onships. Everyday experience shows that in many cases the elder
person is of such an age that there can be no doubt upon this point. And
apart from this, it is not usual to find that it is the younger person
who makes the sexual advances. In most of the cases which have come
under my own notice it was unquestionably the elder who began to lead
the younger astray. The matter is not as harmless as Carpenter makes
out. The same considerations apply to sexual intercourse with immature
girls. Beyond doubt, there are many girls who meet sexual advances
halfway, owing to the premature development of their own sexual impulse;
and some such girls go more than halfway. A common practice of
paedophiles is to begin by arousing sexual excitement in the child,
either by manual stimulation, or else by showing the child erotic
pictures, or by reading to it from an erotic book. We must also admit
that in certain cases the child meets sexual advances halfway, not so
much under the stimulus of its own sexual impulse, but for other
reasons; for example, the child may be following the instructions of its
parents, who regard their child as a marketable commodity, either
because they have been well paid by the paedophile, or because they wish
to use the child as an instrument in a blackmailing scheme. The point
last mentioned is one of great importance--the fact that intercourse on
the part of a grown person with a child under fourteen years of age is
sometimes deliberately instigated by the child's parents or guardians,
with the sole object of securing thereby a permanent income from
blackmail. In other cases, the instigation may not come from the parents
or guardians, or not directly from these, but from professional
procuresses, who have undertaken to satisfy the desires of sexual
perverts. I may refer in this connexion to the _Pall Mall Gazette_
revelations of the London of nearly a generation ago.

False accusations on the part of children, especially on the part of
little girls, who allege themselves to have been the subjects of sexual
assaults, have been mentioned in an earlier part of this work, but the
matter is one of such outstanding importance, that its further
consideration will not come amiss. An experienced Berlin lawyer has
recently emphasised this danger.[120] He shows that it is a regular
practice to utilise the existence of certain punishments as a means of
getting undesired persons out of the way, by bringing false accusati