Cat and Mouse Act
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The "Cat and Mouse Act" (officially, The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913) was an Act of Parliament passed in Britain under Herbert Henry Asquith's Liberal government in 1913.
Background
To attain the goal of universal suffrage, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU, known colloquially as the suffragettes) engaged in acts of protest such as the breaking of windows, arson, and the "technical assault" (without causing harm) of police officers. Many WSPU members were jailed for these offenses.In response to what the organisation viewed as brutal punishment and harsh treatment by the government at the time, imprisoned WSPU members embarked on a sustained campaign of hunger strikes. Some women were freed on taking this action, but this rendered the policy of imprisonment of suffragettes futile.
So, the government turned to a policy of force feeding hunger-strikers by nasogastric tube. Repeated uses of this process often caused sickness, which served the WSPU's aims of demonstrating the government's treatment of the prisoners.
The Act as a response to suffragette hunger strikes
Faced with growing public disquiet over the tactic of forcefeeding, and the determination of the jailed suffragettes to continue their strikes, the government rushed the Act through Parliament.The effect of the Act was to permit the release of prisoners who were suffering illness for them to recuperate; however, the police were free to re-imprison offenders again once they were better. The intention of the Act was to counter the tactic of hunger strikes undertaken by jailed suffragettes and the damaging consequences for the government's support among (male) voters by the force feeding of women prisoners.
Unintended consequences of the Act
The ineffectiveness of the Act was very soon evident as the authorities experienced much greater difficulties than anticipated in re-arresting the released hunger-strikers, many of whom eluded recapture with the help of a network of suffragist sympathisers. The inability of the government to lay its hands on high-profile militants transformed what had been intended as a discreet device to control suffragette hunger-strikers into a public scandal.This Act was aimed at suppressing the power of the organisation by demoralising the activists, but turned out to be counter-productive as it undermined the moral authority of the government. The act was viewed as violating basic human rights, not only of the suffragettes but of other prisoners. The Act's nickname of Cat and Mouse Act, referring to the way the government seemed to play with prisoners as a cat may with a captured mouse, underlined how the cruelty of repeated releases and re-imprisonments turned the militants from targets of scorn to objects of sympathy.
The Asquith government's implementation of the Act caused the militant WSPU and the suffragettes to perceive Asquith as the enemy — an enemy to be vanquished in what the organisation saw as an all-out war.
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