Child sex trafficking has a long history in London

 

The Victorian sex abuse scandal that shocked Britain and changed the law – long before Epstein

Published: April 17, 2026 8.00am EDT

The media exposes a scandal – a network of rich, powerful men are abusing teenage girls. Outrage spreads fast and the public demands that authorities reveal the evidence and bring the perpetrators to justice. Yet the system shields many of those involved, and few face serious consequences. This isn’t about Jeffrey Epstein – it’s a scandal that unfolded in Victorian London.

Our research focuses on the women and girls at the centre of those events. In July 1885, a series of newspaper articles ran in the Pall Mall Gazette with the headline The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. They exposed systematic abuse and trafficking of young girls. From the day the articles were published, there was uproar. Parliament was inundated with petitions and there was a huge demonstration in Hyde Park.

MPs were forced to respond, passing legislation which raised the age at which girls could consent to sexual intercourse from 13 to 16. Records of those events are held in the Women’s Library at London School of Economics, and some are displayed in its current exhibition, The Women’s Library at 100.

---

Read more: Victims have told us the worst of Epstein’s crimes for decades – and they are still being ignored

The Maiden Tribute was the final step in years of campaigning for a higher age of consent. Before then, legislation which aimed to raise it had languished in parliament. According to rumours among campaigners and politicians, this was because some MPs were guilty themselves of abusing young girls. Indeed, opponents openly argued that such legislation would expose their own sons to the risk of prosecution.

Frustrated activists had turned to W.T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Feminist campaigner Josephine Butler, leading Salvation Army members and Stead undertook an investigation of child sexual exploitation, visiting everywhere from brothels to rescue homes. Stead even “purchased” a 13-year-old girl named Eliza Armstrong and sent her to France (in the Salvation Army’s care) to prove that such procuring and trafficking was possible.

Butler noted in a letter to a friend: “O! What horrors we have seen!”

The London scandal

The resulting articles took the reader through the process of recruiting and abusing young women. They portrayed a whole industry devoted to the exploitation of the girls: procurers and brothel-keepers, doctors who “certified” virginity and midwives who ministered to their wounds afterwards.

The series was swiftly syndicated around the world as “the London scandal” and people speculated on the identities of the men described. In New York, it was rumoured that many prominent American men visited the notorious brothel madam Mrs Jeffries’ houses. Some of her clients were named in the campaigning newspaper The Sentinel as MPs, Lords and Dukes, the Prince of Wales and King Leopold II of Belgium.

Popular outrage forced MPs to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act by August. As well as raising the age of consent for girls, the legislation rushed to introduce new offences of procurement and brothel keeping.

Some of these offences further criminalised women rather than those exploiting them. For example, if two or more sex workers operated in shared premises for safety, they could become liable for brothel-keeping – that is still the law today. A late amendment introduced by Henry Labouchere MP also outlawed all consensual sexual activity between men; the new offence was used to convict the writer Oscar Wilde a decade later.

Ironically, only Stead and several of his colleagues were convicted as a result of these events. They were imprisoned for the kidnapping of Eliza Armstrong. Meanwhile, the men accused by campaigners of exploiting underage girls were unprosecuted and unpunished.

---

Read more: Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a work of art activism beloved by Banksy

---

Lessons for today

There is much to be learned from this history. First, some very influential people do not want child sexual exploitation eradicated, making effective reform difficult to achieve. It was only through public pressure that new laws were finally passed in 1885. However, a combination of haste, conservatism and deference to elite male interests meant that the law was deeply flawed and moralistic.

Second, the victims and survivors of abuse are too easily blamed, ignored or politically exploited. Reporting of the Maiden Tribute scandal furthered specific ends. In France and America, it was used as proof of aristocratic degeneracy. Meanwhile, the exploited girls were dismissed by respectable society as “fallen”. As the MP Charles Hopwood said in the House of Commons, working-class “girls who went upon the streets … had a familiarity with these things from an early age and were quite able to take care of themselves”.

Victim-blaming drew attention away from procurers, such as Mrs Jeffries, who offered girls a route out of extreme poverty or lured them with false promises of legitimate jobs. The trafficking described in the 1880s used similar recruitment techniques and enforcement methods to today. Even those girls who benefited financially from their exploitation suffered greatly in their mental and physical health.

Third, the establishment tries very hard to cover up such abuse. In Victorian London, policemen were paid off and one who refused to be bought was constructively dismissed. Earlier in 1885, campaigners had brought a private prosecution against Mrs Jeffries because the police refused to take the case any further; the judge frequently reminded witnesses not to name clients; and Mrs Jeffries pleaded guilty mid-trial, before her VIP clientele was exposed. She escaped with a fine rather than imprisonment. In 1887, Mrs Jeffries would be prosecuted again under the new Act; her clients were not.

