“A mechanical view of sex outside the context of love and the family”, Contraception, censorship and the Brook Advisory Centre in Britain (1964-1985)

In 1972, a cinema advert publicizing the work of the Brook Advisory Centre (BAC)--the first center in Britain to provide contraceptive advice for unmarried people--was screened at different cinema locations in London. The short clip showed a young, heterosexual couple walking along a path surrounded by greenery in a forest. They stop against a tree and hold each other tightly, then resume walking and smile at each other, while the young man protectively embraces the young woman. In the background, a voice explains euphemistically to the viewer, “When you care a lot and want to show each other how you feel, it’s natural to worry about what might happen if you are not careful. Don’t keep your questions to yourself--talk to each other, then talk to somebody at the Brook Advisory Centre.”¹ The clip ended with the slogan “Brook Advisory Centre--helpful people who have helpful answers.” This clip never overtly explained what the BAC was and how it could help young people. Indeed, due to fears of censorship, the advert did not use the words “sexual” or “contraception,” instead conveying an enigmatic and cryptic message. This lack of explicit reference to the nature of the service was picked up by the press; the coverage took an amused tone, asking whether it was an advert for cigarettes or contraception.²

This example illustrates the powerful taboo that shrouded sexual information for young people in euphemisms in Britain at a time when mass media, politicians and contemporary commentators were arguing that sexual mores were loosening for young and unmarried people and sex was increasingly used in commercials to sell products, creating a new form of sexualized consumerism.³ Until the mid-1980s, any explicit language about contraception in publicity targeting young people was deemed offensive to the public and therefore censored by various bodies and organizations. This paper uses five public health initiatives developed by BAC, four poster and TV advertisement campaigns, and an educational teaching pack as case studies in order to analyze how censorship hindered the spread of “scientific,” or what Brook members called “accurate” (as opposed to “moral”), sexual information. This “accurate” information, as this paper shows, referred to medical information about the practicalities of contraception and the functioning of the sexual organs. “Moral” referred to information placed within a framework that exalted heterosexual love, marriage, and commitment.

This paper contributes to the scholarship that has analyzed the various resistances to the “permissive society” in Britain between the 1960s and the 1980s.⁴ A focus on BAC’s work provides an interesting case study, as it both mirrored key changes in terms of the progressive but not linear liberalization of sexuality that was happening in Western Europe more generally and retained some peculiarities of the British context, notably its debate around the “permissive society.”

In the 1960s, the social changes that unfolded were referred to as the “permissive society” by contemporary commentators, such as sociologists and journalists.⁵ This “permissive society” was characterized, among other elements, by a more relaxed and tolerant attitude toward sexual mores perceptible through, for instance, the progressive passing of legislation on consent and censorship (1959), abortion and some homosexual sex (1967), the 1967 Family Planning Act, which allowed but did not require local authorities to provide birth control to all women, regardless of their marital status, and the final achievement of no-fault divorce in 1970.⁶ However, the notion of “permissiveness” has been nuanced by several historians, who have emphasized the continuity of certain traditional values such as the double standard demanding that young women were still expected to be virgins when entering marriage and that marriage, not a career, remained the key goal for teenage girls.⁹

Nevertheless, the contemporary qualification of permissiveness gave rise to fierce attacks on the perceived decrease in moral values. While the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 was perceived as a key milestone for decensorship, obscenity prosecutions of books by the Home Office were numerous in the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting resistance to social and sexual changes.¹⁰ In this context, youth sexuality became a magnet for criticism. Sex education was an easy target for moral campaigners as it not only invited concerns about the young, but was also partially funded by public money through government grants, such as those from the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS). Therefore, sex education was under considerable pressure.

Historians and sociologists have studied the controversy surrounding sex education in Britain during the twentieth century. Lesley Hall has argued that there existed “a persistent reluctance of all political parties in Britain to intervene in sexual matters” and that schools were reluctant to incorporate sex education into their curriculum.¹¹ Up until the 1960s, advocates of sex education presented it as a public health measure to combat the spread of venereal diseases and as a tool to reinforce traditional sexual roles.¹² After the war, the responsibility for sex education was shared between the Departments of Health and Education. While the Department of Health was in favor of developing policy on the subject, the Department of Education, fearing controversy, resisted the idea. The two Departments sub-contracted the responsibility to the Central Council for Health Education, which became the Health Education Council in 1968. The latter worked with independent voluntary agencies such as the National Marriage Guidance Council, the Family Planning Association and later the Brook Advisory Centre in order to train and provide resources for teachers.

From the 1970s onwards, tensions crystalized in the wider society around competing views about the responsibility for sex education and its content. Historians have explored powerful lobbies such the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, created by Mary Whitehouse, which claimed that it would “clean up” the BBC, and the Responsible Society, a moral conservative pressure group created in 1971 by Dr Stanley Ellison, whose main goal was restoring traditional values and who campaigned against school sex education and contraceptive information.¹³ The latter vocally stated that sex education was contributing to the decline in the morality of British society and undermining the family. However, sex education was not the only target. Publicity about contraception was also an object of censorship.

Building on this research, this paper shows how censorship played a role in the resistances against the “permissive society.” It illustrates that censorship was complicated and confused in its exercise. The jurisdiction of censorship was not always clearly defined. This confusion rendered BAC’s work even more challenging, but provides interesting insights into the way that tensions between the local and national scales shaped censorship.

