Sydney:
The Christian World Press, 301 Pitt Street.
——
1896.
Good laws, as a great statesman has said, are for the purpose of making it easy to do right and difficult to do wrong. Such laws protect the weak and ignorant who are unable to take care of themselves, and deter the cunning and unscrupulous from injuring their fellows. When the strong prey upon the weak in any community, without the law in any way attempting to prevent it, such apathy points to a low moral sensibility in the community in which it exists.
This moral indifference and tolerance of injustice, must be charged against the people of New South Wales. Their representatives in Parliament have so devoted themselves to the strife for office and the incidence of taxation, that the question of protecting by law, the chastity of young girls, has been ignored. And the people have been content to have it so. In New South Wales, at the present time, any girl of fourteen years and a day, may be outraged, and unless it can be proved that actual violence was used, the law will do nothing to the man who has ruined her. In other words, the law of New South Wales gives its sanction to the seduction of every girl above fourteen, if this can be done without the employment of brute force. And experience shows that men are not slow to avail themselves of this license. In Sydney, the Rescue Homes, the Lying-in Hospitals, and the lock wards are filled with girls, some about to become mothers, others suffering from loathsome diseases, all social outcasts, and with a future of woe and tragedy before them.
Is not this a foul blot on this colony? Are there no men with chivalrous feeling and pity for the weak, whose blood boils when they hear of these things, are there no women whose hearts go out to these poor, fallen children to save them? And cannot all see that it is infinitely better and easier to try and prevent this fall, than to remedy it after it has happened? For the means of doing this is at hand. It is to raise the age at which a girl can consent to her own seduction. The “Age of Consent” so-called, at present stands at fourteen years. Increase this age to at least eighteen, and thus give the girl protection during the four years of her life in which experience proves that danger threatens her most.
After this age, the girl must be the guardian of her own virtue, and it is most probable that increased knowledge and strength of will power would preserve her from moral ruin. It is a significant fact that while the law holds the child of fourteen capable of defending her honour, it does not allow any girl who may possess property to manage or dispose of it in any way till she is 21 years old, and anyone marrying her without the consent of her legal guardians, even though she may be willing herself, is liable to severe punishment.
If the girl of fourteen is capable of being the guardian of her own virtue then we must concede that physically she is fitted to become a mother, that she realizes to the full, the consequences of immorality, and that her self-control and power of moral resistance render her proof against any bribes or threats by which it may be sought to influence her.
Now all medical authorities would utterly condemn the idea that a girl of fourteen was fit for the stress and strain of motherhood. Not only would she run great danger herself, but her offspring would in all probability be sickly and unfit for the battle of life.