How do you turn a so-called child victim into a real one? One sure-fire way is to have her locked up for 20 hours in a police cell after she has refused to give evidence against her lover.
That is what Judge Robert Bartfield did earlier this month when a 15-year-old girl would not testify against her 32-year-old boyfriend at Bradford Crown Court in northern England.
After the girl eventually testified under duress, the man was found guilty of sexual activity with a child. A spokesperson for Victim Support rightly said the girl had been treated in a “grotesque and, frankly, degrading manner by those who are supposed to be protecting her”. Even the NSPCC managed to get this one right, saying it was shocking – and, for once, they were not talking about the behaviour of the man on trial.
Judiciary officials have launched an investigation into the case.
It is probably too much to expect, but let’s hope the judge’s barbaric insensitivity will be followed by a change in the law, as happened in California following at least one similar case back in 1983, involving a 12-year-old girl called Amy. Her step-father, a US Air Force doctor, was on trial for alleged sexual contact with her.
Amy did not want to lose the man her mother had married four years earlier. Reportedly, she feared the family would be broken up in the event of a conviction. She was kept in solitary confinement for eight days but bravely remained rock solid in her refusal to testify. The case was abandoned only after she had been brought back to court six times, each time defying the judge’s demand that she give evidence.
The new law, passed the following year, was an amendment to the California Code of Civil Procedure Section 1219, to the effect that “no court may imprison or otherwise confine or place in custody the victim of a sexual assault for contempt when the contempt consists of refusing to testify concerning the sexual assault.”
Ten years later the authorities tried to change this law in order to force 13-year-old Jordie Chandler to testify that Michael Jackson had molested him. It didn’t work, and the law fortunately still stands. As I wrote in my book about the superstar’s relationships with boys:
… here were the authorities proposing to force Jordie to testify against his will. Even Michael, with all the insults and humiliation that had been heaped upon him, was never accused of resorting to forcing a child into anything.
Arguably even more shocking than the judge’s tough tactics in the Bradford case was the reaction of at least one feminist commentator, Deborah Orr, in her Guardian column. She supported the judge, on the grounds that his hard line was for the girl’s own good in the long run: just what Jordie’s father said when he betrayed his son’s confidence – which turned out to be a disaster. Feminists rightly used to be angry over men telling women what is for their own good; now they have become the new authoritarians.
Orr then went on to describe a really sinister recent addition to the ever-expanding empire of false victimhood. It goes like this: if the “victim” you aim to “protect” does not feel like a victim, and refuses to be cast as one, then you just change the rules of the game to make sure they cannot escape the victim label you are determined to pin on them.
The “victim” refuses to say they have been sexually assaulted? Very well, in that case you re-brand the man’s crime: it was not sexual assault but “exploiting the victim’s vulnerabilities”. In this scheme of things, if the child had been a willing participant in a sexual act with a grown-up she must have been vulnerable by definition. In other words, she would be deemed automatically to have been unwilling but for her vulnerability to the wicked attractiveness of the adult, who must have been criminally handsome, or outrageously charming, or talented, or famous, or rich, or strong, or protective, or maybe even just a diabolically nice guy. Any or all of these attributes, which might be thought positive qualities in another context, are perversely turned by this dogma into negative ones. They just become tools of “the grooming process”.
The fundamentally anti-sexual agenda behind all this becomes apparent when we see that the vulnerability concept is being applied to adults as well as children. These extremists effectively want to abolish the age of consent. Yes, you did read that right, but don’t rush to crack open the champagne. They are trying to infantilise everyone, making consent more and more difficult at any age. The logical endpoint is no sex at all for anyone, no matter how old they are, rendering an age of consent redundant.
Orr quotes with approval a certain Professor Betsy Stanko, assistant director of planning with the Metropolitan Police. After a decade of research on rape (note that we are talking primarily about adult alleged victims now) she concludes that a way to deal with low conviction rates is effectively to ditch the consent criterion. If the woman consented, so you cannot convict a man, you find ways of finding that consent did not count because the woman was vulnerable. What makes her vulnerable? Being drunk at the time, wearing sexy clothes, being swept off her feet by a tall, dark, handsome stranger, especially if he happened to be rich and famous. Pretty well anything, really, that would show she was up for a roaring good time.
Neatest of all, vulnerability would be demonstrated if the woman had been in a steady relationship with the man. By the Stinko Standard, evidence of such a relationship would count against the man, not for him. What absolutely Orr-some Alice in Wonderland logic!
Bearing in mind the interesting current debate here about feminism, in the comments on Gentle poet Ginsberg doesn’t deserve this, I should perhaps ask fellow heretics whether Deborah Orr is a feminist worth discussing things with, or whether she and her ilk are beyond redemption. I would just throw in the thought that she is married and has children (which in itself surprises me, in view of her seeming anti-sexuality) by the novelist and ubiquitous public intellectual Will Self. I cannot say I have read his books or have any in-depth knowledge of the guy, but he comes across in his articles and broadcasts as intelligent and perceptive.
Maybe we should write to him, in a devious attempt to influence his wife. How about this:
“Sir, your wife is a shrew. It’s time you took her in hand.”
Umm. Maybe not. The Cunning Plan might need a bit more work.
