Two men awaiting sentence in Britain’s latest child sex scandal face an exceptionally steep fall from grace. Unlike the stars whose celebrity sparkle has been so abruptly snuffed out in the last twelve months, following the torrent of allegations about the late Jimmy Savile, this pair have made their name not as mere entertainers but as pillars of the establishment and icons of probity.
They are a judge and a public prosecutor. The crime in which they conspired together and which has already destroyed their high-flying careers and good name is apparently considered – judging by the outcry – the gravest sex crime that can be perpetrated in modern society: they have told the truth!
As readers in the UK will be aware, I refer to Crown Prosecution Service lawyer Robert Colover, QC, and His Honour (now Dishonour!) Judge Nigel Peters QC, who, jointly and severally, did knowingly, wilfully and most guiltily commit an act of truth-telling in Her Majesty’s Court at Snaresbrook last month, contrary to the Inappropriate Truths Act, which has an existence in the minds of child “protection” lobbyists as real and substantial as any government legislation.
Colover has been suspended from prosecuting sexual offence cases pending a review by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), while Judge Peters’ comments are being investigated by the Office for Judicial Complaints. The seriousness of the case could not have been made clearer than by Prime Minister David Cameron, no less, who made it his job (in a notable constitutional development!) to pronounce judgement in the case himself. Handing down his verdict, the Prime Minister told the press the CPS was ”absolutely right” to label Colover’s comments “inappropriate”.
What, then, was the nature of this terrible truth-telling? This is not for tender ears, but it was this: in a case in which 41-year-old Neil Wilson was given an eight-month suspended jail sentence for sexual activity with a child, the prosecutor and judge both “blamed the victim”. They made the well substantiated claim, which has not been publicly rebutted on factual grounds, that the girl who was the 13-year-old “victim” was a more than willing participant in the sexual acts.
The girl reportedly looked older than her actual age and told the man she was 16, which is the age of consent in the UK. Wilson met the schoolgirl when she asked him to buy cigarettes for her while she was playing truant. She stripped out of her school uniform and performed oral sex on him.
In accusatory language Heretic TOC would not support, but which appears to have been backed up by the facts of the case, prosecutor Colover, said in court, “The girl is predatory in all her actions and she is sexually experienced. There was sexual activity but it was not of Mr Wilson’s doing; you might say it was forced upon him despite being older and stronger than her.”
Well, quite! Resistance would have been useless! The poor man was practically raped! The judge in effect agreed, saying that “On these facts, the girl was predatory” and had been “egging on” the defendant. He said his lenient sentence took account of this.
With a prosecution like that, it may be thought, the fortunate Mr Wilson hardly needed a defence lawyer, and indeed none was quoted in any of the reports I saw. What prompted this rare (these days, at least) outbreak of commonsense in court is as obscure as it is welcome, but Heretic TOC needs only to congratulate the Judicial Dynamic Duo!
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Observant readers will notice a gap of several lines (and some stars) after the last paragraph. I am just attempting to prove to myself than I can still write a reasonably succinct blog when I really try. The one above, at well under 600 words, is far shorter than many of my recent efforts, which have ballooned to thrice this length, and more. However, like poor Mr Wilson faced with his striptease Lolita, I still find myself powerless to resist going a bit further than I perhaps should. I must therefore place myself at the mercy of you, dear readers, as my judge and jury in this matter, and hope you will be as forgiving as the two QCs at Snaresbrook Crown Court!
One announcement I feel confident you will forgive: a few moments ago, as I write, I was informed over the airwaves by the BBC that the latest celebrity show trial in Britain has ended in a verdict of Not Guilty. Michael Le Vell, actor in Coronation Street, one of the nation’s longest-running and most popular TV soaps, has been cleared of a number of CSA charges, including rape. I haven’t followed the case closely but I think it was one of those “his word against hers” allegations, with no corroboration. If that is so, the jury were right to settle for nothing less than a proper standard of proof.
And another bit of good news you may not have caught yet: Richard Dawkins has been making waves by saying he and other children in his school peer group had been molested by a teacher but “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.” Peter Watt, director of child protection at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, immediately went public, in effect to contradict him, insisting on the usual dogma of life-long trauma. An advocate of “listening to the victim”, he clearly did not have ears for this one!
