Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders / Report of the Committee of Inquiry Appointed by the Hon. Sir Maui Pomare, K.B.E., C.M.G., Minister of Health

by New Zealand. Committee of Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders

Section 2.—Seriousness of the Evil.

That the order for an inquiry into this question was by no means premature was made apparent to the Committee by the presentation at its first sitting of a return furnished by the Prisons Department, which appears in the Appendix to this report, page 30, showing the number of sexual offenders of the various classes who were actually serving sentences on the 10th May, 1924. The total number of the sexual offenders in the prisons of the Dominion on that date was 185. This number represented 17.273 per cent. of all the prisoners then in custody. Unfortunately, this percentage has since been increased by recent commitments of cases of the most serious types.

A return compiled by the Government Statistician (Mr. Malcolm Fraser) shows that during the five years, 1919-1923, there were 331 persons sentenced in the Supreme Court for sexual offences as follows: Rape, 5; attempted rape, 19; indecent assault on a female, 150; indecent assault on a male, 50; unlawful carnal knowledge, 49; attempted unlawful carnal knowledge, 18; incest, 17; unnatural offence, 23: total, 331.