Labouchère Amendment
래부셰어 수정조항
Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. Slipped into the bill at its last stage by the Liberal MP Henry Labouchère, it punished “gross indecency” between men, in public or private, with up to two years’ imprisonment. Usable against male homosexuality where sodomy could not be proven, it was the law under which Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing were convicted; in England and Wales the Sexual Offences Act 1967 lifted it from consensual relations between adults.
In depth
The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, into which the Labouchère Amendment was inserted, was a law “for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels”. Passed by the Lords from 1881 but blocked in the Commons, it gained momentum in July 1885 when W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, exposed in his series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” how he had “bought” 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong for £5, setting off a moral panic. The act raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 and tightened the laws against prostitution.
Henry Labouchère, Liberal MP for Northampton and founding editor of the magazine Truth, carried the clause at report stage in the early hours of 7 August 1885 after a debate of some four minutes. He first wanted a minimum of seven years’ hard labour; the penalty was cut to up to one year and then, at the request of the former Attorney General Sir Henry James, raised to up to two. A contemporary claimed it was a wrecking amendment meant to make the whole bill ridiculous; other historians see a sincere attempt to control male homosexuality. The section reads:
Section 11. Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.
The Labouchère Amendment did not define “gross indecency”, so it allowed the prosecution of almost any male homosexual act where anal intercourse, punished with life imprisonment under the 1861 act, could not be proven. John Addington Symonds argued that it would only facilitate blackmail, and lawyers called it the “blackmailer’s charter”; it ignored relations between women. In 1895 Oscar Wilde received its maximum sentence, two years’ hard labour, and the mathematician Alan Turing, convicted under it, had to accept chemical castration instead of prison.
In England and Wales the Labouchère Amendment was re-enacted as section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956. The Wolfenden report of 1957 recommended decriminalising homosexual acts between men over 21, but the government did not act, and only the Sexual Offences Act 1967 exempted consensual acts in private between two men aged 21 or over. Scotland followed in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982.