In addition, this paper analyzes how censorship imposed constraints on BAC’s work and the related organized resistance by BAC members. Drawing on archival material relating to BAC, published leaflets and mass media, this paper shows the proactivity and creativity of BAC members in trying to circumvent obstacles to disseminating information about the kinds of advice they could offer, and the relentless extent to which they tried to alter the way censorship worked in Britain. By focusing on two different types of attempts to spread information about their services and contraception--the unsuccessful attempts of BAC to use television and bus advertisements as a channel of information, and their educational material which was successfully distributed--this paper reveals what was deemed legitimate and acceptable in terms of sexuality in British society in the years following the so-called sexual revolution. It shows that despite a common understanding of the urgency to tackle teenage pregnancy amongst experts, activists, doctors and politicians, openly discussing the means to reduce teenage pregnancies without placing them within a moral framework remained controversial. By studying the institutional reaction to BAC’s educational and promotional work, it becomes possible to uncover the engrained anxieties about youth sexuality and the ways that censorship and the powerful conservative lobbies worked against attempts to reduce the abortion rate and unwanted pregnancies. This paper first sketches the history of the BAC before turning to their advertisement campaigns on public transport, and their attempt to advertise on television. Finally, it moves on to address the controversies surrounding a teaching pack created by BAC.

Brief History of the Brook Advisory Centre

In 1964, the first Brook Advisory Centre opened in London. Its aims were “the prevention and the mitigation of the suffering caused by unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion by educating young persons in matter[s] of sex and contraception and developing among them a sense of responsibility in regard to sexual behaviours.”¹⁴ The center broke with the interwar and postwar tradition of providing birth control to married women only.¹⁵ Until then, the Family Planning Association (FPA) and the Marie Stopes Centre were the main providers of contraceptive information and sexual health services for married women. This type of counselling was also offered by the National Marriage Guidance Council and its Catholic counterpart, the Catholic Advice Marriage Bureau.¹⁷ When the birth control activist Marie Stopes died in 1958, Helen Brook, a member of the FPA, was asked to direct the Marie Stopes clinic in London. She took the opportunity to try a new experiment. In 1962, she started to advise unmarried women on contraception, and later set up sessions for young people, girls and young couples. These sessions were kept secret from the board of directors of the Marie Stopes Memorial Foundation and no publicity was made to attract clients. The following year, Helen Brook told the board of this, and the latter agreed to sponsor, as a social experiment, a young people’s advisory session on the top floors of the clinic building, as long as these sessions were discreet, no publicity was made about it, and they were under the supervision of a doctor.¹⁸ These sessions also arose from concerns that middle-class and better-educated girls were becoming pregnant out of wedlock.¹⁹

Meanwhile, in 1964, the FPA recognized the need to address teenage sexuality, but claimed that it was not at that point ready to accept a new responsibility, and that the care of the unmarried, with special emphasis on the young, should be left to the Brook Advisory Centres.²¹ The FPA, aiming to distance itself from youth sexuality and to keep its hard-won legitimacy with the political and medical establishment and financial support, tasked Brook with opening an independent center.²² The opening of Brook Centres in London in 1964 and then in Cambridge (1966), Birmingham (1966), Bristol (1968) and Edinburgh (1968), to name a few, made contraception available to young unmarried people. The centers recruited doctors, social workers and activists in order to provide information about contraception to young people. While there was a steady increase in clients’ attendance, reports from BAC continually underlined the difficulties in reaching out to the young people most in need of help. Schoolgirls and university students were thought to be especially in need of advice, since living away from home opened up space for sexual experimentation. But the category of those “in need of help” was flexible. It comprised those who were sexually active but did not use birth control since they found it difficult to plan ahead; they were usually depicted as teenagers aged 14-18. This category also included those ignorant about contraception and those who were “socially deprived.” The former referred to young people with learning disabilities and the latter referred to working-class young women and young people from Black and Minority ethnic backgrounds.

Pushback from the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and conservative lobbies such as the Responsible Society made it difficult for the BAC to publicize their work and circulate information on contraception.

Advertising Contraception and Censorship

In 1973, the National Health Service Reorganisation Act made contraceptive advice and prescriptions free of charge irrespective of age or marital status. The following year, the DHSS memorandum of guidance on provision of a comprehensive family planning service retained a key role for Brook and underlined the necessity to have a specialist advice service relating to under-16s. In 1977, the National Health Service Act imposed a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that a full range of contraceptive services was available free of charge. Despite these changes, young people’s access to information about contraception and contraceptives remained a controversial topic. This was especially obvious from the censorship of public health campaigns that were aimed at young people and designed to provide information on birth control services. Faced with a high level of unwanted pregnancies and legal abortions, BAC tirelessly tried to counter these trends by expanding its client base in order to reach the young people most at risk of unwanted pregnancies. Means of doing this included using the media as a powerful channel of information and becoming visible in the public spaces used by young people, with posters and leaflets publicizing BAC’s services in strategic locations. However, several campaigns by BAC were censored by the IBA and British Public Transport Advertising, considerably limiting the ability of BAC to attract new clients and make their services widely available.

