VICE PROSECUTIONS
SIR,—Even though the Government, for reasons which they are not prepared to give, arc to throw over the recommendations of the Wolfenden Com- mittee, one would still have expected the police authorities to pay some attention to them. The com- mittee was appointed because during one of the periodical outbursts of prosecutions the authorities were unwise enough to include some well-known names : this gave the necessary advertisement and aroused the public cOnscience, so that the abortive inquiry was demanded. The pogroms, however, con- tinue, one in this neighbourhood having started with long and weary police-court proceedings on the eve of Christmas, so that the festival may presumably be spent in contemplation of the Spring Assize. And this for a lad of seventeen. The pattern is much the same in all these cases. The police go round from house to house, bringing ruin in their train, always attacking the youngest men first, extracting infor- mation with lengthy questioning and specious promises of light sentences as they proceed from clue to clue, i.e. from home to home, often up to twenty. This time the age range is seventeen to forty, which is about the average. Last time, a man of thirty-seven dropped dead in the dock at Assize. Just because this happens in country places and at country assizes, it all goes largely unreported. We had hoped that it might be finished, but if it is to continue we desperately need some society to afford support and comfort to the victims and their families.
The real tragedy is that we still have moralists in high positions who imagine that they do good by this cruelty and in whose hands rests the destiny and happiness of so many of us, heterosexual and homosexual alike.—Yours faithfully,
R. D. REID 8 Chamberlain Street, Wells
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