WOMEN POLICE AND THE SOCIAL EVIL

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 22 June 1917, Page 1

WOMEN POLICE AND THE SOCIAL EVIL

MISS DAMER DAWSON'S EXPERIENCE. Following on the disclosures made bj Vvthev Bernard Vaughan and others., who £ and out of Parliament have directed pointed attention to the alarming growth o? thVSocial Evil-emphasised during, the war by the appearance London of many young S^/gjTft would simply take them aw ded a * f r T nei^ JJT, these homes without the stigma of f degraded class. When men go into a lock hospital they arc not degraded because no one knows about it; and if women could be sent to a farm colony it should, rpoSble for them to go there without nublicitv. Tho Women's Police beivice £ anxious not to-be used in any repressive wav towards our own s*x without the opiwrtunity to help them, because we SoVln cases of this kind how useles, are prison or repressive SOW THE NEW ACT WORh.b. With, regard to the question of controlling Jclal disorders Miss.Dawson said - ° The more we work in the atacets the more difficult we know the problemto be The provisions of the new Criminal Law Amendment Bill aro not alone. sufficient for its solution. Sir George Gave himself admitted that there may be difficulties in bringing home to those who are cuiltv the offence of communicating the disease to another person It there is one thing which the work of the streets proves more dearly than another it is that the only persons' who are arrested tor soliciting are women. We 'nave tried to obtain the conviction of men for molesting and soliciting, and have failed. The police bring in the charge as that of drunkenness, and the Magistrate dismisses them. " The steps to be taken for checking the evil shoidd include moral and sexual hygienic education and the provision of coun-ter-attractions for both men and women, and it should be made a punishable offence to buy or sell that which no one has the right "to buy or sell. •'There are nianv of us who would JiKe | powers to take off the streets the young girls—the young ' flappers '—of 17 or 18, and to remove them from parental control; which is no control, as we do children, anc place them in some educative colony, when they could learn trades nud farm produc tion. It is moral education they need, anc it is lack of parental authority which ha: caused their appearance in the streets. \\ i should be very sorry to see the large num ber of young girls "whom we call amateu prostitutes classed as vicious and degraded They are not any more degraded than th young men who are their companions. Sec tions of both sexes are at present engagei in sowing their wild oats, and they 6houl< be treated with equal firmness and equ3 kindness. FARM COLONIES. " It is true that if you class the youn ■ girls on the' streets as prostitutes an< bring thera under police regulations yo will clear a certain portion of the streets but you will not stop the demand, an where there is a demand there will be ai other supply. There are many of thef girls who would willingly go on to a tarn: They sav to us sometimes: 'We won' go to a "laundry or scrub =>teps; but pi us to grow fruit, and we will yo into th country.* The open-air life would do fc them what it does Jov young fellows wh have ' gone off the "rails.' As to the argi ment that they woidd be contagious they were allowed to work together, med cal" authorities in a position to know tc us that that would not be the case. Wit clean living and ordinary precautions tht would not be contagious to each other. "A woman doctor who came to us ye terdav has had thousands of womi through her hands in munition factorie and it is very interesting to know that ' the larce numbers she lias examined on two were affected. But she made tli remark : ' That would not' have bei the case had there been a large camp overseas soldiers. 1 "