Russell Brand and The Longstanding Culture of Rape and Abuse of Underaged Girls In The UK
--
Read on…
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has always been a strange place.
I make this point precisely because of its past and present.
In the country of my birth, there is a very long history of child abuse, which informs everything happening today and is worth exploring for a minute.
Back in Victorian England, child prostitution was extraordinarily rife: It wasn’t uncommon to have girls as young as ten, working as prostitutes.
And what was also interesting about this was that, these girls were patronized by men of all classes as evinced by the snippet below from Wikipedia on the subject matter:
The investigative journalist William Thomas Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette was pivotal in exposing the problem of child prostitution in the London underworld through a publicity stunt. In 1885 he “purchased” one victim, Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep, for five pounds and took her to a brothel where she was drugged. He then published a series of four exposés entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which shocked its readers with tales of child prostitution and the abduction, procurement, and sale of young English virgins to Continental “pleasure palaces”. The “Maiden Tribute” was an instant sensation with the reading public, and Victorian society was thrown into an uproar about prostitution. Fearing riots on a national scale, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, pleaded in vain with Stead to cease publication of the articles. A wide variety of reform groups held protest meetings and marched together to Hyde Park demanding that the age of consent be raised. The government was forced to propose the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and clamped down on prostitution
Anyone’s read the quote above would notice, the name Sir William Harcourt and his efforts in pleading with the journalist to cease publishing the exposés.
It is worth mentioning because of the notoriety of his son —Lewis.