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And now a bonus blog, offering a few reflections on the case of the Judicial Dynamic Duo:
1) The girl was 13, which in English law is significant in terms of consent. If a girl below this age consents to sexual intercourse, any man who has sex with her is liable to be charged with rape, because her consent counts for nothing. But if she is over 13 and under 16 he can only be charged with the lesser offence of “sexual activity with a child”. This is because her consent is in effect taken into account as real and it acts as a mitigating factor. This being the case, the public outrage over acknowledging the active role of the child in the Snaresbrook Crown Court case flies in the face of the law. The competence of many young people under 16 to make important decisions in their life is also acknowledged in English law in what is known as “Gillick competence”, following the case of Gillick v. West Norfolk & Wisbech Area Healthy Authority, 1986. The highest court in the land, the House of Lords, ruled that those under 16 could give consent to medical treatment as long as they had sufficient understanding and intelligence to appreciate what was proposed and to express their own wishes. Lord Scarman identified the principle that parental rights yield to the young person’s own right to make their own decisions if they have this “Gillick competence”. Significantly, the medical treatment in question can include advice on contraception for sexually active youngsters. As the admirable lawyer Barbara Hewson recently noted, “It has been Department of Health policy since the 1980s that underage teenagers choosing to be sexually active should receive contraceptive advice and treatment, in confidence. Sexual health charities working with young people have been telling policy makers, for years, that the existing age of consent law does not deter those underage teenagers who are sexually active. And the UK’s teen pregnancy rate is one of the highest in Western Europe. Yet if one of these ‘Gillick-competent’ teens is involved in a criminal case, these uncomfortable facts are conveniently forgotten.”
2) Have there been precedents for the Judicial Dynamic Duo’s approach? Definitely, but it’s been a while. In 1993 an 18-year-old babysitter who tried to have intercourse with a nine-year-old girl after climbing in her bed was freed on probation by a judge who described the child as “no angel”. Judge Ian Starforth Hill was unsurprisingly castigated for this remark by the appeal court. Even more notorious from a protectionist point of view were the remarks of Judge Brian Gibbens in a case 10 years earlier, that of William Watson-Sweeney, who admitted having sexual intercourse with a seven-year-old girl. The judge was clearly sympathetic to the defendant, a former soldier, twice wounded in action, who had a drink problem. His Honour made an unfortunate remark to the effect that people could get themselves accidentally into all sorts of problems in life. This emerged as the following headline in The Times: “Sex with children could happen to anyone accidentally, judge says”. Imagine how that would go down today, especially regarding intercourse with such a young child! Not that the “intercourse” was more than minimal: the penis needs only to slightly enter the labia to qualify. The judge pointed out that the child’s virginity remained intact.
3) An even more fascinating aspect of the Watson-Sweeney case was reported in an appendix to a Home Office report some years ago. The defendant pleaded not guilty to rape on the grounds that the child – aged seven remember – had consented to sexual intercourse with an understanding of what that entailed. Remarkably, the court accepted that the girl’s statement that “she knew what mummies and daddies did in bedrooms” was sufficient evidence of her understanding of the true nature of the situation. (From Setting the Boundaries: Reforming the law on sex offences, Vol. 2 Supporting Evidence page 136, Appendix D2, Literature Review of Research into the Law of Sexual Offences Against Children and Vulnerable People, by Caroline Keenan and Lee Maitland).
a new study has shown that in CSA cases “convictions were less likely to occur where caregivers were the complainants (OR = 0.45), and when there were longer court sittings (OR = 0.95). Victim, offender, and offence characteristics, however, did not influence case outcomes.”
[…] How? Through Gillick Competence. […]
Very good points. I normally do not spam sites with multiple links, but I think your readers would like the following topics.
After this disclaimer your readers might like Child Porn Witch Hunt (60), Teenage Sexuality (91), child sex trauma myth , Site Map. Note also that reddit just closed down r/Pedosexhysteria
Yes very moving, and beautifully persuasive Gil, particularly your summing up. I don’t want to bore anybody with my own story (as it is, indeed, ‘boring’ I fear). Suffice it to say I identify profoundly with that phrase ‘violent and brutally celebate life’. The violence was subtle and emotional, rather than physical, and I also count myself lucky for a happy ‘childhood’ – by which I do mean childhood – up to age 11ish – but then things went awry, for which I blame various people/sets of people and social hells.
When commenting on cases of female teachers ‘sexually abusing’ (ie engaging in a spiritually uplifting way with) a male student, I tend to make the not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek comment “well, it should be an integral part of an attractive woman-teacher’s training and obligations.” Done in the right way, this would take care of a lot of disaffected youth, the hetero part of it at any rate.
On Gillick competence: I happened, the other day, to be reading the Icelandic Nationality Act (don’t ask). Right at the end, under ‘Interim provisions’, we read: “If the person who acquires Icelandic citizenship under this provision has unmarried children under the age of 18 years over whom he exercises custody, they shall also acquire Icelandic citizenship. If the child has reached the age of 12 years and holds foreign nationality, the child shall grant its consent in order to receive Icelandic citizenship. Consent shall not be required if the child is incapable of granting it due to mental disability or other comparable circumstances.”
Intrigued, I read further, on the comprehensive island.is website. Under ‘Adoption’, we read: “A child older than 12 years must personally approve the adoption.”
I then turned to the Icelandic Child Protection Bill. Under article 25, about the placement of children in foster care, it says: “If arrangements under item a or b para. 1 are against the will of a child who has not reached the age of 15, the child shall have the opportunity to put his/her point of view to the committee, with the assistance of a spokesperson if applicable.”
