The Needed Change in the Age of Consent

In the 1880s, a fourteen-year-old girl in New South Wales could legally consent to sexual intercourse. Richard Arthur, a physician and Methodist minister, found this obscene. This impassioned reform treatise dissects a legal framework that left young girls vulnerable to exploitation, arguing that a law permitting consent at such a tender age was not merely inadequate, it was complicit in their ruin. Arthur builds his case through empirical observation and moral argument. He documents how girls aged fourteen to eighteen were being preyed upon under the guise of legality, their "consent" a legal fiction masking coercion, manipulation, and predatory adult behavior. He challenges readers to confront the distance between what the law permitted and what justice demanded. The book endures because the questions it raises remain urgent. What age truly constitutes meaningful consent? Who bears responsibility for protecting the vulnerable? Arthur's treatise stands as a historical record of one society's reckoning with these questions, a reminder that legal "protection" often lags far behind moral understanding.