Argus title : Our children need us to nurture and protect them
Our collective past is full of heroines that history has tended to ignore. Josephine Butler was one such woman.
In the 1870s, Josephine Butler campaigned for repeal of legislation which required prostitutes to undergo forceable examination and treatment for venereal disease, while making no such demand upon their clients.
It’s a cause for celebration that her achievements are beginning to appear in school history books. However, what is rarely mentioned there is that Butler was the key architect of the present age of consent – a fact of far greater relevance to adolescents than the Contagious Diseases Acts. Continue reading