Under article 46, ‘Rights of the child in case procedure’, it says: “Children who have reached the age of 15 are parties to child protection cases under the terms of arts 25 and 27 [outside-the-home placements], and para. 2 art. 34 [overturning deprivation of parental custody] … A child shall be given the opportunity of expressing his/her views in cases affecting him/her, in accord with the child’s age and maturity, and the child’s views shall be fairly taken into account in resolution of the case. A child who has reached the age of 12 shall always be given the opportunity to express his/her views. When a child protection committee has decided to initiate investigation of a case, a decision must be made at once on whether a spokesman for the child should be appointed. A spokesman for the child shall normally be appointed before the measures provided in arts. 25, 27 or 28 [outside-the-home placement again] are applied, and before a request for deprivation of custody under art. 29, unless the child has legal counsel, cp. para. 2 art. 47 [government grants of money to parties to child protection cases so that they may obtain legal services]. The Minister shall define in more detail the qualifications and role of a child’s spokesman in child protection cases, by regulations, on receipt of proposals from the Government Agency for Child Protection. ”
Is the choice of age 12 wholly arbitrary? Perhaps not. I certainly remember going through a major and quite sudden development of my ability to see the ‘bigger picture’ of the world when I was 12. A lot of people recall similar experiences, and though I’m hazy on the details, I understand that there’s some research backing this up. Is this relevant to the age of sexual consent, though? My judgment matured quite a lot quite suddenly when I was about 24; again, a lot of people recall similar experiences, and I understand that there is research backing this up. But though I look back at a lot of decisions I made at say 21 and wonder what on earth I was thinking, that doesn’t mean that I was incapable of running my life at the time, still less of giving sexual consent.
I tend to agree with measures requiring a certain level of reasoning ability, such as that often attained around age 12, in order to make major, important decisions: whom you’ll live with, what citizenship(s) you will hold, what medical treatment you will have or not have. I also tend to think that a certain level of maturity is needed in order to handle responsibly sex where there’s a risk of pregnancy, physical injury or sexually transmitted infection. But I don’t really think that the relatively ‘mild’, risk-free acts, e.g. mutual masturbation, which constitute the majority of paedophilic sex especially with younger kids, are in the same category. It’s usually OK for an 8-year-old to give or withhold ‘simple consent’ to such acts even though (s)he’s only 8, because there’s nothing really major hanging on it. It’s an important distinction to make, and it’s a pity that ‘sex’ is so often understood to mean only sexual intercourse, because people rightly object to adults having sexual intercourse with young children.
I think also that a child, no matter how young, should always be asked his/her opinion in things like custody cases. I was the subject of a custody case of sorts when I was 6, and though I wouldn’t suggest allowing a 6-year-old to run the show, I do think I was right to resent very strongly that nobody was consulting me on my wishes. Being 6, I put it this way: “I feel like a sack of potatoes.” What I meant was that I felt I was being treated as an inanimate object to be hauled here and there at will, not as a person with a will of my own.
Good for Iceland! And good for you in mining such fascinating nuggets from such improbable terrain! And good for your six-year-old former self in managing to pipe up!
I think all of us have a like story to tell.
When I was 4 my family moved from Griffith to Deniliquin without asking me. Then while all my brothers went to school I was made to stay home the whole year by myself, because I was an ‘in-between age’ too old for kindergarten but too young for school.
That was worse, because I was not only not asked it was done at my vehement and considerable protest, for which I was repeatedly beaten. The outcome was that I learned at a very young age to endure pain, and being yelled at, and to suffer loneliness, and make my own way in life regardless.
Sometimes I don’t like that part of myself.
When I was 15, within a week of my return from boarding school, my family split up with us all hauled off to Sydney, where I was beaten up for protesting at the sudden move and wanting to know the reason, then because unsettled at school caned again. At 15, for Christ’s sake!
After that I went bush just to get away from all those stupid people and live my own life. Only much later I took such an interest in childhood development studies in Anthropology, specifically in those environments. All my academic work in this field since has pursued these themes, and my literary work. Again, read my books.
All my work with boys and men since, over 30 years of it, has been on that basis; on their approaching me with their own stories knowing I understood them and could advise and counsel them.
For that reason, if one or the other of them wants a bit of loving and affection in such an emotionally barren life, who am I to protest? If one or the other of them needs a bit of release occasionally in such a violent and brutally celibate life, who am I to deny them?
FAR BETTER, were children to be loved and respected, and asked, and considered, and we wouldn’t have all this trouble.
I found this very moving, Gil. Those of us whose parents were considerate and not at all violent, and can look back on a happy childhood, myself included, sometimes forget how lucky we are.
Very interesting. I wonder, though, who usually gets Icelandic citizenship.
I suspect that this often happens to large African and Muslim families, which is a different issue that we also discuss in our blog
I should add that the Dad I quoted was not ‘sinned against’, in the sense that his 2 sons had not been victim of any paedophilia: his ire was simply due to the fact a person outed as a paedophile was living in his community.
I don’t think I’ve expressed myself terribly well on this one. @Gill… ‘for the life of my I still can’t see that I am inherently a paedophile for whom sexual consummation is the end goal of any relationship I might have with a child or young person.’
