What does it mean to arrest a suspected case and send her to the segregated quarter for residence, where any man can assume the right to insult her and demand entrance at her door at any hour? It means that the law takes hold of a woman who may have occasionally done wrong and forces her to do wrong habitually; for after segregation no one will give her honest work. That law is radically wicked which confirms a human being into a habitual breaker of one of God’s ten commandments.
And supposing the girl has not actually done wrong, but has conducted herself imprudently, and brought just suspicion on herself? To put her under the ban of such a law means to create a prostitute by law. That law is radically wrong which can be operated with such deadly effect on society as to actually create evil. Yet everywhere that the C. D. Acts have been operated such cases have occurred. The mayor of a city in South Africa told us that when a proposition for the introduction of these regulations was being entertained by the City Council of that place, and every effort was made to secure his approval, he was one day accosted by an alderman on the street, who plucked him by the sleeve, and pointing out a perfectly respectable-looking woman who was passing by, said, “Now, if we could get our law we could get that woman.” He started back in horror, thinking to himself, “And if he could get his clutches on that woman by such a law, why not on any woman?”
Policemen are not supposed to be infallibly virtuous; and supposing they could be bribed or blackmailed? A policeman in Queensland confessed that he had taken a bribe to deliver a pretty girl over to the power of a libertine by having her registered as a common prostitute, and that he carried out the dastardly crime. A Christian woman in Cape Colony heard of the arrest as a common prostitute of a virtuous girl of her acquaintance, and went to the court to secure her release. There was a keeper of a house of ill-fame whom she recognised, who came to make accusation against the girl. The Christian worker appealed to a policeman, whom she knew as a church-member and a man of good repute, to stand with her for the girl’s defence; but the evil woman took him to one side and she distinctly overheard her threaten to blast his reputation if he interfered. The magistrate took the word of this evil woman, which was corroborated by the falsehoods of the policeman, and in spite of her protestations, the girl was registered.
Another case was told us by a Wesleyan minister’s wife; it occurred in England, before the repeal of the Acts. Her most intimate early friend, a lovely young Christian girl, had a brother who quarrelled with a policeman who threatened revenge. He watched his opportunity, arrested the sister, and gave his oath that she was a common prostitute; she was forced through the examination and registered, and when at last found by her brother, was a raving maniac as a result of the day’s awful experience, and died shortly afterward in a madhouse. We might multiply the instances we have ourselves personally heard on good authority, and relate some of the many cases known to the history of the movement for repeal, but there is no space for further enlargement.
Again we say there is something radically wrong with this law, when women can be so fearfully wronged in its operation, should the police officers and magistrates be either wicked or weak. Practically such a law delivers the reputation of women wholly over to the power of the police. But, some one says, let no case be settled on suspicion; let proof be brought. The question arises, How secure the proof? In India it was considered sufficient by Lord Roberts to teach the soldiers that it was “a point of honour” to save other soldiers from disease by informing against women; but it has frequently been observed that the soldier will usually point out another woman rather than the one he has actually associated with, and women are haled to the examinations who may never have seen the informant before. It detracts nothing from the peril of girls and women when the uncorroborated testimony of a self-confessed libertine can be used against them, and the frequency with which evil men will combine to utterly break down the testimony of a young woman in case of seduction, and the unblushing testimony of these men to their own shameful conduct, which is often treated as a joke by the magistrate, shows that the reputation of a woman is no safer in the hands of a combination of libertines. Nothing is much more difficult than to actually prove a woman a prostitute, and short of absolute proof, the thought of registration, segregation, imprisonment in a Lock Hospital, etc., is intolerable.
Again, a single act of fornication does not prove prostitution, and how many acts shall constitute proof? Practically, these are things that the law never has considered at all; but wherever the compulsory examination has been established, secret information from libertines is received and acted upon with little question as to its veracity, and the whole system has immediately degenerated into a costly effort on the part of the State, paid for by the taxes of respectable people, to pander to the wishes of libertines, and keep the houses of ill-fame filled with attractive and healthy inmates, and thus the State becomes itself the great purveyor of vice. We have said before repeatedly, and say again, that there is no real evidence that prostitution has been made safer by the periodical examination of women, because the false security in vice greatly increases the amount of vice, which is itself the cause of the diseases in question. Not only does correct reason testify to this, but also statistics uphold this statement.
We have now shown that the compulsory examination of women brings into existence, of necessity, every feature of what is commonly called the C. D. Acts; and that, as that compulsory examination is of itself a sin, so every feature of the enactments necessary to carry out that law is at each step liable to fearful abuse, and the system as a whole is ruinous to the morals of any community.