WOLFENDEN REPORT

Wolfenden Report on Male Homosexuality in United Kingdom



Wolfenden Report on Male Homosexuality in United Kingdom

Introduction 

The Wolfenden Report signified a British revolution in the regulation of sex and socalled matters of “morality”. It made the first inroads into decriminalising homosexual sex since buggery was made a capital offence under Henry VIII. The Churchill Government established the Wolfenden Committee in 1954 in response to public concerns about a “serious increase” in women's street prostitution and male homosexual offences after the war. Chairman John Wolfenden lobbied for buggery to remain a crime between consenting adult men in private, and for the “lesser offence” of gross indecency in private to be decriminalised. However, after deliberating evidence of the practice of arrest and of the futility of gaoling homosexual men, Wolfenden was persuaded otherwise, and the Committee recommended the decriminalisation of both categories of offence when performed in private, along with a heightened punishment of women soliciting sex in public. The prostitution recommendations were enacted swiftly in the Street Offences Act 1959, but it took ten years of parliamentary prevarication before male homosexual acts were partially decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Discussion

Male homosexual tradition was for a extensive period offending in United Kingdom. It had been usually reviled and penalized by longish terms of detention. In criminal law their Lordships might eagerly be heard in judgement in such cases to state no vague view as to its unconstructive manipulation on the people. Looking back it seems that the current tolerability of homosexuality as a customary or preferable mode of behaviour at least in this Kingdom is only based on the conclusions of the Wolfenden1 report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution of 1957. This chose to neglect any investigation of deformity of the situation. Sir John Wolfenden had been a headmaster of public schools for 15 years. An important member of that query team was the Lord Chief Justice of that period. Soon after publication of the report, the psychiatric condition of homosexual distortion removed from the ruling list of criminal activity. (Dixon, 2010) 

A remarkable and humanistic document, the Wolfenden Report was published in 1957 by the British government. The report issued by a group headed by Baron John Frederick Wolfenden, a librarian and educator, author in 1932 of The Approach to Philosophy and a member of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution from 1954 to 1957. The report recommended the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. (Young, 2007) 

There must be a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business. Most of the report's recommendations implemented by 1967, and the British Medical Association endorsed it. The Catholic Church, although emphasizing that homosexuality is a sin, did recommend decriminalizing homosexuality.

In the United Kingdom, homosexuals classified as security risks during this time. Vern Bullough commissioned by then Humanist book review editor Warren Allen Smith to write a critique for the magazine. Bullough has marked the review as the beginning point of his becoming a historian of homosexuality. (Cherrett, 2010) 

Since the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (Wolfenden Report) in 1957 Britain has been confronted at various times with issues concerning homosexuality. Indeed, the recommendations expressed by Lord Wolfenden's committee were only implemented ten years later with the legalization of homosexual acts between ...