For the life of me (without even knowing you) I’m sure you’re not. In fact, I doubt if such a person exists, perhaps only on the very extreme wings of paedophilia (active 24/7 in pursuing the objects of their desire). For the other 99% of so-called paedophiles, life is surely a complex blend of quietly and harmlessly bearing the cross of non-consummation, interacting with children with varying feelings of repressed sexual tension or simply the desire to ‘interact’ utterly asexually. Even the most crazed sex-addict of any disposition must enjoy some mental ‘time off’. In short, ‘sexual consummation as the end goal’ is probably true in *less* than 1% of all instances of paedosexuals’ (my preferred term) dealings with children.
@Tom ‘Richard Dawkins has been making waves by saying he and other children in his school peer group had been molested by a teacher but “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.” Peter Watt, director of child protection at the NSPCC, immediately went public, in effect to contradict him, insisting on the usual dogma of life-long trauma. An advocate of “listening to the victim”, he clearly did not have ears for this one!’
LOL Perhaps Dawkins’ childhood trauma has manifested itself in his adulthood lack of eloquence, confidence, and his career under-attainment?
Thanks, Phil, and I tend to agree.
If we are going down this track, however, it must be said that for even the most ardently promiscuous polysexual there are so many other things in life that the experience of desire for children or even thinking about sex cannot possibly take up more than perhaps 5-10% of their mental time/space.
What I am saying here is that even the worst case is most likely over 90-95% non-sexual. I dare suggest, from the available data, that even the worst, most notorious (as I’ve been called myself!!???) case is probably over 99% non-paedosexual.
So, what’s the obsession with such a minute part of themself? Are there no redeeming attributes? What about all the achievements and contributions, all the good they do?
Here we come also to a relevant issue, and a bit of perspective; for men over the centuries the defining attribute is not who we have sex with but whether we have been circumcised or not. Men and boys have been shot in the thousands on such pretext, one way or the other.
Against that background alone, who cares whether, along the way, there was instead a bit of fondling and affection?
“what’s the obsession with such a minute part of themself? Are there no redeeming attributes? What about all the achievements and contributions, all the good they do?”
Just to pick up on this one point… having just read a most disturbing piece by Dia Birkett (in what she reports, not her own attitude or beliefs) referring to acts of campaign groups and vigilantism. I, personally, have no doubt that the likes of you and Tom (and many other tagged with the letter P who I have not encountered) have a portfolio of positive contribution to the world which utterly outstrips the ‘medievally baying mothers’ standing outside the pedophile’s house or the vigilante Dad who is quoted as saying “my intent was to drag him to a wood and nail him to a tree”.
Terrifying people.
Indeed, so, except, not terrifying just plain blithering dumb-arse f*cks whose one redeeming attribute is their . . . no . . . can’t quite think of what it might be right now . . . maybe . . . being quoted ad nauseam by tabloid journos . . . ??
@ Gill. I reply to you without having read the full Finklehor article. Having taken in the abstract, however, I don’t think I need or wish to wallow in the full. It’s arbitrary and implicit categorization of sexual contact as violence or abuse is indeed glaring. They begin by boldly asserting the objective is to identify (‘estimate’ rather=their own word) the range of ‘victimizations’ that children have experienced, ‘sexual’ coming under this umbrella.
Well, it threw up such enlightening statistics as these: ‘10.2% (very precise estimation that!) had experienced a form of child maltreatment, 6.1% had experienced a sexual victimization, and 25.3% had been a witness to violence or experienced another form of indirect victimization.’
Perhaps I’m far too cynical, and I should read on, but I’ll leave this one with a few thoughts: I know of at last one delightfully sweet and highly intelligent 11yo girl who in all seriousness regards maths as ‘cruelty to humans’. I presume she would come under the 10.2%?? Secondly – ‘indirect’ victimization? How the hell do you define that? How on earth can there be a consensus on that? Personally, I believe I have been indirectly victimized in countless ways in my 45yo life, some of which I would consider victimization at the time, some of it in hindsight, some of which I shrug my shoulders and re-evaluate as not victimization at all. The person next to me will bring a wildly different set of perceived victimizations, or none at all if they are one of those rare individuals who seem to feel total inner peace.
‘Witness to violence’ – would they include seeing a violent TV movie as that, or observing their parent/s hating each other (the latter, they *ought* to include, well above for example an instant of having the front of their pants touched).
As to your first post… “How does that alter the perception?”… The crowning glory seems to me to be ‘what is in the youngster/child’s best interest?’ Regardless of whether a friendship is motivated by ‘desires’, I think all is irrelevant if behaviour is governed by an empathy for the youngster’s feelings. ‘Morally irrelevant’, but not legally of course as you know only too well. For practical reasons, our behaviour needs to be governed by that too. I believe the conclusion we have reached is that it is impossible to separate a general affection – a large part of it completely unrelated to sex – from a widespread and millennia-old desire for gratification which these days we have to tolerate as being termed ‘sick’ or ‘taboo’. Nor should it be separated; it is an insult to our humanity, adults and ‘children’ alike. Basically, if it doesn’t hurt (in any sense), it’s alright. It seems that our society can’t agree on what hurts, though. I think we’d have to get into a thesis on the lines of ‘development or/and well-being’ on that one.
