Sexual Offences Act 1967

Sexual Offences Act, 1967

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Long title	An Act to amend the law of England and Wales relating to homosexual acts.
Citation	1967 c. 60
Introduced by	Leo Abse and Lord Arran
Territorial extent	England & Wales
Dates
Royal assent	27 July 1967
Other legislation
Amended by	Sexual Offences Act 2003
Relates to	Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000
Status: Amended
Text of statute as originally enacted
Revised text of statute as amended

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom (citation 1967 c. 60). It decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21. The Act applied only to England and Wales and did not cover the Merchant Navy or the Armed Forces. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Scotland by the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 and in Northern Ireland by the Homosexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 1982.

Legislative history

In the 1960s, one MP, Leo Abse, and a peer, Lord Arran, put forward proposals to change the way in which criminal law treated homosexual men by means of the Sexual Offences Bill. This attempt to liberalise the law relating to male homosexuality can be placed in a context of the rising number of prosecutions of homosexual men.

In his 1965 Sexual Offences Bill, Lord Arran drew heavily upon the findings of the Wolfenden Report (1957) which recommended the decriminalisation of certain homosexual offences.

The Wolfenden committee had been set up to investigate homosexuality and prostitution in the mid 1950s, and included on its panel a judge, a psychiatrist, an academic and various theologians. They came to the conclusion (with one dissenter) that criminal law could not credibly intervene in the private sexual affairs of consenting adults in the privacy of their homes. The position was summarised by the committee as follows: “unless a deliberate attempt be made by society through the agency of the law to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private that is in brief, not the law's business” (Wolfenden Report, 1957).

There was no political impetus after the publication of the Wolfenden report to legislate on this matter, but by 1967 the Labour Government of the time showed support for Lord Arran's mode of liberal thought. It was considered that criminal law should not penalise homosexual men, already the object of ridicule and derision. The comments of Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary at the time, captured the government's attitude: "those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of shame all their lives" (quoted during parliamentary debate by The Times on 4 July 1967).

The Bill received royal assent on 27 July 1967 after an intense late night debate in the House of Commons.

Lord Arran, in an attempt to minimise criticisms that the legislation would lead to further public debate and visibility of issues relating to homosexual civil rights made the following qualification to this "historic" milestone: "I ask those [homosexuals] to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity… any form of ostentatious behaviour now or in the future or any form of public flaunting would be utterly distasteful… [And] make the sponsors of this bill regret that they had done what they had done" (quoted during Royal Assent of the bill by The Times newspaper on 28 July 1967). The legal consequence of the legislation is often described as partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality as the act introduced a strict exemption from prosecution (distinct from a full decriminalisation), the implication of this being that outside this exemption, technically speaking, homosexuality continued to be a punishable offence in and of itself.

Peter Tatchell in his 1992 book Europe in The Pink claims that the legislation facilitated an increase in prosecutions against homosexual men.

Debate

No subsequent reconsideration of the issue of male homosexuality in statutory law took place in England and Wales until the late 1970s.

In 1979, the Home Office Policy Advisory Committee's Working Party report Age of Consent in relation to Sexual Offences recommended that the age of consent for homosexual offences should be 18. This was rejected at the time, in part due to fears that further decriminalisation would serve only to encourage younger men to experiment sexually with other men, a choice that some at the time claimed would place such an individual outside of wider society.

Amendments

• The age of consent of 21 for homosexual males set by the 1967 Act was reduced to 18 by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 after an attempt to equalise the age of consent with that of the heterosexual age of consent of 16 introduced as an amendment by the then Conservative MP Edwina Currie narrowly failed.
• In 2000, the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 were invoked to ensure the passage of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 which equalised that age of consent at 16 for both homosexual and heterosexual behaviours throughout the UK.
• The Sexual Offences Act 2003, though subject to some controversy, overhauled the way sexual offences are dealt with by the police and courts, replacing provisions in the Sexual Offences Act 1956 as well as the 1967 Act. The offences of gross indecency and buggery have been repealed from statutory law, and sexual activity between more than two men is no longer a crime in the entirety of the United Kingdom. As a result of the 2003 Act, the vast majority of the 1967 Act has been repealed.

See also

• Sexual Offences Act
• LGBT rights in the United Kingdom

References

• Tatchell, P Europe in the Pink London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992
• The Times in Microfilm Facsimile Periodical Publications, London The Times 1967 (available in digital form via JISC)
• Wolfenden, J (chair) The Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (cmnd 247) HMSO, 1958
• Coming out of the dark ages, Geraldine Bedell, The Observer, 24 June 2007
• Grey, Antony Quest for Justice, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992