Roger Davidson

This Pernicious Delusion: Law, Medicine, and Child Sexual Abuse in Early-Twentieth-Century Scotland

IN J A N U A R Y 1913, Robert James C., a thirty-seven-year-old coal miner, was indicted in the High Court, Glasgow, on a charge of raping his nineyear-old niece and of the aggravated offense of communicating to her “gonorrhoea and other venereal disease with which his private parts were at the time affected.”1 In preparation for the trial, Crown Counsel specifically requested the Procurator Fiscal to question prosecution witnesses about “whether there exists a common superstition . . . that intercourse with a virgin is a cure for venereal disease.”2 The inquiry elicited a revealing consensus among medical witnesses. Dr. J. M. Thompson of Aidrie responded: “It is a common belief among the lower classes that connection with a virgin will cure a venereal disease.” Similarly, Dr. Elizabeth Smith, Physician to Glasgow Lock Hospital, considered it to be “a widespread idea . . . in all the lower classes that contact with an untouched virgin [would] cure the disease.” The evidence of Dr. James Devon, H.M. Prison Surgeon, was even more sweeping:

The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950-1980

Tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations Chapter 1 Introduction PART I SEXUAL OFFENCES Chapter 2 Female Prostitution Chapter 3 Homosexual Law Reform, 1950-67 Chapter 4 Homosexual Law Reform, 1967-80 PART II REPRODUCTIVE ISSUES Chapter 5 Abortion Chapter 6 Family Planning PART III DISEASE AND ENLIGHTENMENT Chapter 7 Sexual Health Chapter 8 School Sex Education PART IV SEX AND CENSORSHIP Chapter 9 Moral Censorship and the State in the 1950s Chapter 10 Sex, Censorship and Scottish Governance in the 1960s Chapter 11 Policing Pornography and Obscenity in the 1970s Chapter 12 Conclusion Sources and Select Bibliography Index.

“A Fifth Freedom” or “Hideous Atheistic Expediency”? The Medical Community and Abortion Law Reform in Scotland, c.1960–1975

The purpose of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, published on 15 June 1966, was to amend and clarify the law relating to termination of pregnancy by a registered medical practitioner. When David Steel, a young Liberal MP from the Scottish Borders, put this bill forward, some suggested that a Scottish politician had no need to introduce abortion reform since Scots law was already satisfactory in this regard. Certainly, abortion law in Scotland was more flexible than its English counterpart, and the number of prosecutions few. The line between criminal and non-criminal abortion was, however, just as indistinct, with great medical uncertainty in this area. On becoming law, the 1967 Abortion Act was the first piece of abortion-related legislation to cover Scotland, England and Wales collectively.1 None the less, for a variety of legal and moral reasons, abortion policy and practice continued to differ on either side of the Border. The sexual politics surrounding abortion law reform has, in recent years, attracted increasing attention from historians, sociologists and political scientists. Several broad strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. Early writing on the history of abortion and the 1967 Abortion Act generally subscribed to an “heroic” interpretation of events. It was largely produced by abortion law reform activists and sympathizers to stress the significant advantages accruing from an end to surreptitious and expensive criminal abortions, and to praise the importance of the Abortion Law Reform Association (hereafter ALRA) within the process of legal reform.2 Thereafter, a range of more nuanced approaches have been advanced. For example, historians of sexuality have interpreted abortion law reform as part of a whole raft of legislation in the 1960s, including homosexual law reform and the revision of divorce law, which redefined the relationship of the State and the law to the moral domain of the private citizen.3 Other commentators have focused on the political manoeuvring surrounding the 1967 Abortion Act, often as a case study in the role of pressure groups in shaping sexual politics.4 In addition, a body of literature has investigated the role of the medical profession within abortion law reform, and the degree to which the law has influenced, and been interpreted within, medical practice.5 In particular, feminist analysis, some drawing heavily upon the work of Foucault, has been brought to bear on the implications of the “medicalization” of abortion law reform for the reproductive rights of women.6 Such writing tends to exhibit pronounced ambivalence towards the medical monopoly of abortion provision through the 1967 act.7 In many respects, this literature feeds into other areas of research centring on the impact and penetration of biomedical perspectives within individual, social and political life.8 However, while the history of abortion policy and provision in Britain has received extensive attention by scholars, such studies have mainly centred on the social politics surrounding the issue at Whitehall and Westminster. There have been no substantial corresponding studies of Scotland to date, despite the fact that, to a significant extent, Scotland possessed its own system of law, local government and medical practice, as well as arguably a distinctive civic and sexual culture. In the case of abortion law reform this is particularly surprising given that the 1967 act was to be substantially modelled on the Scottish experience. Using a range of legal, medical and governmental files, supplemented by oral testimony, this article seeks in part to rectify these omissions by examining such regional differences as they informed abortion law reform. First, it surveys abortion law as it existed in Scotland prior to the 1967 act, contrasting it with English statute law and law enforcement on the subject. Secondly, the article examines Scottish medical practice relating to abortion before the 1967 act, highlighting the work of the gynaecologist, Dugald Baird, and the influence of his liberal ideology and clinical practice in Aberdeen at a time when uncertainty and misunderstanding of abortion law prevailed elsewhere in Scotland. Thirdly, it explores the input of Scottish medicine to the politics surrounding the 1967 act, focusing on the two key medical figures of Dugald Baird and Ian Donald. Residual doubts over the inclusion of Scotland in abortion legislation and continuing anomalies between English and Scots Law after the passing of the act are then discussed. Finally, the impact of the act north of the Border is charted using Scottish evidence to the Lane Committee (1971–74), and an evaluation made of how far abortion procedures were in fact medicalized in the following decade. The article concludes by characterizing the attitude of the Scottish medical community to abortion in the 1960s as one of “reluctant medicalization”, an attitude which current historiography has generally failed to take account of when critiquing the process of “medicalization”. Many Scottish doctors, and even more Scottish nurses, strongly questioned intervention in this field both in terms of ethics and propriety. Moreover, whereas the conventional historiography largely stereotypes the response of the medical community towards abortion, this article will suggest the need for a more nuanced approach which captures the diversity and ambiguities that characterized the medical communitys response to the “medicalization”—or enforced medical monopoly—of abortion at this time.