Re. that survey again, personally I would cast the lot of it out but retain and use this one part of it as an unequivocal yardstick of bad behaviour:
“One in 10 (10.2%) had experienced a victimization-related injury.”
(Nothing to do with the 10.2% to which my little maths-hater belongs).
Phil, thanks for your reply.
To address most of it, let me point out to you sound rejoinders to the Finklehor thesis not only in Frank Furedi’s various discussions on the culture and politics of fear, the right to hug, and so on, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘The Black Swan’ and ‘Antifragile’.
But also, and as importantly, my earlier post on repeat victims being the most clear and consistent predictors of crime, not ‘offenders’. As we have seen far too often now, these wannabe career victims not only predict crime they create crime.
There is a lot of money to be made. In the Yew Tree thing alone up to £50,000 was being offered. As I write, news on the radio is that in the first round of hearings in the current Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse this morning, the issue being argued is not what harm was done but, you guessed it, how much compensation the ‘victims’ should be paid.
English common law requires, by contrast, that people be reasonable with one another as a matter of first principle.
Actually, a prosecution can succeed in the UK if it can be proven that the defendant was meeting a minor, or intending to do so, after grooming that was intended as the prelude to a sexual offence. Proof can sometimes be obtained e.g. in the case of online grooming there may be evidence of direct sexual propositions to a “minor” (who may actually be a police officer!) on a social networking site. I imagine the police regard it as a great deal easier to get a conviction if the defendant already has at least one sex offence on his record, especially for face-to-face grooming when direct evidence may be hard to get. As you are a man “of good character”, not making sexual propositions nor leaving an evidence trail of such propositions, I do not see how, in law at least, you could be regarded as grooming a child through acts of friendship. That will not necessarily prevent suspicion though, sadly.
You can only mean, Tom, “99.9% likely to be a police officer.”
Real children will quickly shy away, or giggle and hesitate, not believing their luck.
You can tell the cops from their steady grinding persistence . . .
Pursuant to this thread, the fairly recent Safe Horizon – Yale Child Study Centre White Paper on abused children in the US gives the 2009 data on child maltreatment as 62% neglect, 14% physical abuse, 8% sexual abuse, 6% psychological abuse, 2% medical neglect, 8% other abuse and 1% missing data.
These figures are consistent with substantiated child abuse data for Australia, though consistently lower firstly because they are not based on complaints or conviction rates and secondly because general neglect is factored in, rightly, as over 60% of the maltreatment profile.
Now, the point is, rather than interpreting the ‘sexual abuse’ component as being abusive, on the same evidence interpreting attempts at intimacy and sexual intimacy rather as the seeking of solace; the wanting of attention in the midst of general repudiation and neglect, seems to me as valid a position to take.
As there is no evidence to suggest that early or for that matter any sexual activity is either traumatic in situ or causes trauma at some later stage, in the same light it can be argued that successful intimacy in fact ameliorates and consoles the real and very large trauma of violence and neglect.
So, what was this dreadful Neil Wilson fellow doing but comforting the girl?
These stats are very revealing. Actually, “the wanting of attention in the midst of general repudiation and neglect” is often obliquely admitted, but the dogmatists invariably cast this background in terms of vulnerable kids being doubly victimised, first on account of their “troubled” backgrounds (backgrounds which are then ignored rather than identified as an important locus of investigation and action because attacking the family is politically sensitive) and second through sexual “predators”. They refuse to see that an adult’s sexually motivated physical intimacy will often be accompanied by more general feelings of goodwill and kindness, and that these can be very positively experienced by a child. What is needed, surely, is an intelligent distinction between this kind of case and those in which the adult really is uncaring, as in some of the ghastly so-called “grooming” cases in Britain recently. Grooming, incidentally, has of course traditionally implied one person or animal taking care of another, so this is a grotesque misapplication of the word. Also, it should never be forgotten that by no means all children involved sexually with an adult have an abusive background.
As for Mr Wilson, I’d have been a bit more impressed by his comfort contribution if he had given her oral sex rather than the other way around! Seriously, though, I don’t think we have much evidence to go on as to whether this particular gentleman was potentially a positive part of this girl’s life or not.
Glad you picked up on that word ‘grooming’, there, Tom. I never cease to frown in puzzlement and no little discomfort whenever it is applied these days. It’s one fine example of the re-writing of language which characterises the dangerous shifts in perspective towards sensuality and affection. Yes, my first thought too is always with animals (not in the deviant sense) – as in a girl grooming her beloved pet pony. Whoa, is she doing something awful to it, then?? The frightening thing is the way the word ‘grooming’ is now all but synonymous with ‘befriending’. The latter can be accused as the former on a whim. I guess at the point in legal wisdom we have reached currently, ‘befriending’ a minor is only a criminal thing if it subsequently (even many years later) leads to sexual contact. If it has not led to anything, then the offending adult can only informally be regarded as ‘creepy’ or ‘questionable’.
