OUR UNJUST CRIMINAL CODE.

White Ribbon, Volume 27, Issue 314, 18 August 1921, Page 8

OUR UNJUST CRIMINAL CODE.

(To the Editor. Madam.- Let me put before the Unions the ease of Hilda Burgess, a girl of sixteen years and four months, of previous good character, accused of murdering her newborn child on July 7. and acquitted, despite wounds on the infant's body, at the Supreme Court. Christchurch, on August 2. That child went through woman's supreme ordeal of pain alone in a hotel, and stood alone after at the bar of justice, while her betrayer goes free, not even named. Men commit crimes like this with impunity because we women citizens .so long have not insisted that the law shall be made protection for girls, not for grown .and evil men. Every year or so our Unions have bleated feebly against the three crying defects of our criminal code, which make such cases possible the age of coasent be ing sixteen, not twenty-one, or at least eighteen; the time of laying information for assault being six months, instead of twelve; and the man having the nebulous but always effective defence of “having reasonable cause for believing” his victim over sixteen. Because our Judges and juries are better than our law. Hilda Burgess and many others in like dreadful plight have been acquitted. Does that lessen our guilt as citizens, or make for safety and purity?

While moral and religious uplift of tone i.s the only permanent safeguard for our girls, we must press for every legal protection now denied. Can we not signalise this year by enforcing these three reforms on Parliament? If every Union at once empowered the Dominion Executive, the W.C.T.U. could present a formidable front this session. Better still, if the W.C.T.U, worked with the National Council of Women, which is itself moving on these lines this spiing. The annual Council Conference begins on October 2. There is time, but no more, for united action of the women of New Zealand to wipe off one outstanding blot from our scutcheon. I am, etc., JESSIE MACKAY. Dom. Press Supt., W.C.T.U, Christchurch. August 5.