Censorship relating to advertisement did soften during the period under study. Following the 1967 Family Planning Act, the British Code of Advertising Practice sanctioned the widespread advertising of contraceptives as long as “they did not contain anything deemed offensive to decency.”²³ In 1969, the IBA, the regulatory body for commercial television and radio, changed its code of advertising standards to allow the advertising of “official or officially sponsored family planning services” but not of specific contraceptive products or brands.²⁴ The outbreak of HIV and AIDS changed the situation by making condom use a more urgent public health issue, and advertising of condoms on British television, after much debate and controversy, was approved in 1986.²⁵ Similarly, in the early 1970s, the Newspaper Publishers’ Association left the decision of whether or not to publish advertisements for contraceptives to the discretion of individual editors.²⁶ Nevertheless, these changes in the regulation of advertisements left open space for interpretation that jeopardized BAC’s work in publicizing their services.

In their attempts at making their services widely known, locality played a key role in the censorship that the BAC faced. Local opposition proved successful in preventing the display of posters and advertisements. Birmingham provides a revealing example. For instance, in 1970 in Birmingham, BAC sent a poster to 130 headteachers of secondary schools in order to advertise its services. The poster depicted a young adult heterosexual couple in their early to mid-twenties with a close-up of their heads; the young man was leaning protectively towards the forehead of the young woman, kissing her. A caption read “Contraceptive advice for unmarried people, Birmingham Brook Advisory Centre,” and the address of the center in Birmingham was provided. Six headmasters displayed the poster, but one hesitated and referred the matter to the Chief Education Officer. As a result, the Department of Education sent a letter to all heads advising them not to display it. The Chairman of the City’s Education Committee, Ald. Sydney Dawes, described the poster as “an active encouragement to immorality.”²⁷

The City’s Education Committee’s opposition to the BAC was not new. There was a long tradition of opposition to birth control information and abortion in Birmingham, reflecting a specific local culture. Indeed, following the announcement that a BAC was to be opened in Birmingham in 1965, an intense debate had taken place in the columns of the local newspapers and amongst members of the City Council. The then Chairman of the City’s Education Committee, Nigel Cook, had strongly opposed BAC’s work, arguing that the clinic would “lead to a higher degree of promiscuity.”²⁸ In 1966, the Birmingham City Council Health Committee decided not to allow its health workers to distribute the center’s literature. because this would constitute a “tacit approval of pre-marital sex.”²⁹ Given the enduring opposition to BAC’s services present amongst Birmingham authorities, it was not surprising that the Education Committee forbade publicity for the center. Moreover, Birmingham was also famous for its doctors’ anti-abortion stances, led by Hugh McLaren, a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Birmingham;³⁰ furthermore, it was from Birmingham’s Town Hall that Mary Whitehouse and Norah Buckland launched their campaign to “clean up” the BBC through Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and later the Nationwide Festival of Light.³¹

BAC members lamented this attitude in the local newspaper, explaining how difficult it was for them to spread publicity, and some of them tried to challenge the decision. ³² For instance, the controversial Martin Cole, who was a founding member of Birmingham BAC, lecturer in genetics at Birmingham University and active member of the Abortion Law Reform Association, wrote to several headmasters to ask their opinion about the poster. The majority of the replies supported the City Education Committee’s decision. For instance, the headmistress of Lordswood Grammar Technical School for Girls answered, “I entirely agree with the City Council’s views, and in any case, had no intention of passing on the Centre’s literature. This I consider to be a matter of parents’ responsibility, not mine.”³³ Meanwhile, Theresa Stewart, a member of the City’s Education Committee, praised the BAC approach as practical, since there did after all exist situations in which schoolgirls were getting pregnant. She complained about the fact that BAC’s services were deemed to be “dirty” by the committee. Her opposition proved unsuccessful, and the posters were removed from secondary schools.³⁴

This opposition to the BAC’s promotional material lasted in spite of the 1972 Birmingham City Council’s endorsement of BAC’s work through its policy of free birth control advice for all. Indeed, a 1972 advertisement was banned in buses and railway stations by The West Midlands Transport Board. The advertisement stated “A contraceptive service for you at Brook” with the BAC’s phone number. Here, again, the words “contraceptive” posed problems. The West Midlands Transport Board asserted that advertisements for contraceptive advice were “controversial and liable to upset some passengers.”³⁵ The fear of offending passengers was plausibly connected to the stark opposition in Birmingham which continued despite the city council’s support for BAC; many conservative MPs and doctors were opposed to the work of BAC and believed that providing contraceptive information to young people would encourage a lowering of moral standards and condone promiscuity. The spokesman of the West Midlands Transport Board stated that he had received three letters from doctors urging him to maintain the ban on contraceptive advertisements, evidencing the controversial nature of the subject.³⁶ Similarly, a planned cinema advert, which would have included the wording “Brook Advisory Centre offers you a contraceptive service and help with emotional and sexual problems,” was rejected by all cinemas in Birmingham. Cinema advertisers stated that the words “contraceptive,” “sexual” and “emotional” would offend their audience. Brook offered to drop the use of “sexual” and “emotional,” but the cinema advertisers maintained their position.³⁷

