Deny, Normalise and Obfuscate: The Government Response to the Virginity Testing Practice and Other Physical Abuses

Abstract

On 1 February 1979, journalist Melanie Phillips broke the story about the practice of virginity testing on the front page of The Guardian. The Labour Party coming out of the ‘winter of discontent’ and facing a slump in the polls in the lead-up to the May general election, sought to lessen the harm this claim could do the government of James Callaghan. Home Secretary Merlyn Rees made a public statement that this was essentially an isolated incident, claiming that it had only happened twice before in the previous decade and that it was a regrettable outcome of a ‘normal’ medical examination. However, over the next month, further details emerged that seemed to contradict Rees’s account, suggesting that more cases had occurred in British High Commissions in South Asia and that various government officials had prior knowledge of this practice happening. Questions about the frequency of these gynaecological examinations were raised in the media, by migrant groups and by MPs, such as Jo Richardson, in Parliament. Documents uncovered by the authors from the FCO files at the National Archives show that the government became aware in March 1979 that the number of ‘tests’ that had occurred up until that time were likely to be more than 80, and that by 1980, when Willie Whitelaw had taken over as the new Conservative Home Secretary, it was suspected that more than 120 such tests had been carried out on the Indian subcontinent.