by Webb, Simon;
Returning now to the question of remaining silent about abuse, we consider the final part of the statement quoted above, that children in the late 1940s ‘did not tell their parents about encounters with “flashers”’. It was precisely this, that children very often did not tell their parents about sexual encounters with adults, which allowed abuse to flourish at that time. It was not only ‘flashers’ that children did not tell their parents about, but also overly-affectionate teachers and swimming coaches with a propensity for touching their bodies. Silence of this kind is pernicious and helps promote the sexual abuse of children. That anybody could grow mistyeyed and nostalgic about such a state of affairs is frankly incredible.
So far we have been looking at older girls, those roughly of secondary school age. Genuinely little girls, those who had not yet undergone puberty, were regarded as strictly off limits, even in the 1960s. A sharp line was generally drawn between the pursuit of the sexy little minx in a school uniform and the molestation of little girls of seven or eight. The one was a little daring; the other, utterly beyond the pale. Nevertheless, the abuse of very young children was also tolerated in the first three decades after the end of the war in a way that most of us find shocking today. Take the case of one of the commonest forms of abuse, then, as now; indecent exposure.
These days, if a man exposes his penis to a child, we take the matter pretty seriously and if it comes to light, then the police are more than likely to become involved. It was not always so. Certainly during the period we are examining, this offence and others leading on from it were often overlooked, even when children reported them. There were several reasons for this, chief of which being that ‘flashing’, or exposing oneself to a child, was not until 2003 classified as a sexual offence. Prosecutions were instead made under two obscure pieces of nineteenth-century legislation. One of these was the 1824 Vagrancy Act and the other the 1847 Town and Police Clauses Act.
These laws were passed not to tackle sexually-motivated exposure of a man’s genitals, but rather the inadvertent sight of them consequent upon urination. Before public lavatories appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, any convenient alley-way or secluded corner was liable to be used, principally by men, to empty their bladders. The idea that a Victorian lady might thus catch a glimpse of a man’s exposed penis was felt to be very shocking and laws were needed to discourage the habit. There are still old signs fixed to the walls of London streets, bearing the legend, ‘Commit No Nuisance’. This was the quaint way of warning men not to urinate in the area.
There were two consequences of this legal situation. The first was that no real statistics are available for the prevalence of this offence: they were buried among convictions for other trifling matters under the two acts, convictions relating to public health, Sunday trading and so on. There is no way of knowing which of the men who appeared in court and were subsequently convicted under the Vagrancy Act had been exposing themselves, unless a newspaper reporter happened to be present in the court. Secondly, and more seriously, the charge against those accused of indecent exposure quoted the law, which was that the man had exposed himself to ‘a female’, it being only women who were thought liable to be affected by such an experience. This meant that there was absolutely nothing to hinder a man showing his penis to small boys if he wished. Only girls were protected against this type of low-level abuse. Nor was this the only problem, as the law stood at that time.
Common sense tells us that the younger the victim of the ‘flasher’, the graver and more reprehensible the offence. What might be laughed off by a young woman of 18 could be a most distressing experience for a girl of six. In the 1950s, this was not at all how the matter was seen. Since the essence of the offence was that a ‘female’ might be shocked or insulted by the sight of a man’s genitals, the question was seriously debated that there might be a lower age limit below which neither insult nor offence could properly be said to exist. After all, it was argued, what possible harm could be done to a girl of two if she glimpsed a man’s penis? The significance of catching a fleeting glance of that part of the body would be quite lost on such a young child. What about a four- or five-year-old? The same grounds could perhaps be advanced for supposing that in such cases too, no real harm was done and the girls concerned would not be in the least shocked.