Similarly, several campaigns by BAC using posters on buses were shut down by British Transport Advertising. In this case, censorship was applied via a national organization. In 1973 in Bristol, BAC members were informed that after two years, the advertisement in a railway station stating “BAC help the unmarried with birth control and pregnancy advice” was to be withdrawn. Caroline Woodroffe, the General Secretary of BAC, wrote to the Senior Sales Representative of British Transport Advertising Limited and suggested a different wording: “BAC help single people with birth control and pregnancy advice.” To support her request, she presented a series of evidence to show that “although birth control for the unmarried was once a sensitive subject, that had gone.”³⁸ To substantiate her point, she accompanied her letter with speeches and circulars from the Government about family planning policy and provision. These elements were all excerpts of the material from and debates around the 1973 NHS Reorganisation Act. For instance, she quoted the Secretary of State for Social Services, who had stated that information about services providing free contraception should be made widely available. She also mentioned the National Opinion Poll on population and birth control carried out in 1972, where more than 60% of 1920 electors had answered “yes” to the question “Do you think the Government should spend money on national education and publicity campaigns for birth control?”³⁹ Finally, she restated the fact that the government retained a central role for BAC in the provision of contraceptive advice.⁴⁰ Despite this effort to convince British Transport Advertising Limited on the grounds that public opinion and government policy were both changing dramatically, the advertisement was finally withdrawn because the words “unmarried” and “birth control” might be offensive to the travelling public. British Transport Advertising Limited’s policy implied that BAC had to use euphemisms, thereby undermining their strategy of attracting young people. As Julie Davidson, a journalist who published an article denouncing the censorship that BAC experienced, explained the term “family planning” did not speak to young people, as they did not associate it with their own sexual life; the last thing they wanted was to plan a family.⁴¹

The words “unmarried” and “single,” alongside “contraception” and “birth control,” remained taboo, even though government health policy had promised to make no distinction in terms of availability of contraception between the married and unmarried. Censorship hindered publicity for contraceptive advice, which testifies to the resistance to information on services, or what BAC called “honest” and “clear statements of their services” as opposed to euphemistic information.⁴² BAC members tried to oppose this censorship by asking MPs to draw attention to the issue in Parliament. Caroline Woodroffe wrote to the Labour MPs Arthur Palmer (Bristol) and Renée Short (Wolverhampton) for support in denouncing the censorship of advertisement on public transport. They both raised the issue, asking the Secretary of State for Social Services, Sir Keith Joseph, to send a circular about the need to advertise contraceptive services to British Transport. The latter refused, claiming it was not his jurisdiction.⁴³ As late as 1977, London Transport Advertising sill prohibited publicity for birth control clinics on public transport.⁴⁴

Anxious to counter the trend of unwanted pregnancies, the next move Helen Brook made was to contact Lady Plowden, the Chairman of the Independent Broadcast Authority, in 1976, suggesting the lifting of the ban on contraceptive advertisement. She argued, “IBA’s continuing ban on advertising contraceptive products means that we are still fighting with one hand held behind our back.”⁴⁵ She stressed the need to spread the message that young boys should also carry contraceptives to prevent young girls getting pregnant, and that advertisements for condoms should therefore be allowed. In addition, she underlined the fact that Brook’s work aligned with Government health policy. Lady Plowden replied, explaining that IBA supported the release of the TV advertisement by the Health Education Council created to encourage people to attend family planning clinics. The advertisement featured a conversation between an older and young woman about family planning, with the slogan “Don’t listen to old wives’ tale about family planning. Any clinic will welcome you, married or single, with friendly, accurate advice.” However, Lady Plowden argued that advertisements for contraceptives would be offensive, since “they would appear without warning, giving no opportunity to the viewer to avoid being confronted with references to a subject which may be found highly embarrassing in a family circle.”⁴⁶ This argument, relating to the family as the targeted audience, was not new. It was used in the interwar years to justify the fact that family newspapers did not advertise the work of the FPA, as Adrian Bingham has shown.⁴⁷ In the interwar years, sexuality was still deemed a taboo topic and it was believed that young people had to be protected from sexual knowledge. Similar fears about triggering embarrassment and the wish to preserve the innocence and ignorance of children were still used as a key reason to avoid contraceptive advertisement in the mid-1970s.

Another strategy that BAC adopted was to point to the hypocrisy of censorship whereby sex was used to advertise a wide range of products. BAC members not only wrote many letters to Lady Plowden complaining every time they noticed an advert using sex, but they also published a leaflet (via their press officer Suzie Hayman) entitled “Sex and Advertisement,” which received wide coverage in the mass media.⁴⁸ They denounced the hypocrisy of the operation of censorship in Britain.⁴⁹ While a moral framework was deployed in the assessment of advertising for birth control services and contraceptive products, the same moral framework was not applied for the use of sex to sell commercial products. BAC members complained about an advertisement for shampoo, which depicted a young girl showering and getting ready for an invasion of Vikings as if she happily anticipated being raped. This was deemed “hardly acceptable,” especially in a context where the first reading of the Sexual Offence Act was taking place.⁵⁰ They also denounced an advertisement for Dorothy Perkins clothes with the slogan “She’s done her homework,” which showed an obviously underage young girl, and drew attention to the use of a giant naked woman by London Transport as a way of encouraging people to take the bus.⁵¹

This discrepancy between authorizing the visual depiction of female naked bodies as a means to sell products and forbidding the display of contraceptive products on television or the use of the words “unmarried” and “birth control” in the same sentence reveals that contraception for young people was still perceived as damaging their morality, i.e. encouraging promiscuity and unmarried sexual activity. While showing nudity with an erotic undertone was deemed acceptable, saying and therefore recognizing that young people engaged in sexual activity was not. Age and reference to the sexual life of young people were central elements to censorship; this testifies to the fact that children and young people were still perceived as in need of moral protection. In this context, British Transport and IBA acted as gatekeepers of morality by claiming to protect the public from offensive and indecent advertisements. However, as Ben Mechen has argued, it only became more broadly acceptable to mention contraception and specifically Durex condoms in the early 1970s, drawing on the idea of safe sex within marriage before gradually moving to condoms as a facilitator of sexual pleasure in the late 1970s with the advent of what Mechen calls “contraceptive consumerism.”⁵²

