The Criminal & the Community

by James Devon

The fact is that feelings the result of sex strike far deeper and wider than many good people care to acknowledge; but the whole subject is one on which a taboo is placed and it cannot be treated as frankly as it ought for that reason. The cause of jealousy and the excitement of the feeling is not so simple as many seem to think. It may be absent where there would appear to be the strongest ground for expecting its presence, and present under circumstances where it would not be looked for; and when present it may induce criminal acts on a provocation that would appear small indeed.

There are fewer female than male criminals and offenders, but they are more likely than men to continue in the wrong way when they set out on it, for it is more difficult for them to recover. Women are much harder on one another than they are on men; or than men are, either on their own sex or on women. This may be one reason why so few of them go astray, but it also contributes to keep the stray sheep from getting back to the fold. The girl is more closely guarded at home and is more intimately associated with her mother than the boy is. Even mothers who have gone to the bad do not always want their daughters to follow their example; and I have known those who lived by vice and crime who have sent their daughters away from them in order to be trained in religion and morals. Most of them cannot do that, but many do what they can, up to a point, to keep them straight. A girl suffers more than a boy from the neglect of a mother, and when to neglect is added bad example it may have a fatal effect on her. In proportion to their numbers there are more daughters than sons of criminal mothers who take to evil courses.

Apart from the mother, there are districts of the city where girls hear language and see sights that are not likely to have a good effect on them. The girl is taught to repress herself more than the boy and is trained towards secretiveness. The boy is rather given to flaunt his new-found naughtiness and to be checked for it or to discover of how little account it is. The girl may nurse it to her harm. It is a mistake to suppose that because a man or woman never uses objectionable language, or repeats objectionable stories, they have not left an impression when heard. As a matter of fact, the female side of any lunatic asylum is generally more remarkable than the male side for the foulness of the language of the inmates and the filthiness of their ideas. Among the sane members of the community the opposite is notoriously the case, but the insane are only repeating words that have lodged in their mind when they were sane. The same thing is true of female offenders; they outdo the men in the profanity and indecency of their language, when they begin.

When as a result of their surroundings young girls take to imitating their elders in vice they are much more dangerous than boys. Every surgeon in a great city, if he is connected with the administration of the law, knows that very young girls are sometimes made the subjects of horrible assaults; but he also knows that other girls as young incite and provoke assaults, and that some among them make the most terrible and detailed charges against men on no foundation whatever but that of their own imagination excited by what they have seen. When men are guilty of certain offences under the Criminal Law Amendment Act there can be no defence of their conduct; they have no excuse for taking advantage of young girls; but it is sheer folly to ignore the fact that there are girls of school age in some parts of the city who deliberately importune men. It is terrible that it should be so, but they are only doing what they see their elders do and there is no use disregarding the fact.

If the street is a bad playground for the boy it is worse for the girl. She runs greater risks and her ignorance is as vast as his. When she goes to work new perils beset her. Her choice of occupation is more restricted, and her wages, though they may not be less in the first instance, do not increase in the same ratio as she grows to youth and womanhood. Whatever may be said for the higher education of women it is out of reach of the many. Most girls have the idea that some day they will be married; and they are often right. When this idea is present it is bound to affect their actions. Marriage means for a man the holding on to his work; for a woman it implies the giving up of her employment—at any rate, in Scotland most men who marry try to keep their wives at home. Among the poorer labourers this is not always possible; but it remains true that the great majority of married women are not industrially employed. They have quite enough to do at home, and sometimes more than enough; but the fact that the home is to be their permanent sphere of work, or the hope of this, makes many girls and women careless as to the choice of their occupation meanwhile. It also prevents combination among workers, to a large extent, and tends to keep wages low. How some of them live on their earnings is a mystery, but they do; and keep themselves in a condition of health and fitness which will compare favourably with that of many of the scientific people who prove by figures and standards that they don’t. There is grave risk in it, however; risk that they should not be asked to run. If they were not members of a family, each contributing earnings to a common pool, and each undertaking a share of the household work, many could not exist on the wages they receive. That any large number of them are directly driven to the street by the low rate of their wages is not, in my experience, true.

Complaints have been made that the children of well-to-do people accept lower wages and make it hard for those who have to earn their living to obtain reasonable pay. This may be true in a few cases, but it is not of general application. These people do not compete at all in many occupations; their parents are not foolish enough to let them do much for nothing; but they do sometimes exercise an injurious influence on the other girls by their presence. Girls are at least as vain of their appearance as lads, and they are quite as much given to personal adornment. Indeed, I think men will readily admit that women pay more attention to their dress and are keener on ornaments than they are. Certainly when one gets a new kind of hat-pin or “charm,” others must obtain something to balance it. If a girl has a fund to draw upon apart from her earnings she is likely to dress more expensively than her neighbours, and the weaker sisters are sometimes tempted to adopt extraordinary measures to keep pace with her.