The law itself, of course, did not distinguish in this way between different ages: it was a question of the judgement made by individual magistrates when cases of this kind were brought before them. The result was that the police too used some discrimination in deciding which cases they could successfully prosecute and others which could be settled with a quiet word to the man reported for ‘flashing’. This was all bound up with the perception of indecent exposure as a relatively trivial, low-level offence which was unlikely to lead to anything worse. There are to this day two schools of thought about this. Some believe that ‘flashers’ are essentially inadequate and harmless individuals who resort to this behaviour because they are too timid to do anything worse. Then again, there are some experts in the field who view indecent exposure as a ‘trigger’ offence, a warning that here is a disturbed person who might commit other and more serious sexual crimes if not deterred.
That indecent exposure can lead to something worse is indisputable. Such a case occurred in 1951 and the consequences were far-reaching: arrests and convictions for the indecent assault of children dropping sharply in the aftermath of what was known as the ‘Clitheroe Case’. For the best part of a decade after the judgement, there was no realistic chance of gaining a conviction for the indecent assault of children, provided always that the children had been cajoled, bribed or otherwise persuaded to engage in sexual activity.
We have already looked at a number of instances of children walking to school alone or ‘playing out’ without the supervision of adults, noting that this often left them unprotected and at hazard from various threats, ranging from traffic accidents to homicidal maniacs. The Clitheroe Case was another of those times when the presence of a parent or other responsible adult might have averted an unpleasant situation and prevented it from developing further. In the middle of May 1951, four little girls, ranging in age from six to nine, were playing by a deserted riverbank in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe. A man appeared and began urinating into the river. This was evidently no more than a pretext for getting out his penis, because he then called over one of the girls, who was nine, and asked her to touch his penis. She did so. By good fortune, she was not afraid to tell somebody what had happened and the man was subsequently arrested and charged with indecently assaulting the child. He appeared at the local magistrates court on 24 May 1951 and the case was dismissed. The police then appealed against this decision and on 17 October 1951, the matter eventually ended up being heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard.
There was no doubt at all about the facts, as they had been presented. The only question to decide was whether or not what had happened to the little girl that May had been an assault. The court ruled that it had not. The three judges sitting that day were unanimous in their belief that an assault must be accompanied by hostile action of one kind or another, whether words, gestures or physical contact. In this case; nothing of the sort had happened. The man had simply asked the girl to touch him and she had done so willingly. The implications of this judgement, Fairclough v Whipp, were profound for children throughout the rest of the 1950s. In effect, the highest court in the land had ruled that molesting children was perfectly legal, as long as you could persuade them to touch you, rather than the other way round.
Modern readers might feel shocked to learn that a ruling like the one above could be made, but the law as it stood made such a decision inevitable. The Clitheroe Case was by no means the worst example of how this legal loophole left the police powerless to act against even the most disgusting offences against children. Consider a case two years later, DPP v Rogers, 1953. An 11-year-old girl was sitting in a downstairs room with her father. He
came over and sat next to her, putting his arm around her shoulders. Then he led her upstairs to his bedroom; where he got her to masturbate him. Today, we find it almost inconceivable that such a course of action would turn out to be quite within the law, as it stood. Nevertheless, the father, although arrested, was acquitted when the case came to court, the precedent in the Fairclough v Whipp case being binding upon lower courts.
Anybody hoping to understand sexual abuse of children during the 1960s and 1970s, whether by famous singers and disc jockeys or merely within a normal family setting, will be quite unable to make sense of what was going on at the time, unless they are aware of the background and legal judgements such as those outlined above. Throughout most of the 1950s, adults were free to abuse children as the mood took them, always providing of course that they did so without violence or threats. The law simply could not touch such awful behaviour. It was not until the passage of the Indecency with Children Act, which came into force on 2 July 1960, that it became possible to prosecute adults for inviting children to touch them indecently. The Indecency with Children Act of 1960 was the first gender-neutral legislation in Britain designed to deal with cases of sexual abuse of children. Up until then, such offences had been strictly demarcated into those against girls and others against boys.