I’m sick of having to feel like this, even when I do such a little thing as lend a DVD of a movie to a favourite mid-teen student or discuss favourite movies with her. This is despite her ‘enjoying’ the chats (her mother said so, who knows all about it). I find I have to question myself: am I, 40yo man, ‘grooming’ this person? Am I being far too informal as a teacher? Inwardly, yes I guess I would love nothing more than a sexual relationship with said student, and perhaps she even has developed ‘thoughts’ about me. However, it’s not going to happen for many reasons (stigmatic, practical, legal), and in no sense am I ‘trying’ for it although I am manifesting my affection for her which has its roots in the dream of it – but also in the overall affection for her (which as you point out characterises a good deal of pedo or ephebo feeling). The only scenario I could imagine it happening for real is if we were both marooned indefinitely on a desert island away from all the socially-imposed shame of it.
Well, in view of the fact I go about my business in quiet resignation of the cross I have to bear, and with no expectation whatsoever of gratification, then I can just about allow myself to believe I am a moral person in befriending these sweet objects of my affections. I’m a strong-willed, intellectual person – but bloody hell it’s hard to resist feeling like a demon or alien for the mere possession of such thoughts!
[not intending to use this as some kind of support forum, sorry if I rambled a little here!].
[TOC adds: No problem, Phil. Interesting post.]
@Phil, leaving myself time to reflect on your post, to sleep on it and think it over, I find myself returning with as much a rhetorical question as a rejoinder. I hope you don’t mind, Tom.
Does the question being posed here have the end point of consummation of a paedophile’s desire for sex with young children and/or young people, or are there broader issues embedded in the matter at hand that need to be resolved?
If we are to take the alternative approach, not concerned with what paedophiles, or people who identify as paedophiles, ephebephiles, hebephiles, and all the rest of them might want, but what is in the best interests of the child or young person, how does that alter our thinking on what is going on here?
I am mindful of two things. The first is hearing of a centre for troubled youth in The Netherlands run by paedophiles, to which children and young people were referred but has since been closed down. The second is a case currently before the courts here in Western Australia, in which a therapist with over 20 years experience working with boys has been charged with multiple sex offenses against numbers of said boys.
I ask thirdly, because I had never thought of it this way myself; about actually approaching boys for sex or even suggesting it to them, but in the event found some of them asking me. At the time it made me stop and think what it was about me that attracted them, and how I should think about myself because of it. What is the best approach to take?
Having then been charged and convicted on this extremely petty, trumped up absurdity of touching the front of a boy’s trousers, followed by six months pretty much by myself in prison, under protection and thus solitary with plenty of time to think about it, and many police interrogations, academic studies and discussions since then, for the life of my I still can’t see that I am inherently a paedophile for whom sexual consummation is the end goal of any relationship I might have with a child or young person.
In all my life, and after many years living with and raising children, my sole experience is that only good has ever come of my many and various dealings with them.
How does that alter the perception?
I point you all to this paper of Finklehor’s in which the arbitrary setting up of sexual contact within a broader crime spectrum is glaring. The article in full text is found at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124/5/1411.full.
It uses the US National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) screening process, in which the various questionnaire items are classified under:
Conventional Crime
Child Maltreatment
Peer and Sibling Victimisation
Sexual Victimisation
Witnessing and Direct Victimisation
Exposure to Community Violence
Exposure to Family Violence and Abuse
School Violence and Threat
Internet Victimisation
Note that in the embedded ‘sexual victimsation’ category, questions are pre-phrased carefully to include ‘forced’, ‘touched’, ‘private parts’, ‘didn’t want to’, and such like.
OK, that seems fair enough; assuming that’s the reality, though from long experience I cannot say that such situations are in any way typical. Children are inherently very well able to look after themselves in such settings.
The overwhelming observation of children over many years is rather more like ‘feel’, ‘fondle’, ‘touch’, ‘pee-pee’, ‘dickie’, ‘pussy’, ‘crack’, ‘laughing’, ‘giggling’, ‘wanted to’.
From the same evidence and more, one might well add here, in terms of abrupt cessation of enjoyment, nothing more than ‘parents/teachers’ ‘found out’ . . .
I followed this one when it came out, and got a real lashing on Facebook for suggesting ‘mitigation’ for the guy, Wilson, on account of the girl’s part in it. ‘Mitigation’, note, is what I said, not ‘exoneration’. The crusaders were armed with 2-pronged shafts of dogma (halbards?) to skewer me with. Anyway…:
1) victim-blaming. I’m ‘part of the problem’: it’s outrageous to ‘blame’ the victim. I felt I was speaking a foreign language in trying to counter a) I’m not ‘blaming’ her, since I’m not suggesting SHE be tried or sentenced. b) if she has indeed behaved in the ways described by Colover and Peters, then she is distinctly less of a ‘victim’, no?