Sexuality and the State: the Campaign for Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1967–80

The historiography of homosexual law reform in late-twentieth-century Britain has mainly focused on the sexual politics surrounding the Wolfenden Committee and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act (applicable only in England and Wales). Using a range of government archives and the papers of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), this article explores the campaign to introduce law reform for Scotland in the period 1967–80. It focuses on the interface between the SMG and Scottish governance and how it shaped the fortunes of a succession of measures designed to advance the legal status of homosexuals north of the Border. It concludes that the achievement of limited decriminalisation in 1980 was a pyrrhic victory and that the main reason for the partial and protracted process of reform was less the tactics of the SMG, or the lack of Scottish legislative autonomy, than the continuing homophobic culture within Scottish politics and society.

The Board of Trade and Industrial Relations 1896–1914

From the standpoint of the late Victorian and Edwardian governing classes, the most disturbing feature of the ‘social problem’ was the breakdown of British industrial relations. The long ideological and political truce observed by organized labour more or less since the 18405 had ended. A new and more militant trade unionism had emerged which condemned the consensus policy of the craft unions and challenged both the prerogatives of management and the conventional criteria of wage determination. Not only did it endanger social stability, it was also regarded in government circles as a major obstacle to British economic growth. Industrial unrest would, it was feared, disrupt production, intensify resistance to technical innovation, and weaken Britains cost competitiveness in world markets. In the establishment press, in the parliamentary reports, and in the political memoirs and diaries of the period, one therefore finds a growing concern to secure industrial peace; a concern reflected in the growth of state intervention in industrial relations.

Psychiatry and homosexuality in mid-twentieth-century Edinburgh: the view from Jordanburn Nerve Hospital.

There has been little historical research into the post-war treatment of homosexuality, especially in Scotland. Using surviving records from the Jordanburn Nerve Hospital (JNH) in Edinburgh for the 1950s, this paper sets out to rectify this omission. The views of homosexuality held by the psychiatrists, and the main treatment strategies adopted (categorized as hospitalization, suppression, reorientation/‘cure’, and adjustment) are surveyed and illustrated from particular cases. The Edinburgh experience is also compared with perceptions and practices relating to the treatment of homosexual problems in Glasgow. It is concluded that psychiatrists at the JNH adopted a cautious, ad hoc approach to therapy, reflecting both ideological and resource constraints and an attachment to taxonomies of deviance rooted in established notions of sexual pathology.

‘A Festering Sore on the Body of Society’: The wolfenden committee and Female Prostitution in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland

The proceedings and report of the Wolfenden Committee on Prostitution and Homosexual Offences (1954–7) figure prominently in the historiography of the sexual politics of late twentieth-century Britain. In terms of female prostitution, three broad but inter-related strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. First, a largely narrative approach has located the Committee and subsequent legislation within the broader story of changing sexual mores and associated moral panic in 1950s Britain. Secondly, many social historians and sociologists have focused upon the coercive and regulatory implications of the report and the Street Offences Act of 1959,often within a Foucauldian framework of analysis. For commentators such as Jeffrey Weeks, the Wolfenden Report, by redefining the relationship of the law to the private moral terrain of the citizen, enabled a reaffirmation of the policing of public space in the interests of order and decency. Similarly, for Frank Mort, one of its most significant features was its codification of a ‘new geography of sexuality’ which both made the ‘troublesome and dangerous sexualities of prostitution’ more visible to the official mind and furnished a new ‘topography of regulation’. Meanwhile, other commentators have advanced a more specifically feminist interpretation of events. Thus, Carol Smart views the central thrust of the Wolfenden Committee’s deliberations on

Official Labour Statistics: A Historical Perspective

This paper explores some of the social and economic forces shaping the development of official labour statistics in Britain a century ago. It examines the competing fears and ideologies that fuelled the demand for intelligence about the labour market and the major constraints on its provision, such as Treasury control, industrial resistance and the lack of co-ordination between the statistical branches of government. The broader impact of official labour statistics on social politics is discussed in both a British and an international context, with particular reference to the problems of industrial unrest, unemployment and low income destitution. The paper uses a historical perspective to demonstrate the continuing significance of past investigations to British labour statistics.

Social Conflict and Social Administration: The Conciliation Act in British Industrial Relations

The problem of industrial unrest featured prominently in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British political debate. Within the governing classes, there was growing concern at the inability of the existing machinery of collective bargaining to stabilise labour relations and at the consequent threat to social order and productive efficiency. In an effort to reinforce private dispute procedures, the Conciliation Act was passed in 1896. It provided the sole legal sanction for Government intervention in collective bargaining prior to the First World War, yet its administration by the Board of Trade and its impact during a critical period in the growth of British industrial relations have been superficially treated by historians.