The censorship of advertisements once again hit the headlines in 1983. A TV advertisement jointly created by BAC, the FPA and ITV television channel was censored by the IBA because they believed that the film condoned premarital sexuality. Aimed at teenage boys in order to encourage them to take contraceptive precautions, the 30-second film featured the actor and singer Adam Faith, a well-known figure among teenagers. Taking place in a burger bar, two boys discuss the fact that their friend had got a girl pregnant. One of them says that this behavior is not clever--”getting caught at 16” is nothing to be proud of, and a “trip to the chemist” might have saved them “a lot of grief.” Adam Faith then joins the discussion, saying, “Any idiot can get a girl into trouble. If you want to know more about contraception, we send you a list of clinics where young people are welcome.” Then follows the main central message: “If you’re not man enough to use birth control, you’re not old enough to make love.”⁵³ This campaign aimed to change the gender dynamic that, since the commercialization of the birth control pill, had placed the responsibility for birth control on young women. It was part of a broader strategy developed by the FPA to raise awareness among young men about their role in negotiating birth control responsibly.⁵⁴ Indeed, BAC explained in their annual report and to different newspapers that the most at-risk group was sexually active teenage girls and the group least likely to receive information was the teenage boys who put them at risk. Therefore, they opted for “an attack on the traditional macho image which leads some sexually active young men to refuse contraception and see a pregnancy as something on which to boast.”⁵⁵

What created outrage for the IBA was not so much the fact that men were targeted--this double standard was widely accepted--but the recognition that young people, both boys and girls, engaged in sexual intercourse. The IBA ban was widely covered in the mass media, with several articles underlining the hypocrisy of this move. This shows that some newspapers were in apparent support of Brook’s campaign and highlights the discrepancy relating to censorship between different media channels. In particular, the stance taken by Suzie Hayman, Press Officer at BAC was widely conveyed by the media. For instance, the Daily Express quoted Hayman as saying: “This is hypocrisy--one TV programme after another encourages premarital sex. Look at The Professionals--every week Doyle and Bodie hop into bed with a different girl.”⁵⁶ Similarly, the Daily Telegraph printed the reaction of the General Secretary of the FPA, Alistair Service, who said, “It is deplorable that society condemns unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births to teenagers but is prepared to undertake none of the practical measures that might help or reduce these events.”⁵⁷ Suzie Hayman again expressed her outrage and stressed examples from TV, pointing out that men in television dramas did not use contraceptives and that this behavior was presented as “macho and admirable,” while Brook was not allowed to “speak honestly and properly to show how important contraceptives are.”⁵⁸ Following this media coverage, IBA invited ITV to revise the script. The take-home message was now “Any idiot can get a girl into trouble, don’t let it be you.”⁵⁹ This message, again, was implicit. It was only with the AIDS crisis that more straightforward information on condoms would be allowed on TV and only after 9pm. This restriction to the night schedule once again testifies to the desire not to expose children to sexual health information and shows the strong resistances at play.

While sexual content was widely used to sell products, advertising contraception and contraceptive services for young people was deemed unacceptable. This was closely connected to the fear of condoning premarital sex. Indeed, youth sexuality was considered a taboo topic that should not be addressed. Any advertising campaigns aimed at young people that explicitly recognized the reality of the fact young people engaged in sexual intercourse were deemed offensive.

Educational Materials: Navigating the Edge of “Morality”

As BAC was the first charity to specialize in teenage needs, its members were increasingly called upon to give talks in school and train social workers and teachers about contraception. A dedicated unit for Education and Publication was set up in 1978. Its role was to design material to be used by teachers and to create a newsletter where resources on sex education would be compiled. Part of the funding for sustaining this unit came from the DHSS, which awarded BAC an annual grant. This grant recognized the medical character of and the role played by BAC in improving young people’s health. Under this new heading, BAC developed a contraception teaching pack, which contained suggestions and material for teachers to introduce the topic of contraception. However, BAC’s work, in particular its Education and Publication unit, was being threatened by concerted action against them from conservative lobbies, who were trying to pressure the Minister of Health, Dr Gerard Vaughan, to withdraw the DHSS funding. As Hera Cook has argued regarding the related issue of the limited funding for local authority family planning clinics in the 1960s, there existed a “strong resistance to the spending of public money in support of sexual activity.”⁶⁰ In 1980, several attacks were made on BAC and its role in providing sex education in schools. First, a new Education Bill was introduced in 1980. The preliminary debate provided a space to express opposition to sex education in schools and the use of BAC materials. For instance, George Gardiner, the Conservative MP for Reigate, who had a close connection with the Responsible Society, suggested an amendment stating that parents should be informed by school heads about any provision of sex education, should review the teaching materials and have the right to withdraw their children from sex education classes.⁶¹

