exual will sometimes
conceal a perverse inclination directed towards children under the cloak
of friendship or of an educational interest. I have previously referred
to the danger that the child, at a time of life when its own sexual
impulse is still undifferentiated, may sometimes reciprocate such a
feeling. When I recall the light-heartedness with which homosexual males
have acknowledged to me their experiences of sexual intercourse with
apprentice-boys, and with pupils attending the higher forms of our
secondary schools, and when I think of the readiness with which
homosexual women seek opportunities of sexual intercourse with immature
or partially mature girls, it seems to me that there are good grounds
for the utterance of an urgent warning. My experiences in this
department further lead me to believe that if Section 175 of the German
Imperial Criminal Code is to be repealed, a further alteration in the
Code will also be indispensable, namely, that the Age of Protection
(_Schutzalter_--equivalent to the _Age of Consent_ in the English
Criminal Law Amendment Act) should be raised to the completion of the
eighteenth year, and that the protection should apply, not merely to the
actions now specified in Section 175 as "unnatural vice," but to all
acts of sexual impropriety in the widest sense of the term. Recently
this proposal has been approved by a resolution of the Reichstag.[151]

There are certain additional points about which it is unnecessary to
write here, for the reason that these have all been considered in some
appropriate connexion earlier in this book. For example, I have insisted
upon the importance of anyone who possesses children's confidence taking
steps for the removal of corrupted children from the environment of
uncorrupted ones.

Where we have reason to believe, in the case of a particular child, that
a perverse mode of sexual sensibility is developing, we shall
occasionally find it preferable rather to attempt to hinder the growth
of the perversion, than to try to check the general manifestations of
the sexual impulse. Thus, in the case of a boy of fourteen, who is
continually affected with homosexual imaginings, we shall find it far
more difficult to repress sexual manifestations altogether, than to
divert the homosexual sensibility into heterosexual channels. If a boy
affected in this way be thrown much into the society of girls, or
conversely, a girl into the society of boys (at dances, games