Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

“Then come 4460 pitiable girls, victims of the lust of human monsters.

“Then come 3205 little slaves of unsuitable and harmful occupations and dangerous performances, untimely births in traveling vans, acrobats at fairs, trapeze performers and tight-rope walkers in circuses, laboring under too heavy a load, and suffering the most diverse outrages. The procession is 60 miles long and takes 24 hours to pass by.”[82]

The society spoken of above is a private institution. The extent of its labors is very limited, which is why it has not taken cognizance of a great number of the children who have been thus treated. At the time when the report containing the above figures had just appeared, it had only been in operation ten years—during the last five more effectively, as a part of the first five was taken up with the organization of its service. Finally the field of its labors includes only the United Kingdom, while capitalism reigns over a great part of the world and has everywhere the same consequences. In consideration of these facts we can form an idea of the great destitution in which a multitude of children are found, and what sort of persons children so treated are likely to grow up to be.

To sum up what has been said, we see that the system of education for the child has not always been what it is now, and that we cannot therefore speak in this connection of institutions created by nature, except as regards the relation between mother and child during the first years of the latter’s life. It has been shown, I think, that the present system of education is closely bound up with the method of production of the day. No one can deny that in this regard also we are far from living in the “best of possible worlds.”[83] [[321]]

C. Prostitution.[84]

By prostitution must be understood the social fact that there are women who sell their bodies for the exercise of sexual acts, and make a profession of it. The putting of one’s body at the disposal of another for the purpose of sexual intercourse constitutes then at times the sale of merchandise. To find the cause of prostitution in our present society it is necessary to begin by asking: “What are the causes for the demand for this merchandise?” These causes may be reduced to the following:

a. The difficulty or impossibility of marrying found by many men. We have already seen that in our present society there is a continually increasing number of the petty bourgeois and of those who practice the liberal professions who, in consequence of the insufficiency of their incomes, cannot marry, or only at a rather advanced age. As we have seen, also, this is not in general the case with the proletariat. They reach the maximum of their wages while still quite young, and are less exacting as regards their material needs. All this brings it about that they marry sooner and so have less recourse to prostitution. (Soldiers and seamen, who are often forced to remain unmarried, form an exception.)

b. Besides those of whom I have been speaking, those also must be mentioned who do not wish to attach themselves for life to a single woman. Further, separate education, inducing a different life for the two sexes, is often an obstacle to the easy meeting of two persons [[322]]who might make a marriage of inclination. Many men renounce marriage because the intellectual plane of women is altogether different from theirs, as a consequence both of their education and of their manner of life, and also because with them the thought of improving their economic position by marriage predominates.[85]

The larger contingent of men who have recourse to prostitutes is made up of bachelors,[86] and the smaller of married men. Whence springs the following cause:

c. Often the marriage is not contracted from inclination, but for financial reasons, which brings it about that the men often indemnify themselves with prostitutes. But this is applicable also to those cases where the marriage has not been made for the reasons named, but in which, for any cause, an antipathy has sprung up between the couple, without the dissolution of the marriage, either because of the difficulty of securing a divorce, or from motives of expediency. Since monogamy does not proceed from an innate inclination, prostitution is a necessary correlative of marriage.