the people”—that is, that they were homegrown and therefore worth protecting. Had the “Lily” of the “Maiden Tribute” articles not been an English lass, the story would never have resonated with the public as it did. There would have been no riots and no inquiries or lawsuits, and the law would have remained unchanged for at least some time.

Neither Stead nor many of the other English sex-law reformers gave a damn about the millions of girls under British rule in India, even the ones taken daily as child brides. Everyone applied different standards where the colonies were concerned. The idea of imposing an age of consent of sixteen on India, in line with England’s new law, never came up. In fact, the age was only raised to twelve (from ten) in 1891, after a furious debate and the well-publicized travails of a “Hindoo lady” named Rukhmabai, who was sued in Bombay for refusing to submit to a marriage forced on her as a child. The trials of this media-savvy woman, and the intense publicity her case received worldwide, showed the difficulties of applying English sexual standards in the colonies. In this case, British support for a low age of consent for Indian girls was tied to its efforts to hold on to its most prized foreign possession.

Rukhmabai, the daughter of an educated Hindu family, had been married off to Dadaji Bhikaji (variously described in the press as “ignorant,” “idle,” a “boor,” and a “coolie”) in 1876, when she was eleven and he nineteen. The marriage was never consummated, and she remained with her stepfather until 1884, when Dadaji demanded that she come to live with him. Bucking thousands of years of tradition, she refused. He then went to the Bombay High Court to get an order forcing her to comply. Dadaji lost the first stage of the case, when the British judge ruled that there was no marriage because there had been no sex, and because his claim for “restitution of conjugal relations” had no root in Hindu law. Dadaji appealed and won; the higher court found that while native law didn’t approve such a suit, it didn’t forbid it either. Rukhmabai was ordered to go to her husband, or to jail for six months. Her stepfather then paid Dadaji two thousand rupees to drop his suit, after which Rukhmabai traveled to England to study medicine and become a physician. She eventually returned to India to head up a women’s dispensary.