Some Questions of history: Prosecuting and punishing child sexual assault

Abstract

In January 1924, an article in the Sydney Truth newspaper alerted its readers to a spate of crimes against children that had recently appeared before the courts. Sexual offences against three girls and one boy had been committed in various suburbs around the city within a matter of weeks. It was shaping up to be a bad year, the paper claimed, potentially worse than 1922, which had the most recently accessible police data. The annual returns from the police commissioner for that year revealed that sexual crimes constituted ’a grave element’ of the criminal calendar with an average of three offences per week coming to notice. While lamenting that there were ‘no graphs or charts prepared by criminologists and penologists showing the rise and fall of this class of offence as compared to the total population each year’, the paper was at pains to point out the ‘startling’ number of children to be found among the victims, and to a lesser degree, among offenders: 29 juveniles were arrested for sex crimes in 1922. From a list of 158 sexual matters, 14 offences had been committed on girls under the age of 10, with another 71 on girls between 10 and 16 (almost exclusively crimes of carnal knowledge and indecent assault). The report did not identify the number of crimes against boys, but recorded22 arrests for indecent assaults on males of various ages and 10 ‘unmentionable’ crimes. Added to the number of arrests, scores of other matters appeared on summons (Truth [Sydney], 27 Jan 1924, p. 8). Truth marshalled such evidence in calling for greater parental responsibilities, changes to the legislative and education system, and for the deportation of mentally-defective migrants (for further discussion see Kaladelfos, 2010, pp. 235-58). Yet the statistics gathered for this campaign tell another story, one in which Australians in the first half of the twentieth century readily deferred to the criminal law to respond to sexual assaults against children.