2) NO: because such behaviour on her part indicated ‘prior abuse’ (note how this closes all avenues of reason). thereby making Wilson’s molestations all the more unforgivable. I meditated on these words, truly I did. In effect, sexual behaviour in a 13yo girl by necessity indicates ‘prior abuse’, they say. The fact she has the vocabulary and concepts to offer fellatio indicates an abused soul (some of them were out for the Dad, stepdad or uncle at this point if I remember right).
I’ll dangle it there for now. Alas if I had more, there’s an entire sociological/anthropological thesis in this.
I’ll conclude with the final comment in said FB ‘debate’:
“You do know that a 13yo girl goes through/has gone through certain changes physical and emotional at this time of her life? Do you know *why* these changes happen?”
I received no answer.
Take solace, Phil, in the long established fact that the most consistently reliable indicator of repeat crime is not repeat offending but repeat victimisation; in short, if you want to know where and when crimes are most likely to be committed, don’t follow potential offenders around but an established victim.
There is good reason behind this anxiety to “not blame the victim”, being the simple reality that victims are far too often to blame for attracting a criminal incident.
It follows, and has long been proven the case, that the surest way to prevent crime is to have ‘victims’ get a life finally, do something to keep themselves safe, stop whinging and complaining so much. That’s all ‘victim support’ really entails, to make sure it doesn’t happen again and everyone gets back on with their lives.
Short of actual invasion and with it retributive rape of women as adjunct to the execution of males, as in Kosovo, and especially given the pleasures of sex and intimacy, the highly dubious nature of these charges becomes clear.
The two officers involved in this matter, the judge and the public prosecutor, will undoubtedly have known all this. All law officers in common law jurisdictions know all this, it’s inherent in their coursework and professional development.
The question remaining is only concerned with clarifying matters in public discourse. It’s politicians who need taking to task for their trepidity in facing the truth, and with it the facts of life.
The ‘no angel’ case is very interesting — brings up several points.
Firstly, ‘no angel’ is an understandable remark to make if the child had been given to genuinely bad behaviour — as opposed to normal childish naughtiness — but we are told that the judge said that because she had been the object of an older boy’s sexual interest before. A passive object, or an active participant in an exchange of sexual signals? How much older was this other boy? We are not told. But I would like it if everyone recognised that a nine-year-old girl’s interest in sex is normal and healthy and does not preclude her being the nicest, sweetest kid on the planet.
Secondly, there is a very long and sorry history of women’s sexual history being used against them in rape trials. The official idea — and probably the judge in this case was thinking along the same lines — was that if a woman had consented to sex on other occasions, she was more likely to have consented on this occasion. But in practice, the view was often that sexually active women are ‘sluts’ and raping them doesn’t count, or they have it coming — all kinds of horrible things like that. That is why we have rape shield laws now. They don’t always work, but they are an improvement.
Under a better legal system, somebody would sit down with the girl — apparently twelve when she told what had happened: no longer a really little kid — and have a talk with her, in as relaxed and unjudgmental a way as possible, asking her what had happened, what she had done, what he had done, how she had felt. If she said she had agreed to her babysitter’s actions, and especially if she said it had been her idea, then the young man should be let off with a slap on the wrist. I say with a slap on the wrist rather than scot-free because I don’t think that, generally speaking, (presumably) adult-sized youths of eighteen should be having or trying to have sexual intercourse with nine-year-old girls. Thirteen-year-old girls, OK, but a nine-year-old is likely to suffer pain and physical injury from an adult-sized penis. Presumably the intercourse was only attempted rather than completed because his dick just wouldn’t fit, but he deserves no special prizes for not keeping on trying to shove it in: stopping at that point was the only decent thing to do.
If the girl said she had not clearly consented, and I do think the consent would need to be quite clear in such a case, then the young man would indeed be on trial for attempted rape, and then it would be wrong to bring up her previous sexual history: at issue would be not whatever sexual things she might have done before, but whether he tried to have sex with a child who on this occasion had not consented.
But we don’t have such a system. Even if a child says she suggested the whole thing, that officially does not count. So the judge had to rely on other evidence, like whether or not she had previously shown sexual interest in older boys. And I don’t think he was necessarily wrong to do so, even if he could have phrased his remarks better.
Quite so! In fact, I find nothing to disagree with in your entire post although my blog might easily have given a different impression: packing in info about several different cases meant leaving lots of t’s uncrossed and i’s undotted!
Oh, I wasn’t disagreeing with anything you said either — just, in part, with the judge. The ‘no angel’ remark was a bit too Madonna-whore for my liking. It put me in mind of the post of mine which you were kind enough to make a guest blog a while back — what I was thinking about repressive ideologies of female sexuality now being put on kids.
The outcry over the remarks about Neil Wilson’s case is another instance of justified feminist indignation, here simply misplaced, or over-generalised rather. “Blaming the victim” is what this judge and public prosecutor would have been doing if they implied the kid was at fault for being sexually molested because she had, say, rolled up the waistband of her school-uniform skirt and gotten tipsy on alcopops, or whatever. It is not what they did in pointing out there is every sign that this purported child ‘victim’ was actually a willing participant and indeed instigated the sex.