In so far as a standard of dress is set up that is beyond the earning power of the workers to maintain, girls who have other resources than their wages are liable to exercise an injurious effect on their fellow-workers. X 27 was a young woman of prepossessing appearance and good manner. She had been employed in a place of business in town. Her wages were small, and she had charge of cash transactions to a considerable amount. She was quietly and well dressed. She was arrested on a charge of embezzlement and she admitted her guilt. She confessed that she had begun to take small sums in order to keep herself “respectable,” and her peculations not being discovered, she had continued to help herself. There was sickness at home, and to relieve the pressure there she had taken larger sums and been found out. In the course of enquiries I found that there were other employees none of whom had her opportunities of taking from the cash-box, but some of whom dressed themselves on “presents” from gentlemen. There was room for suspicion that each knew what the others had been doing. It was certain that they knew that their earnings were insufficient to enable them to live and dress as they did, and it was equally clear that in their cases they had no resources at home to supplement their earnings.

There are some workshops in which the moral tone is very low, and the association of young girls together in them has a bad effect on their conduct. The ignorance of many men and women with regard to the most elementary physical facts is remarkable. Mysteries are made of physiology, as though innocence and ignorance were synonymous terms. Fear takes the place of enlightenment, and when a girl is seen to transgress the limits of conduct laid down for her without the dreadful consequences they have been led to expect, the others are apt to think they have been misled; and some of them embark lightly on a certain course of conduct with a confidence begotten of ignorance as great as that which once made them timid. Young people are better to learn the truth about themselves from those they respect and trust, than to be kept in ignorance till some chance reveals a distorted version to them. X 28 was a man of the labouring class who was charged with contravention of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. He had been a very hard-working man, and for years had lived on little and saved the greater part of his earnings. Then, as systematically as he had put the money past, he started to get rid of it. He had nearly £200, and he proceeded to spend about £2 a week on his “spree.” He drew the money from the bank in small sums, and, doing no work meanwhile, he proceeded to take enough drink to keep him on the right side of drunkenness. This had been going on for over six months before his arrest. Early in the course of his wanderings he had made the acquaintance of two girls who were employed in a tailoring establishment in the city. They spoke to him and made him certain proposals. This was in the dinner-hour. In time he was introduced by one girl to another during the succeeding four months, till he had dealings with seven in the same establishment—that is to say, seven admitted the facts. Their ages ran from fifteen to nineteen years, and without exception they were all the daughters of respectable parents, to whom the story of their conduct came as a severe shock. That story will not bear repetition; it was exceedingly gross. The facts were only discovered in an accidental way through the illness of one of the girls. She at first denied everything; but under pressure made a confession of part of the truth, and, the charge being laid, enquiry elicited the rest.

A large number of girls are still employed in domestic service, though the tendency has been for them to seek industrial work, where they are for some part of the day their own mistresses. The spread of elementary education has been blamed for the shortage in the supply of servants, but it is only one of many causes for the change from the time when there were more girls seeking work than places for them; and girls are not likely to seek service as a result of the railings of those who, to judge by their utterances, are in need of some elementary education with regard to their own position. There seems to be an idea fixed in their heads that they have a right to be served by others, and that on their own terms. If the schools have taught the girls that they are not born to do for others what they ought to be able to do for themselves, it is something to the credit of the schools. Domestic servants have been too long treated as though they were inferior beings, with the natural result that their work has come to be looked upon as lower in character than that of the factory or the office girl. A greater independence of spirit and behaviour is permitted in those engaged in industrial occupations than in domestics, and this has a good deal to do with the preference shown for these pursuits.

Domestic service is a better preparation for married life than work in a factory, but in spite of this it has very serious disadvantages. It presents the form of family life without the spirit. In a great many cases it has all the disadvantages and few of the advantages. Those who are loudest in their complaints of the degeneration of servants show quite clearly that they are angry really because they no longer get girls to give not only reasonable service, but the obedience of flunkeys. Girls in workshops are not treated as domestics are; they would not stand it. Their wages may be lower, but at least they are not looked upon as beings of another creation than those placed over them. When people shun certain kinds of employment it is not generally because they are foolish, but because they believe that that kind of work is not worth having.