Jane first became interested in the late-Victorian campaign to raise the age of consent for girls when researching her biography of Josephine Butler. Butler joined W T Stead’s team of brothel investigators, and it was she who introduced him to the reformed ex-brothel keeper, Rebecca Jarrett, who delivered to Stead a 13-year-old virgin and trafficked her to Paris as a newspaper stunt—an episode Stead wrote up as ‘A Child of Thirteen Bought for £5’.
In revisiting this case it was necessary to determine whether the Criminal Law Amendment Act (which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16) met the expectations of Butler and Stead. Did the legislation result in a significant number of new prosecutions? Did the sexual attitudes of the police, judges and juries, or indeed society at large, change as a consequence of the passing of the new law? Since Stead’s focus was on sexual crimes against girls in London, Jane's forthcoming study will analyse those cases of child prostitution and child sexual assault heard at the Old Bailey 1880-1890.
The Age of Consent
Victorian Britain had one of the lowest ages of consent in Europe. In a reversal of the situation we see today, British girls were trafficked to Paris and Brussels, provided with false passports and sold into prostitution, because on the Continent prostitutes had to be over 18.
Feminist campaigners had for some years petitioned Parliament to raise the age of consent for girls, but the results were negligible: in 1875 the British Government agreed to raise the age of consent from 12 to 13 but would go no further. As the campaigning newspaper editor, W T Stead, would argue: ‘The law at present almost specially marks out (girls aged 13 and above) as the fair game of dissolute men. The moment a child is 13 she is a woman in the eye of the law’.
