Wolfenden report
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The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Lord Wolfenden, the chairman of the committee) was published in Britain on September 3, 1957 after a succession of well-known men were convicted of homosexual offences.
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The Committee
The committee of 14, including three women, was led by John Wolfenden (1906-1985) who had previously been headmaster of Uppingham and Shrewsbury and in 1950 became Vice Chancellor of the University of Reading. He later became Director of the British Museum.
The committee also included:
- a consultant psychiatrist
- the chairman of Uxbridge magistrates court
- the vice-president of the City of Glasgow Girl Guides
- a Scottish Presbyterian minister
- a professor of moral theology
- a High Court judge
- a Foreign Office minister
- the Conservative MP for Putney.
The committee first met on 15th September 1954 and met on 62 days, 32 of which were used for interviewing witnesses. Evidence was heard from police and probation officers, psychiatrists, religious leaders, and gay men whose lives had been affected by the law.
The Recommendations of the Report
Disregarding the conventional ideas of the day, the committee recommended that "homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". All but one of the committee were in favour of this and, contrary to medical and psychiatric witnesses' evidence, found that "homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects". The report added, "The law's function is to preserve public order and decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious, and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others ... It is not, in our view, the function of the law to intervene in the private life of citizens, or to seek to enforce any particular pattern of behaviour." The recommended age of consent was 21.
The recommendations led to the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which replaced the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act that was the previous law on homosexuality. The law was only narrowly passed and it was a decade after the report was published before the law was changed.
Its publication was a turning point in the legalization of homosexuality in Western countries, most of which have now legalized homosexuality and homosexual acts.
John Wolfenden came 45th in a list of the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes, The Pink Paper, 26th. September, 1997, issue 500, page 19.
References
- Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution, 1957. Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
- Reprinted 1963 as The Wolfenden Report: Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution. New York: Stein and Day.
- Eustace Chesser, 1958. Live and Let Live: The Moral of the Wolfenden Report. Taylor Garnett & Evans.
- Charles Berg, 1959. Fear, Punishment, Anxiety and the Wolfenden Report. George Allen & Unwin.
See also
- Gay Rights
- Law reform
- Sodomy law
- Homosexual Law Reform Society
- Age of Consent
- Victim - 1961 film starring Dirk Bogarde widely held to have contributed to the liberalisation of cultural and legal attitudes to homosexuality in the UK
External links
- Homosexuality should not be a crime (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/4/newsid_3007000/3007686.stm) (BBC).
- [1] (http://myweb.lsbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/wolfenden.html) (Knitting Circle)
- [2] (http://www.gmax.co.za/think/history/2004/041111-wolfden.html) (GMax - Queer History)