In parallel, the Responsible Society launched a public campaign against BAC using the mass media. Mass media acted as a platform for both sides of the argument, allowing BAC and their opponents to make their positions heard. The Responsible Society presented the education materials developed by BAC as immoral, since they supposedly removed emotions such as fear and shame from sex. Valerie Riches, its general secretary, featured in an article published in the Daily Telegraph on the 13^th of March 1980 entitled “The sex industry versus the parents.” In it, she complained about the “sex lobby’s” opposition to the amendment Gardiner suggested. The “sex lobby’s” main motto, Riches claimed, was that “there are no rights or wrongs about any forms of sexual activity at any age provided only that no conception results.” BAC had a specific philosophy, she argued, whereby children should be liberated from the repressive attitudes of parents and teachers, and sex should be dissociated from emotions, in this case negative emotions. Riches implied that presenting youth sexuality as something natural was immoral, since the fear, shame and taboo surrounding premarital sex were removed. These negative emotions, moral campaigners believed, were powerful deterrents against young people engaging in sexual activity. She particularly denounced the positive attitude towards young sexuality that BAC conveyed, and emphasized the fact that the charity recognized sexual pleasure as a component of young people’s sexuality. For moral campaigners, sexual pleasure was only acceptable in a loving married relationship.⁶² Riches also condemned the use in schools of a sex education manual called Make it Happy: What Sex is All About. Published by the feminist press, Virago House, in 1980, the book received the Times Educational Supplement Senior Information Book award. BAC featured in the acknowledgments of the book. Due to its content, which used what Riches qualified as “the whole gamut of vulgar and obscene sexual words” to describe sexual organs, masturbation, sexual identities, orgasms and birth control, and because it presented sex as an enjoyable experience that “can be fun” where people could share pleasure, the book was held up as emblematic of the work of the “sex lobby” who were trying to “influence and change the mores of society.”⁶³ For Riches, positive sex education had the potential to corrupt young minds and encourage sexual promiscuity by stressing the positive side of engaging in sexual activity instead of a negative narrative around risks.

The journalist Robert Butt also attacked BAC in The Times, using the argument that their educational and informational material lacked a moral approach. He pointed out that BAC did not care about parents’ opinions, stressing that Brook’s leaflet, Safe Sex for Teenagers, stated, “We must be prepared to challenge our established attitudes that sexual activity in young people is dangerous.”⁶⁴ The leaflet also mentioned that moral judgement was counter-productive. Gardiner’s amendment eventually failed because of lack of time, which meant that it was not actually voted on. Therefore, there is no information available on parties and individual MPs’ opinions on this issue.⁶⁵ Another attack was made in the Commons in May. John Stokes, the MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, condemned the educational materials published by what he called the “sex education industry,” namely BAC and the FPA.⁶⁶ He described BAC as “so revolutionary in their approach to sexual and family morality that there is not even a pretence of respectability.”⁶⁷ In particular, Stokes lashed out against the most recent educational leaflet designed by Brook, Safe Sex for Teenagers. He pointed out that the leaflet could have been called “Safe Bathing for Teenagers, for sex is treated as of no more moral concern than bathing or any other harmless physical activity.” He accused BAC of having triggered a revolution in teenage sexual behavior, and further stressed that BAC’s practical approach encouraged young people to “indulge in sexual intercourse from an early age” and that sex was presented as the “most normal and natural thing in the world. I call that damnable advice.” He called for the removal of the DHSS grant to the FPA and BAC.

This call was renewed by Jill Knight in August. As the chairman of the all-party Lords and Commons family and child protection group, she denounced the funding of family planning charities with public money. She claimed to have received a complaint from a father that his daughter’s school was visited by doctors from the BAC during a sex education day course. She particularly denounced the fact that “first, a speaker from the family life association spoke about adult relationships, about love and marriage and the dangers of illicit sex. Then a doctor from the Brook Clinic spoke on contraceptives, and all kinds of contraceptives were not only discussed but examined.”⁶⁸ Knight attacked the work done by the FPA and BAC, arguing that the latter undermined the family and encouraged promiscuity and that “money is being used to break the law of the land and to weaken family ties and debase children.” She therefore urged the Minister of Health to reconsider providing DHSS funding to the FPA and BAC. During the same debate, Tory MP James Pawsey opined that “parents should have the absolute right to withdraw their children from such classes if they feel that it would have long term ill-effects, or any ill-effects, for that matter.”⁶⁹

Caroline Woodroffe, aware of the pressure on the Minister of Health, orchestrated a campaign to ensure that the DHSS renewed its financial aid. She wrote to many influential personalities that were long-time supporters of BAC, such as Labour MPs Charles Morrison and William Hamilton, asking them to defend BAC in the Commons in order to maintain the grant.⁷⁰ Hamilton and Morrison closely followed the argument written by Woodroffe and took a stance against Knight in the Commons, underlining that BAC and the FPA were meeting “the consequences of a lower standard of sexual morality” rather than encouraging a lowering of moral standards.⁷¹ This shift in BAC rhetoric from sex education and contraceptive information as a means to tackle repressive attitudes towards sex, in particular the idea of premarital sex as immoral, to the emphasis on a pragmatic approach to youth sexuality where BAC’s work functioned as a response to young people’s low sexual morals testifies to the various and sometimes contradictory strategies that BAC members had to deploy in order to counter censorship. By taking on the very idea of low sexual morals denounced by BAC’s opponents and using it to their own advantage, BAC’s members aimed to appease their opponents’ criticisms that they encouraged promiscuity.