One factor which complicated matters relating to the sexual abuse of underage girls was that the school leaving age in Britain was, until September 1972, set at fifteen. This meant that until the 1970s, there was nothing to stop a girl who was not old enough to consent to any sort of sexual activity getting a job as a cocktail waitress, a dancer or even a striptease artiste! Those seeing what was apparently a desirable young woman in such roles might very well make an erroneous assumption about their age and maturity. A case illustrating this point with great clarity came to light at the beginning of 2016, when it was revealed that a well-known BBC disc jockey had been fired for allegedly being evasive about the circumstances of an investigation into possible sexual impropriety fortyfive years earlier. In 1971, a girl whose name had been linked with that of the disc jockey was found dead of a drug overdose. She had taken her own life at the age of 15. Incredibly, this child had featured a number of times on the television programme Top of the Pops, where she was shown dancing on stage. The camera tended to focus upon her because she was very attractive and looked considerably older than her actual age. The line became very blurred at that time between grown women and children; a circumstance which tended to play into the hands of potential abusers. A few years earlier, another famous disc jockey, John Peel, had actually married a 15-year-old girl in the United States and then brought his bride home to Britain.
So far, we have looked only at the abuse of girls during the baby boomer years. What was the situation with boys at this time? As has been seen, one of the commonest forms of low-level abuse, the crime of indecent exposure, did not even count when carried out against male children. The difficulty about researching statistics and figures for the sexual abuse of boys is that it was enormously widespread and very little of it was recorded. It is impossible to say whether it was more common than the abuse of girls, but it was definitely regarded in a different light. In some settings, schools and scout groups spring to mind, paedophile abuse of boys was, if not accepted, then without doubt expected. The schoolmaster and scout leader with an unhealthy interest in little boys may be stereotypical figures but they are rooted firmly in historical fact. Both existed for many years and were simply a known but regrettable feature of schools and youth groups. Such men, for men they almost invariably were, were regarded as pathetic, but not particularly wicked. Often they were figures of fun, rather than objects of hatred
It seems strange to believe that the systematic abuse of young boys could ever have been thought of in this country as amusing, but it is nevertheless true. The late Arthur Marshall, broadcaster and newspaper columnist, most famous for his appearances on the television programme Call My Bluff, was well known as a humorous writer. In 1974 he published a book called Girls will be Girls, a miscellany of his writings for various magazines and newspapers. Included in the book were sketches of his childhood at a well-known boarding school. These too were written for laughs, with farcical accounts of the tribulations facing a sensitive boy at a school renowned for its sporting prowess. It is the section dealing with paedophilia which causes one to gasp with amazement today. Marshall writes that:
Preparatory schools at that time seemed each to have its quota of unmarried masters who were still waiting for Miss Right . . . Some of them were by nature looking about for Miss Right rather less vigorously than others. Dedicated paedophiles stalked the linoleumcovered corridors and, sensing a non-frosty reception, pounced. No boy who wasn’t actually repellent could consider himself safe from an amorous mauling among the rows of pendent mackintoshes.
This account relates of course to events in Arthur Marshall’s own boyhood, perhaps fifty years earlier, but it is quite extraordinary that he should have been able to write in a book published in the 1970s so lightheartedly about systematic abuse of this kind. The reason was of course that paedophile teachers and scoutmasters were just as common when he was writing in 1974 as they had been during his schooldays in 1924. People knew that they existed and were abusing children on a regular basis. It was just one of those things and if a famous humourist like Arthur Marshall could see the funny side of being abused like that, well then, maybe we should too! This too is indicative of the attitudes to paedophile abuse forty or fifty years ago.
Another fascinating glimpse into the mindset of those days, indicating the widespread acceptance of the sexual abuse of children in the years at which we are looking, was provided a few years ago by the renowned and controversial biologist Richard Dawkins. He revealed that he had been abused by a teacher when he was at school in the 1950s. The language that Dawkins used to describe this awful experience is telling, indicating a similar attitude to that displayed by Arthur Marshall towards the sexual molestation to which he was routinely subjected. Richard Dawkins relates that he was pulled onto the lap of a male teacher, who then pushed his hand inside the boy’s shorts and fondled his genitals. Incredibly, sixty years later, the victim of this abuse refuses to condemn the perpetrator, even now minimizing the action by describing it as ‘mild touching up’.