It is not easy to make the powerful face consequences. Of the leading figures exposed in the Maiden Tribute, the only person who ended up in jail was a woman: Mary Jeffries. The men faced no reckoning, except for gossip about their involvement.

The history, then, offers useful guidance for the present: put pressure on those in power to take effective and swift action, do not trust politicians exploiting abuse to gain power, rigorously uncover institutional corruption and ensure that money and influence do not protect abusers from rightful consequences. Most importantly, believe and centre the voices of victims and survivors.

My call to blog about child sexual abuse

 

The Call

Last week the leader of the intercessory prayer group I have attended since 2000, asked me to share how God called me to ministry. I wrote this very brief story to prepare.

I lived the first 4 years of my life in my grandmother’s home. Granny had a policy that you didn’t touch a child more than absolutely necessary or you would turn them in sissies – especially boys. Unfortunately, one relative didn’t obey Granny’s dictum, and I was sexually abused multiple times at the age of three. Aside from sexual abuse, I was physically abused a couple of times and emotionally abused for much of my youth.

Mom and Dad got back together when I was four, and we lived a fairly normal life from then on, except that there was no bonding between my parents and me, or between them and my three older sisters. I grew up in a full house, but one devoid of real love or intimacy. The first person I bonded with was my daughter at age two.

Perhaps it was this familiarity with loneliness and the need to have someone who cares for you, that prepared me for fostering children for 15 years, starting in my thirties. In the end, my wife and I burnt out completely and even had to give up custody of our adopted special-needs child.

We spent ten years attempting to recover from the depression, anxiety, and exhaustion with only partial success. It was then that such horror stories of the three teen girls kidnapped from the streets of Cleveland and held for ten years, being raped almost daily; and the story of Anna Kampusch, the Austrian pre-teen kidnapped and held in an underground bunker for most of the next decade, and of course, raped daily, affected me.

My sympathy morphed into curiosity as I researched the internet to see how much of this evil really existed. I was horrified to find out that child sexual abuse was rampant throughout the entire world, and yet, nobody wanted to talk about or read about it, not even Christians. This meant that very few Christians were praying for this, which I decided was the worst atrocity in the world.

Over the past 12 years, I have come to the conclusion that God will allow man’s will to be done even when that will is egregiously evil, unless there is a significant will countering the evil, which might appear as Christians praying against it. But few Christians are praying about this, and most don’t even want to hear about it.

I associate with one of the largest churches in western Canada and yet when I started putting brief stories of children being sexually abused on their prayer website, I was kicked off the website. The administrator and Prayer Pastor felt the stories were inappropriate. I was devastated. I realized that is how the Lord must feel about it, too.

I believe God has called me to help spread the message of the incredible horror of child sexual abuse and the desperate need there is for Christians to pray for them.

In the western world, about 1/3^rd of girls will suffer from one of myriad forms of child sex abuse. In Africa, South Asia, and South and Central America, the numbers fall between one half and two thirds of all girls when you count all the different types of child sexual abuse.

My Child Sexual Abuse blog has been read in more than 150 countries with the total number of pages viewed at more the 2 million. If it has made any difference in the world, I won’t likely ever know this side of Heaven, but I’ll keep trying. God would expect nothing less.

https://northwoodssaveachild.blogspot.com/

@GaryWmMyers

The Anglican Church of Canada and Their Response to Residential Schools Horror

The video below is about Canada's role in residential schools for First Nations children. 

The Anglican Church of Canada played a role in this dark chapter of our history, and began taking steps to acknowledge the history and begin the healing in the 1990s. Here's a link to a summary from the national church's web site: http://www.anglican.ca/tr/schools/

Then-Archbishop Michael Peers issued an apology on behalf of the national church in 1993: http://www.anglican.ca/tr/apology/english/

I was General Synod 2004 in Waterloo, ON when First Nations observers were present for the first official time (I think), and were telling their stories of what happened to them and their families because of residential schools. 

At the same meeting, members were discussing what was to be done about litigation, and someone asked the General Synod Chancellor, Canon Bob Falby, whether the issuing of the apology had been 'wise', and whether it had made us more to be sued. 

The Chancellor very wisely said (and I was proud to be there to hear it) "Who Cares?! It was the Right Thing To Do!". We don't usually applaud at General Synod, but I seem to remember we did then.

Above written by my sister-in-law, Tanya Moxley, who is daughter to Sue Moxley, who was the first female Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada.

video 2:43

A couple weeks ago a Conservative Senator Lynne Beyak rather foolishly announced that there were many good people doing good things in the Residential Schools and they should be recognized for such. The response condemning her remarks came from many places including the Anglican Church which actually ran many of the schools.