In 1981, the conflict escalated when a junior education minister, Lady Young, received several complaints from MPs about the Look at Safe Sex leaflet that was part of a contraceptive teaching pack developed by BAC. The Look at Safe Sex leaflet was only one element of the teaching pack, which contained more than 22 items. Three main themes were covered: biology of sex; methods of contraception; and use of contraception. Each was arranged around resource materials that featured visual graphics. In addition, the pack suggested a group discussion about morality and relationships, and a roleplaying exercise where students were put in the shoes of a mother of a young girl and imagined her fears and concerns. As it was meant to be readable by students with impairments (“slow-learning teenagers”), the leaflet graphically depicted the different methods of birth control and the ways to insert them through the use of young women and men’s naked bodies. For the purpose of providing “simple and explicit” information with no room for interpretation, the BAC leaflet represented frontal nudes and erect penises, with Latin words to describe them, which provided the scientific and medical terminology, alongside “barrack-room language.”⁷² As Suzie Hayman explained, “It is no good using long Latin words to kids. They will not understand you. You must start by using words they already know. It is called barrack-room language. But children learnt it from the playground.”⁷³ The teaching pack contained different leaflets that provided a scientific view of the biology of sex and contraception. For instance, the leaflet A Look at Your Body contained both a frontal depiction and cut-side view of the male and female genitals, with an identification of the different anatomical parts.

Tory MPs Sir Bernard Braine and George Gardiner vilified the educational kit. Braine first wrote on the 19^th of May 1981 to the Department of Education and Science to complain about the teaching pack created by BAC. His letter reveals a misunderstanding of the purpose of the teaching pack and the role of the DHSS and Department of Education and Science in the use of this material. Braine appeared to believe that the teaching pack was to be made available in schools as part of a governmental campaign for reducing teenage pregnancies. In fact, the leaflet had been available separately from the teaching pack for the previous three years and was on the recommended list published by the School Council and the Health Education Council as part of their joint 13-18-year-olds project.⁷⁴ The main contention lies in the alleged financial support and institutional backing provided by the Department of Education and Science. Braine was particularly upset about the content of the teaching pack; in his view, it contained no moral education but instead encouraged children who wished to “indulge in sexual intercourse to do so without the risk of pregnancy.”⁷⁵ Similarly, on the 22^nd of May, Gardiner wrote to Lady Young, asking to set up a meeting to discuss the fact that BAC would be involved, under the responsibility of the Health Education Council, in the campaign to motivate teenagers to seek contraceptive advice. Gardiner presented BAC’s work as “an amoral just-try-it propaganda” and expressed concern about its involvement.⁷⁶ He suggested that Riches from the Responsible Society should be invited to discuss the subject with them.

The matter was not constrained to internal correspondence. Braine raised the same issue in Parliament. He asked the Secretary of State for Social Services “what will be the annual cost to public funds of the campaign starting in the autumn to motivate schoolchildren to use contraceptives using a teaching pack produced by BAC, and how much of this will be provided to the centre directly or through health education channels[?]” ⁷⁷ This question, as well as the private letters sent to Lady Young, reveal that Braine’s and Gardiner’s understanding was not accurate. Indeed, the Health Education Council never planned to use the BAC teaching pack in its public health campaign and its campaign was not directed at schools. Braine and Gardiner’s anxieties reveal that public funding was a key part of the history of censorship. The spending of public money was invoked strategically as an additional argument against sex education in school. Indeed, spending public money to support information that helped young people to engage in protected sexual intercourse was strongly opposed by moral campaigners. The controversy around the teaching pack soon hit the headlines. Tory MP James Pawsey used a late-night debate in the Commons to qualify the pack’s content as pornographic, saying it “contained some of the most pornographic material I have ever seen.”⁷⁸ This was picked up by the Daily Telegraph.⁷⁹ What outraged Pawsey was the visual representations of naked adolescent bodies and the depiction of their sexual organs; he complained that the material included “full frontals and goes into considerable details about sexual intercourse.” In this instance, censorship was based on visual materials. The chairman of BAC, Caroline Woodroffe, replied to Pawsey’s comment in a brief letter published in The Guardian entitled “Body talk for honesty.”⁸⁰ She asked, “[Do you] really think you can illustrate how to use a condom or cap with drawings of fully dressed people?”, pinpointing the ridiculousness of teaching young people about contraception without using naked bodies. Suzie Hayman also differentiated the visual materials used by the leaflet from obscene materials by stressing that the drawings were “artistic[,] very gentle and not crude and they could be seen any day in the National Gallery.”⁸¹ She also drew a clear line between pornography, which was meant “to titillate and excite,” and BAC material, which was used to educate and inform.⁸²

However, visual depiction was not the only matter of contention. Another upsetting factor for the pack’s opponents was the fact that the leaflet did not contextualize the sexual relationship in a broader moral framework but was instead limited to factual and descriptive information about birth control methods and insertion in what was denounced as a “mechanical view of sex outside the context of love and the family.” Lady Young stated, “I think a lot of young people are confused by this and by the implication that as long as you don’t get pregnant, it’s all right.”⁸³ The leaflet did solely focus on providing practical, simple and explicit information about young people’s sexual organs and contraceptive methods, since it was aimed at teenagers with learning difficulties. For BAC’s opponents, recognizing that young people engaged in sexual activities was not acceptable, especially when sexual intercourse was not connected with negative emotions such as fear of pregnancy, or positive ones such as love. However, moral campaigners had a restrained vision of love; they believed that love could only happen in a committed relationship. Moreover, sex had to be framed within the context of the family, which meant that sexuality was only deemed legitimate between married heterosexual couples. Finally, emotions were restricted to married love; other positive emotions such as pleasure were unacceptable, since they would encourage young people to “indulge” in sex. This attack on the leaflet’s lack of morality and its absence of mention of the broader family environment was countered by Suzie Hayman, who stressed that the leaflet was part of a wide range of material that did cover morality and relationships and presented a “serious and responsible approach to sex education.”⁸⁴

The renewal of the DHSS grant was made conditional on BAC’s removal of teaching aid materials such as the Look at Safe Sex leaflet, a wordsearch puzzle about contraception which was said to present contraception as a game, and a tape recording of girls talking about choosing safe sex. These items were censored because they recognized the fact that young people had sex and provided visual depictions of naked bodies. This request was inconsistent, given that at the same time, the Government was launching a campaign directed at teenagers in order to promote responsible contraceptive practices. Indeed, the Health Education Council of England and Wales, in tandem with the Scottish Health Education Group, were planning to curb the rate of teenage pregnancy through a media campaign planned for the coming autumn.