These two accounts typify the attitude of many people until relatively recently to the abuse of schoolboys by scoutmasters, teachers, youth club leaders and others. It was felt to be, if not normal, then certainly unsurprising. Even the victims often put up with what was being done to them, viewing it perhaps as just another of those tiresome rites of passage which children and adolescents had to endure. Mercifully, this has now changed, but unless one understands the endemic sexual abuse in the decades following the end of the Second World War, then it will be altogether impossible to make sense of the attitude towards their abuse of people like Richard Dawkins. That kind of thing was the subject of jokes, rather than outrage.
To show how some sexually-motivated activity which targeted children was not taken at all seriously, even by the victims, we turn to accounts from the 1970s. Here is Arthur Marshall again, describing a visit to some public lavatories during a school trip to a cricket match:
Our first concern, after the hour’s drive, was to make for the lavatory, an open-air and rather whiffy square construction of brick, conveniently close. As we hastened in, a solitary figure drew all eyes. In a corner, and facing outwards, an aged and decrepit clergyman was standing, smiling encouragement and wildly waggling. At our fairly tender years this was a startling spectacle and one hardly knew where to look. Where not to look was plain to all. Subsequent visits found him, hope on hope ever, still there and at it.
Although this ‘humorous’ account was written in the 1970s about something which took place back in the 1920s, such attitudes were still very strong throughout the formative years of the baby boomers. Lowlevel sexual abuse of this kind was just something which happened to
schoolchildren and there was no point in making a fuss about it.
As we know, exposing one’s penis to little boys in this way was not even against the law when the baby boomers were growing up. Inevitably, this immunity from the law led inexorably to some men going even further, confident in the knowledge that their actions would probably not even be regarded as a criminal offence. From showing their penis to a boy, it was only a short step to masturbating in his presence. A boy sitting alone in a cinema might find a man coming and sitting next to him, who, as soon as the lights went down, would take out his penis and begin playing with himself. Very few boys would have even thought of telling their parents about such a thing in those days.
The 1950s and 1960s were certainly a golden age for those who wished to indulge in the sexual abuse of children. Some of this abuse, exposing oneself to a boy for instance, was not even illegal and for the whole of 1950s it was not even against the law to persuade a little girl to masturbate you. Combined with the legal situation was the fact that most children would not have told any adult about abuse, even when it was of the grossest and most unpleasant kind. Sex was something which was offlimits as a topic of conversation in the average family. After encountering the man who was, we are given to understand from Arthur Marshall’s account, masturbating in front of schoolboys, not one of them reported the matter to a member of staff. As the author went on to say, ‘Instinct told us not to discuss the matter with Matron . . .’ During the first two or three decades following the end of the Second World War, it was quite common for all the pupils in a school to know which of the teachers was a pervert, but for parents and staff to be completely in the dark. Both girls and boys would warn each other of the perils of being alone with this or that PE or music teacher, and yet the information never reached an adult.
When it did became apparent, as happened from time to time, to a school, scout group, church or other organization that one of the adults working for them had an unhealthy interest in children, the chief emotion felt by all parties was embarrassment. Nobody wished to make a distasteful fuss and the commonest mechanism for handling the problem was that of a discrete word being spoken to the person concerned, who then went off quietly, often to join another youth club, athletics association or whatever, where he could then continue his predations against little boys or girls. Until very recently, this was almost invariably regarded as the most satisfactory means of tackling a very unfortunate and awkward situation. It was felt to be in nobody’s interest, least of all the children concerned, to see the matter dragged through the courts. All of which made it very easy and satisfying to pursue a career of child molesting during the years at which we are looking.