Catherine Booth Quotes

Contrary to most state laws, the Catholic Church considered the age of consent to be as young as 12.

At the very least the [Mormon] church should make it clear that religious leaders cannot have sex with young girls just because an angel told them that it was OK to do so.

I was sent to a camp in Maryland for three weeks when I was nine years old, and that was my first training on how to sexually please men. I was through a training course, like a seminar…. I was taught to talk to older men and encouraged to become friendly with older men and eventually, when I was old enough, I was sent out into what they called the operational field, and I would be photographed [in sexually compromising scenes] with [foreign] government and agency officials

There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children. I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims' accounts.

No child should be born to work at the cost of his childhood and freedom..

Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century Fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many.

No being who is not too degraded or too utterly mentally and morally diseased to be a safe person to be at large, could wish that a little child, a baby girl fourteen, twelve, aye, ten years of age should be made as is the case in many of our states, the legal and rightful prey of grown men. There is no argument. There is no basis for a difference of opinion. No man on earth would pass or want passed such a law for his own child, for his own sister, for anyone for whom he cared. It is too gross, it is too inhuman for words. No legislature on the earth, if its discussions were open to women, if women were present at its sessions would ever have passed such acts.

It is a fact that there are now scattered throughout practically every section of the United States a vast number of men and women whose sole occupation consists in enticing, tricking, or coercing young women and girls into immoral lives and then either living directly off of their illicit earnings or transferring them for a consideration to others for a similar purpose.

The exploitation of children is both easy and profitable.

Child marriage does not seem to be confined only to the mountains of Tennessee. The marriage of the little nine-year-old girl in that state, however, brought to light the marriage of a twelve-year-old girl in New York State. It seems inconceivable that parents should countenance a practice of this kind unless food is so short that one mouth taken out of the home counterbalances all other arguments. Certainly no one in their sane senses would want a child of nine to be married, and the publicity which has attended this marriage we may well hope will result not only in the passing but in the enforcement of laws requiring that children under a certain definite age may not be married. We have all heard with horror of the child marriages in India, and it is rather a shock to find that we are open to the same criticism in our extremely modern country.

I don't believe that sex with 13-year-olds is okay.

And at some point who's to say that you cannot have sex with a child some point.

To ensure that children are protected, the abuse and exploitation of children must be brought to light and those who violate children brought to justice.

I do not support child abuse. It's a disgusting crime of which I am a victim.

In Thailand the sexual behavior of Thai men accepts prostitution. Every class of Thai men accept it, practice it. So they don't see it as a problem. So when it comes to the policymakers, who are mostly men, of course, they don't see this as a problem. They know there are many women who are brought into prostitution in Thailand. They know that some are treated with brutal violence. But they don't think it's a terrible picture. They think it's just the unlucky cases. And, because of the profit, I think there are many people with an interest involved, so they try to turn a blind eye to this problem

The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America … In the Lancashire cotton mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood), children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural labourers were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first effect of machinery in England.

And thought the nation ne'er would thrive Till all the whores were burnt alive.

Sometimes not all adolescent victims [of sexually predatory priests] are so “innocent”. Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise.

The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. … In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination. Unfortunately the wrong man was generally assassinated. The true criminal was an absentee, and his agent was shot instead of him

You don’t play around with the lives of children.

Since 17-year-olds can join the military, there is no way our legislature is going to tell [them] they’re old enough to risk their lives for our country but they’re too young to get married.

We still have a soft approach on the perpetrators of crimes like worst forms of child labour.

Children shouldn't have to suffer for any reason.

When it comes to gang-based child exploitation, it is self-evident to anyone who cares to look that if you look at all the recent high-profile cases, there is a high proportion of men that are of Pakistani heritage.

I'm not feeling R. Kelly. And I got a daughter, so I'm super not jacking R. Kelly at all.