Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents

Excerpt

I. Preliminary Observations

(1) Sensational Press Reports

In the second week of July 1954 various newspapers throughout the Dominion featured reports of proceedings in the Magistrate's Court at Lower Hutt against youths charged with indecent assault upon, or carnal knowledge of, girls under 16 years of age.

The prosecuting officer was reported as saying that:

The police investigations revealed a shocking degree of immoral conduct which spread into sexual orgies perpetrated in several private homes during the absence of parents, and in several second rate Hutt Valley theatres, where familiarity between youths and girls was rife and commonplace.

He also stated that:

... in many cases the children came from excellent homes.

A few weeks previously reports had appeared in the press of statements made by a Child Welfare Officer and a Stipendiary Magistrate that juvenile delinquency (meaning delinquency in general and not only sexual delinquency) had more than doubled in recent years, and that in many cases the offenders came from:

... materially good homes where they are well provided for.

Such statements naturally provoked a good deal of private and public comment throughout the Dominion. The anxiety of parents deepened, and one leading newspaper asserted editorially that:

It is probably quite safe to assert that nothing that has occurred in the Dominion for a long time has caused so much public dismay and so much private worry as the disclosure of moral delinquency among children and adolescents.

There is room for difference of opinion as to whether or not the ensuing public discussion of sexual offending was desirable. On the one hand it provoked many conversations on the subject between children themselves and a noticeable desire to purchase newspapers on the way to and from school. On the other hand the focusing of attention on the existence of the peril to school children caused many parents, temporarily at any rate, to take a greater interest in the training and care of their children than they might otherwise have taken; it caused some heads of schools to arrange for sex instruction; and it also resulted in a public demand that something should be done to bring about a better state of morality in the community.

Following hard upon the newspaper reports of these cases in the Hutt Valley there was the news that two girls, each aged about 16 years had been arrested in Christchurch on a charge of murdering the mother of one of them. It soon became widely known (and this fact was established at their subsequent trial) that these girls were abnormally homosexual in behaviour.

There were also published in the press extracts from the annual report of the Justice Department to the effect that sexual crime in New Zealand was, per head of population, half as much again as the sexual crime in England and Wales. The reasons why the Committee does not accept this statement at its face value are stated later under .

(2) Press Reports from Overseas

In view of the fact that the happenings in the Hutt Valley were reported in all New Zealand newspapers, and by many newspapers in Australia and Great Britain, the Committee points out that the increase of sexual delinquency is not confined to any one district or any one country....