Due to its financial difficulties, BAC had to comply with the request, but complained about the conditions. In their statement to the Press Association, BAC members were quick to stress that teachers and youth workers “involved with disadvantaged young teenagers at risk of pregnancy” had found the teaching pack very useful, saying that “simple, explicit material is just what is needed.”⁸⁵ Disadvantaged young teenagers were those with learning difficulties. Further reinforcing the unfairness of the request, the BAC members underlined that experts such as doctors, nurses and social workers who dealt with the young pregnant girls “who are the casualty of contraceptive ignorance” found the teaching pack to be appropriate. The teaching aids were not free, meaning it was not paid for by public money, but intended to be bought by “teachers exercising their professional judgement.” The censorship involved withdrawing the incriminated materials. In addition, tight control over educational materials by the Department of Education was implemented. BAC members were asked to consult more widely with “educational interest suggested by the Department of Education and Science on any draft material intended for use in schools.” As a result, the School Publications Advisory Panel was formed in 1982. Its purpose was to advise the Publication and Education Unit on the material they produced specifically for school. A representative of the Department of Education and Science was invited as a board member, and every piece of educational material was, from that point onwards, the subject of close attention.

Conclusion

The censorship that targeted the publicity surrounding the BAC services and educational material produced by BAC was heavily dependent on national and local politics and organizations. While national public health policy makers such as the Department of Health and Social Security recognized the need to widen access to family planning and birth control clinics for young people, censorship coming from different organizations precluded charities such as BAC and the FPA from reaching clients in need of information, i.e. sexually active young people who did not use contraception.

Censorship functioned locally and nationally, depending on the place of advertising and operated based on geography and extra-governmental regulatory bodies, and concerns about backlash from advertisers and from the public. For instance, locality played a role in the censorship of a poster aimed at pupils and students in secondary schools. In Birmingham, the City’s Education Committee’s continued opposition to BAC from the point of its creation in 1965 prevented the charity from advertising its services in 1970. Posters aimed at offering descriptive information about BAC’s clientele were censored because they used the words “unmarried,” “birth control” or “contraception”.

Yet, censorship took place on a national level as well. Posters displayed in public transport were also censored by the national British Transport Advertising Limited. As a result, BAC were asked to use euphemisms to describe their work. Similarly, British television, through its national Independent Broadcasting Authority, refused to advertise contraceptives and censored a TV public health campaign designed by BAC and the FPA to encourage young men to use contraception. IBA feared that they would offend and embarrass its audience, which consisted of families. BAC members actively tried to fight this censorship by writing letters to the IBA, lobbying politicians, publishing leaflets and denouncing the IBA’s policy in mass media. They argued that the IBA and British Transport Advertising Limited’s policies contained a double standard; they resorted to sexually explicit material to sell products and even represented erotic naked bodies, but BAC’s informative poster and public campaign were deemed unacceptable. This was due to the fact that BAC recognized that young people engaged in sexual activity and thus, in BAC’s opponents’ view, were condoning promiscuity. However, BAC’s voice was not heard in the context of the vigorous debate about the permissive society, with morality returning to the fore in the political scene. Despite these drawbacks, BAC continued to disseminate information about their services; nevertheless, they were limited in their undertaking and had to use euphemistic language.

The content of their sex education material was also closely scrutinized by moral campaigners on the national level; sexual health charities, which they called the “sex education lobby,” were their favorite target for criticism. Conservative MPs and the Responsible Society worked hand in hand to attack BAC’s work, in particular a leaflet from a contraceptive teaching pack. This informative leaflet, designed for slow-learning students, was labelled as evidence of BAC’s destructive work to corrupt the morals of young people. Depiction of young people’s naked bodies, as well as the use of Latin words alongside young people’s language to describe genitals, were denounced as obscene and immoral by moral campaigners. BAC’s opponents accused them of providing a mechanical view of sex, since the leaflet was not framed within a broader moral framework and limited its content to descriptive information about the way contraceptives worked. BAC, in contrast, presented their educational material as scientific, since they were trying to provide accurate and simple information to help young people understand their bodies and contraception. Through intense lobbying, moral campaigners were able to pressure the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Health and Social Security to make the renewal of BAC’s governmental grant conditional on increasing state control over its educational material.

These examples illustrate that moral campaigners were powerful enough to set the visual and discursive boundaries of acceptable advertisement of the BAC service and sexual educational material for young people. These boundaries limited BAC’s ability to convey informative and explicit messages about their work, forcing them to use euphemistic language.

Biography

Caroline Rusterholz is Assistant Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She has extensively published on the history or reproductive politics and sexual and reproductive health services. She is the author of Women’s medicine: Sex Family Planning and British female doctors in transnational perspective, 1920-1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)