4. The governess Friederike B. was accused of improper conduct and seduction of the little boy Szepsan, and was condemned to six months’ rigorous imprisonment. In April, 1900, Szepsan disappeared through her connivance; she had him confined under false names in various cloisters. The accused denied all blame, and declared that she was the benefactress of Szepsan, whom she intended to bring up as a priest. The evidence, however, sufficed for her conviction.
5. A very scandalous affair is reported by Le Matin. Some time ago the Parisian police arrested a young fellow on account of an offence against certain civil and natural laws. The accused thereupon denounced an old Count W., and others of his friends, and also Baron A., who daily waited the coming out of the boys from certain Parisian schools, and then took them in his automobile to his own house or to that of Count W. The police, having received information, kept under observation the sons of certain distinguished families attending the school in question, and ascertained that the statements were true. The Count and his friends carried off the boys, among whom were three sons of an engineer, the eldest thirteen years of age, to the Avenue MacMahon or the Avenue Friedland. A., who is engaged to a young lady belonging to the Parisian aristocracy, was arrested; Count W. has escaped. The examination of their dwelling disclosed all kinds of compromising materials.
In view of the wide diffusion of acts of fornication with children, we must always keep one point clearly before our minds, on account of the great forensic importance of the matter. That is the question whether the initiative to the improper act proceeded in the first place from the child, in consequence of a premature awakening of the sexual impulse. [See, for example, Emil Schultze-Malkowsky, “The Sexual Impulse in Childhood,” in the periodical Sex and Society, 1907, No. 7, pp. 370-373. He reports five sexual scenes dating from the year 1864, the heroine of which was a little girl seven years of age!]
In a certain proportion only of such cases have we to do with a degenerative, morbid, inherited state; in many instances this sexual perversity occurs in children who in other respects are perfectly healthy,[643] and is evoked by seduction, bad education, and chance causes, such as intestinal worms, etc. This is to be observed also in children of savage races, among whom this phenomenon of sexual prematurity is perhaps more frequent, in part owing to climatic conditions. In the country the observation of sexual acts on the part of animals, frequently occurring under their very eyes, makes children early acquainted with the fact of sexual intercourse. In large towns prostitution and overcrowded dwellings, in ways to which we have already alluded in detail, give rise in many cases to a very early initiation of children into a knowledge of the facts of sexual life.
Apart from the question of child prostitution, to which we shall allude presently, we can observe such early mature types of children also in every class of the population of large towns. Among the circles of the middle classes, and among the “upper ten thousand,” we have the type of the demi-vierge, which recently Hans von Kahlenberg has so admirably described in his “Nixchen.” In the female sex this early sexual maturity is much more clearly manifest. In an essay entitled “The Zoo as an Educator,” in the weekly newspaper Der Roland von Berlin (No. 27, July 5, 1906), we find a striking description of such a type:
“We find definite types of early-ripe girls, which we must regard as a peculiar acquirement of the twentieth century. We distinguish without difficulty the simple, hot-blooded, sensual variety from the thoroughly developed perverse types. A short-legged, buxom type is the most predominant. Such girls seem extraordinarily energetic, and appear also to excel in mental powers their pale-cheeked and half-alive male companions. Their dress is extremely conspicuous, and they wear highly ornamented hats. Whilst, when we look at them from behind, their whole figure suggests the age of fifteen or seventeen years, the front view suggests that they are at least eight years older. They prefer to lace very tightly, in order to display their rounded hips, and to make their already strongly developed breasts all the more imposing. But this development displays their mental and physical corruption, especially when undeveloped shoulders and thin arms show beyond question that they are really of a very tender age. The sharply-cut features, with the sparkling black eyes, which at once fascinate us, plainly indicate the lines which the passions are about to engrave on their features; we discern, also, that by the age of thirty they will already be old women.”
Sexual intercourse on the part of children with one another, or with grown persons in cases in which the invitation has proceeded from the child, are by no means rare occurrences. The following remarkable cases may illustrate this:
1. Some years ago a schoolboy, K. J., thirteen years of age, was accused in Berlin of several acts of sexual intercourse with girls of from six to eight years. The guilt of the accused was fully proved. He was sent to a reformatory.
2. A young man made the acquaintance of a girl sixteen years of age. Although greatly impassioned, he did not dare to touch the girl, because he was deceived by her sweet and blameless demeanour, and did not wish to be her first seducer. Soon afterwards he learned that this angel had had sexual intercourse for several years with a married man forty years of age!
3. Legroux showed in 1890, at the weekly meeting of the physicians of the Hospital St. Louis, a boy, eleven years of age, who, after three months’ sexual intercourse with a syphilitic girl aged seven years, had been infected in the ordinary manner, per vias naturales (reference in Unna’s Monatsheft für Dermatologie, 1890, vol. x., p. 335).