Leaders of the Anglican Church of Canada have penned a strongly worded letter to Lynn Beyak, the Conservative senator who recently mounted a defence of the Indian residential school system, to denounce her remarks and take ownership of the atrocities committed in the church-run schools.

The head of the Anglican Church of Canada, Fred Hiltz, wrote a strongly worded letter Monday condemning Senator Lynn Beyak's defence of the Indian residential school system. (Anglican Church of Canada)

In a letter sent Monday, church leaders said they were "dismayed" that Beyak would try and shed a positive light on the system, telling her, rather, "the overall view is grim. It is shadowed and dark; it is sad and shameful."

"Senator Beyak, you are quite right in saying that for a small minority of survivors, their personal experiences of residential school were 'good.' But in much greater numbers, the personal experiences of children who were housed in those schools were 'bad — very bad in fact," the letter, written by the Most Rev. Fred Hiltz, the archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Right Rev. Mark MacDonald, the national Indigenous Anglican bishop, and the church's general secretary, Michael Thompson, said.

The church leaders note children were forcibly removed from their homes, subjected to exacting punishment for speaking their native tongues and were subjected to "rampant" physical, sexual and mental abuse.

"There was nothing good about children going missing and no report being filed. There was nothing good about burying children in unmarked graves far from their ancestral homes. It heaped cruelty upon cruelty for the child taken and the parent left behind," they wrote.

Children pictured at Gordon's Reserve school in Saskatchewan, run by the Anglican Church of Canada, have a meal in 1945. (General Synod Archives/Anglican Church of Canada)

Between 1820 and 1969, the Anglican Church ran three dozen "Indian" and "Eskimo" residential schools and hostels, many of which were built by the federal government. As the church itself concedes, the goal of the schools was the assimilation of educated Indigenous peoples into the non-aboriginal world — "the 'savage' child would surely be re-made into the 'civilized' adult."

Beyak, an Ontario senator appointed by former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2013, said she has spoken to Indigenous people who have told her of the positive experiences they had while at the schools, adding many have kept their Christian faith after it was imparted to them by school administrators.

Actually, I know a few such people myself and at least one has told me he would not change a thing in his past if it meant that he never found Jesus Christ. But Residential Schools were not a model for evangelism that Jesus  Himself would ever have approved.

In a meeting of the Senate's Aboriginal Peoples committee last month, Beyak said, "I was disappointed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report in that it didn't focus on the good. The people I talk to are Christians."

"Conditions in these schools led to fires, to outbreaks of diphtheria, to gas leaks. Children died. We cannot speak about the residential schools without acknowledging these truths. To do so would once more silence the witness of thousands of children — some of whom never returned home," the leaders write in response to the senator's assertions.

The letter notes that a former leader of their church, Archbishop Michael Peers, issued an apology to survivors in 1993, more than a decade before the federal government acknowledged the destructive nature of its assimilationist policies.

Hiltz, the most senior archbishop in Canada, added later in an interview that the church accepts it played a hand in this dark chapter in Canadian history, but it is resolved to do what it can to foster a spirit of reconciliation. Beyak's comments hinder that effort, he said.

"What I would say to the senator, with respect, is that she has a responsibility, I believe, as a person in public office to make sure Canadians are hearing the whole story," he said in an interview with Rosemary Barton on CBC's Power & Politics.

"What this points out is that there are a number of Canadians, who, I think, need to make a concerted effort to educate themselves about this sad and lingering legacy in our country."

Hiltz said Beyak is correct to point our many schoolchildren had positive experiences — he said he knows some of them, and they are "actually grateful for that" — but many more had negative experiences that subjected First Nations communities to intergenerational trauma.

Trauma includes, unfortunately, intergenerational child sex abuse, which, I thoroughly believe has a great deal to do with the disturbing rates of child suicides on many remote reserves.

The Anglican Church has taken the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action seriously, Hiltz said, and has formally adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes provisions on spiritual matters, including the right to practise, develop and teach their own spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies.

Indigenous peoples make up about four per cent of the Canadian Anglican population, according to the church, and about 225 congregations have all or nearly all Indigenous membership. There are approximately 130 Indigenous Anglican priests in Canada, many of them working on a volunteer basis.

The Anglican Church has had some sort of relationship with Indigenous people in Canada since 1753 when the Rev. Thomas Wood came as a missionary to the Mi'kmaq people.

As I expressed to my sister-in-law, the Anglican response to the horror of residential schools is very refreshing after posting many reports from around the world on church responses to child sex abuse. Accepting responsibility and putting the survivors and their sorely affected children and grand-children above the reputation of the church itself is a clear sign that there is almost certainly a strong relationship between the leaders of the Anglican Church in Canada and the Lord they serve.