The Wolfenden Report

From the presses of Her Majesty's Stationery Office last week came a 155-page, blue-paper-backed official report that was destined to be a runaway bestseller even before the first copy was up for sale. The book: the long-awaited Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, compiled after three years of research, investigation and learned pondering by a group of 15 prominent Britons headed by Sir John Wolfenden, 51, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University. The first printing of 5,000 copies was sold out within a few hours, and Her Majesty's printers quickly got to work on a second printing.

If some of the eager buyers were incited to purchase through prurience, they were doomed to disappointment. The report itself is as devoid of racy reading matter as an economic yearbook. What made the headlines was the report's two major recommendations: that 1) homosexual behavior in private between consenting adults be no longer classed as a crime, and 2) arresting officers or complainants be no longer required to establish the fact of "annoyance" to bring prostitutes to book for soliciting.

Where Will It End? The recommendation on adult (over 21) homosexuality touched off the most violent reaction. "Bad, retrograde and utterly to be condemned," snapped Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard. "Freeing adult males from any penalties could only succeed in intensifying and multiplying this form of depravity." Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail agreed: "Great nations have fallen and empires decayed because corruption became socially acceptable. [The proposals constitute] legalized degradation." "There's no knowing where it will end," complained a woman M.P., Mrs. Jean Mann, on television. "We may even have husbands enticed away from wives."

But if popular opinion was immediately and instinctively against seeming to condone homosexuality, an important minority of staid and conservative opinion favored changes in the law. The Times declared: "Adult sexual behavior not involving minors, force, fraud or public indecency belongs to the realm of private conduct, not of criminal law." Said the Spectator: "The present law on this point is utterly irrational and illogical." The London Economist thought that "private homosexual behavior between adults does no medical harm to themselves and no harm of any sort to others." Also in support of changing the law were the Church of England, which found the report "thorough, courageous and liberal," and a Roman Catholic spokesman who said that the Wolfenden committee's recommendations were "only acceptance of the fact that the community should not, in general, pry into a citizen's private deeds--even when they are misdeeds."

High Visibility. The Wolfenden committee's proposals on prostitution were less radical, as if the best that could be expected was to make the whores less visible. The committee warned against "too rigorous" a prosecution against women who loitered in pubs, on the grounds that this would only drive more of them onto the streets. The London Times agreed that "it would be wrong to punish the prostitute for being a prostitute," and the Spectator recalled Nietzsche: "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is strong."

Public prostitution flourishes more conspicuously in London than it does in any other major capital in the world, providing a sight that U.S. tourists, expecting London to be staid and sedate, stare at in fascinated wonderment. From noon until the small hours of the morning, London's vast troop of trollops are busy as squirrels in the fashionable West End as well as in Limehouse. Many have regular stations. They throng four deep on the sidewalks under the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus, patrol Mayfair, Park Lane and-Bond Street with the lighthearted aplomb of 4-H members at a county fair. The attractions of prostitution in easygoing Britain are also luring large numbers of foreign women--French, German, Belgian, and a sprinkling of Negroes, mostly from the West Indies.

In the West End, prostitutes often demand -L-5 for their favors but settle for -L-3 ($8.40). Sir Ronald Howe, retired deputy commissioner of Metropolitan Police, estimates that many London prostitutes take in as much as -L-60 ($168) a night--tax-free, of course. Postwar, London's prostitutes have become a menace as well as a nuisance. A young stenographer was disfigured for life recently when an irate harlot slapped her in the face with a heavy handbag under the mistaken impression that the girl was "working" her territory. Because prostitutes ply London's better streets so regularly, any woman sauntering or window-shopping in the West End at night is apt to be accosted by a potential customer, and the result is often mutual embarrassment.

To help sweep the prostitutes off the streets, the Wolfenden Report recommends that maximum penalties be increased to a -L-10 fine for a first offense, -L-25 the second time around, and a three-month jail sentence on a third arrest. The present -L-2 ($5.60) fine even for repeated offenders has prevailed for more than a century, and is regarded by many prostitutes as a license: they keep their receipts to show bobbies that they have been run in recently. Said Probation Official Frank Dawtry: "I don't think increasing the penalty is going to have much effect--a girl will merely get more from her client."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.