The remark of the judge in that case is also interesting: that this thirteen-year-old was ‘predatory’. Well, I guess if adult-child sex is always predatory, and if the adult’s not the predator, the child must be! But given that this guy kept ringing and texting the girl, it seems he didn’t feel himself too terribly preyed upon. Could it be that nobody was preying on anybody — that this was a mutually enthusiastic fling?
This is a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but the ‘somebody has to be preying on somebody’ notion reminds me a little of the sex-role ideologies so prevalent across much of the ancient world, and elsewhere: that adult, masculine, citizen males are penetrators, and boys, women and girls, effeminate men and slaves are penetrated. This notion lingered well into the twentieth century with talk about ‘active’ and ‘passive’ roles in sex. In fact, it still lingers: it has fallen out of favour where I live, but Latin American acquaintances of mine assume that one member of a gay couple must be the masculine ‘giver’ and the other the feminine ‘receiver’.
Such roles are important and enjoyable to many gay couples, and to many straight couples, and perhaps especially to many BDSM couples, who aren’t after all as uncommon as all that. But to me, talk about one person being active in sex and the other passive is just factually inaccurate: mutually enjoyable sexual intercourse in my experience involves, well, mutuality: movement by both parties and a fair amount of position-switching. I surely cannot be alone in this, given the prevalence of woman-on-top porn and that most common of male sexual complaints about a woman: “She just lies there!”
I like to think that in a more sexually relaxed society we would be far less prescriptive about sociosexual roles, and think of sex not as something A does to B but rather as something A and B do together. And I’m sure we all wish that we could stop forcing human relationships into tidy boxes, even as our natural tendencies incline us to do just that.
But I don’t want to lose sight of the point of your original post: broadly, these remarks by the judge and public prosecutor are very heartening. It’s just a great pity the two are having to pay for them now. And Cameron does seem to be pushing the anti-paedophile angle very hard indeed lately, doesn’t he?
Very well observed! I’ve recently been re-visiting ancient Greek (and Roman) pederasty: might blog about it soon.
What I find to disagree with is the bias against boys and men, given in the idea that it’s OK to rape sluts. I don’t know who does that, beyond an idea coming out of courts of law, or convents perhaps.
Who is calling the girl a slut anyway? Aren’t sluts by definition loose, unkempt and promiscuous? Why aren’t boys who behave the same way sluts?
I think it’s way past time we change the way we use language, especially in the propagation of “horrible things” that on even cursory examination are shown not to exist in any substance.
I wouldn’t sit a girl down talking to her about her sex life, or anybody for that matter. It’s nobody’s business but hers. From experience, on the other hand, young people may want to talk to someone about it, to clarify some point usually.
The most telling example has been a boy seeking advice not on sex but on handling his ‘mates’ wanting ‘their turn’ with his new girlfriend, though girls of that ilk are just as bad.
That has nothing to do with sex as such, but with generally bad behaviour of hooligans. They all need a good talking to.
Centuries past, in a pre-Age Of Enlightenment. The great logician/victim Gallileo proved that the crime of ‘Telling Truths In Lands Of Lies’ is ‘HERESY’ ! And now in a post-WW2 Anglo Fascist media ‘Age Of Endarkenment’, the great logicians/victims Heretic-Toc and blog, plus eminent lawers, serially commit the same heinous HERESY – ‘Telling Truths In Lands Of Lies”. Quote WW2 anti-Fascist Dad’s Army Corporal Jones: “They do not like it UP ’em!”
On many issues, not just ‘Sex’, Anglo Justice & Journalism continues to be serial gang-raped daily – in plain sight !
Well, yes, precisely. Not so long ago an ethnographer reporting observed facts against local silence that not only were 11-12 year-olds fooling around, but so were 17 year-old girls with 12 year-old boys, and all the rest of it, while only the older boys were being arrested, to find himself not only sanctioned but set up by said kiddies, and then charged and convicted albeit on the fairly trivial and absurd charge of touching the front of a boy’s trousers.
The trial was by hysterical media and political pressure to “get rid of him” for reporting the truth, when in the event the trial judge and prison officers alike went out of their way to protect him and protect his rights. That’s how desperate the sexual hysterics become, the moment they think a responsible adult has “found out” what the kids in their charge are all doing.
In another case, charges against a group of teenage Aboriginal boys in one of the North Queensland communities for fooling around with a 10 year-old girl was dismissed in court, on the substantial and widely corroborated evidence that she was the primary instigator. Hetty Johnston of the notorious vigilante outfit Bravehearts interfered, forcing the case back to trial where it was again dismissed.
We do need to pursue these matters with some vigour, not to necessarily support changes to Age of Consent laws though they would help, but in all cases for a return to due process in law, for factual evidence over hearsay and gossip, and not least because these are criminal matters not civil, a burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Historically disadvantaged protected classes get special PC leeway for sexual crimes, even of the non-consensual kind.
“Police did not want to appear racist”, thus let 1400 children be abused over 15 years
There was another case where a Muslim boy got a slap on the wrist for sex with a 12 year old in Britain. We reported on it, but I would have to search for the link.