moral delinquency among children and adolescents.

There is room for difference of opinion as to whether or not the ensuing
public discussion of sexual offending was desirable. On the one hand it
provoked many conversations on the subject between children themselves
and a noticeable desire to purchase newspapers on the way to and from
school. On the other hand the focusing of attention on the existence of
the peril to school children caused many parents, temporarily at any
rate, to take a greater interest in the training and care of their
children than they might otherwise have taken; it caused some heads of
schools to arrange for sex instruction; and it also resulted in a public
demand that something should be done to bring about a better state of
morality in the community.

Following hard upon the newspaper reports of these cases in the Hutt
Valley there was the news that two girls, each aged about 16 years had
been arrested in Christchurch on a charge of murdering the mother of
one of them. It soon became widely known (and this fact was established
at their subsequent trial) that these girls were abnormally homosexual
in behaviour.

There were also published in the press extracts from the annual report
of the Justice Department to the effect that sexual crime in New Zealand
was, per head of population, half as much again as the sexual crime in
England and Wales. The reasons why the Committee does not accept this
statement at its face value are stated later under Section IV (2).


=(2) Press Reports from Overseas=