One angle might be to play on his justified sense of grievance over being suspected as a paedophile by a security guard and a police officer when he was in the countryside hiking with his 11-year-old son last year. Justified, as I say, but by Jesus, Mary and all the saints did Self bang on about it! A torrent of indignation poured forth from his keyboard about what was admittedly bound to have been an upsetting experience, although it’s not as though he was arrested or had his reputation trashed in the media. His tale of woe was nevertheless spun into an epic yarn of over two and a half thousand words in the Daily Mail.
As the Mail’s headline put it, “Will Self reveals moment an innocent ramble became a nightmarish tale of modern Britain”. Who knows, having had a slight taste of the nightmare some of us have to put up with every day of the week, maybe the traumatised Self could be tapped as a source of sympathy.
a new study shows that in the sexual offending cases different courts distinguish misdemeanors and felonies differently, and the way how the investigators do does not predict the courts’ decisions:
It is understandable for such criteria of the offence seriousness like taking the “victim” from his/her family by social workers or “humiliation” during the offence are neither clearly defined, nor prove the seriousness of the offence.
a new study shows that illegal child sex experience is the least predictor of depression in 17ᵗʰ through 22ⁿᵈ year of life among the other forms of child abuse/neglect (the study did not use a control group), and that sex abuse can be a predictor of depression only when it is experienced in middle school, not earlier. It means that pubescent children are more vulnerable then pre-pubescent — perhaps, because they worry about being disclosed or pregnant more than younger and older children, or may be they face more sexual prohibitions
Thanks, Cyril. In case anyone is wondering, Cyril has emailed me since making this comment to say the study in question is here:
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.918092
I’ve got ineresting data, Tom. WEIRD countries consider girls as victims more often than developing ones (25% vs 21%), women call themselves victims more often than girls (22% vs 18%), girls older 15 more often than younger girls (just 10%)
Well spotted, Cyril.
I am surprised the difference is not greater. I would have expected 25% in WEIRD countries and maybe 10% in non-WEIRD ones.
the main thing is the older a female is the more she is inclined to consider her sexual experience as abusive — due to education, I suppose
That makes sense.
[…] http://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/creating-victims-real-and-imaginary/ […]
well if theres one iota of truth that came out, when those undercover cops
spent about 2 yrs with TOC is that he really is a nice guy
Cheers, Mr P! I’m sure you are too!
Sorry never read the book,dr jekyll and mr hyde,il take some constructive criticism there,but you get the point i was making in the blog,again i apologise
for my lack of omniscience on a serious subject.
Criticism was not intended Mr P, and no apology is required. It was meant to be a constructive addition of information for the benefit of some readers who might otherwise have been baffled by that particular reference. Sorry for any offence.
This reminds me of the link i was sent regarding those interviews with the dutch boys,johnny,stephan and peter.The police would use a jackal and hide character,take them for a high speed run in the police car,when that proves useless turn to capricious methods to get their info
Do you really want your school friends to know your a little bender etc
Theres a blog i picket up on that seems to fit well,when a word is used to refer
to anything from an insulting remark to beating the s**t out of someone,
What does it even mean to say a relationship is abusive?
[TOC adds: “a jackal and hide character”. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story of a split personality good/evil figure will be very familiar to British readers but I’m not sure about others. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde ]
A brilliant piece Tom.
‘These extremists effectively want to abolish the age of consent. They are trying to infantilise everyone, making consent more and more difficult at any age. The logical endpoint is no sex at all for anyone, no matter how old they are’
This is exactly how I have felt about the way things are going, with the music school ‘abuse’ cases, and the closely related teacher-pupil relationship cases such as Jeremy Forrest. While real victims undoubtedly exist (or ‘existed’, since many hark back decades), these are lost in a fog of hysteria and retrospective accusations by women wanting to blame their problems on past intimacies that did not work out or they feel ashamed by. Whenever I’ve debated these cases on Facebook (it’s not appropriate in polite company ‘for real’), or dared to venture any mitigation for *anybody* or to differentiate the cases at all, I’ve been met by a sense of pathological hatred of sex emanating from many of the females. The male fundamentalists’ motivations are less clear: I guess at a lack of libido, or a feverish dream of maintaining their own daughters’ chastity to a ripe old age (25, say), or simply a desire for high status in the PC community. Feminism and hatred of ephebephilia (let alone paedophilia) are undoubtedly closely-related phenomena. They want complete control in matters sexual, which basically means giving men *nothing*, save for some ‘sperm donor’ husband if they wish to breed. Naturally this has to start from an early age, in conditioning the youth of the country to their viewpoints, hence the ‘abuse inquisition’ of our time. It does indeed feel like a kind of ‘last throe or puritanism’, as somebody put it in another thread. If feminist extremists are behind this, I’m not sure how this effects the homosexual side of things. I guess they want to deny those men any sexual outlet too. It’s about misandry, period, but in hating men they’re not letting true femininity blossom either, and they’re killing the potential for sexual freedom and trust to develop between anybody, which suits them fine, since they’re phobic of the whole concept of sex as recreation.
Oh, and another thought on what Kit said about sexually considerate MAPs: often their sexual considerateness seems to rub off on (ahem…no pun intended) their younger partners. Every so often a study will be published which shows that an alarmingly high proportion of adolescents, and typically nearly as many girls as boys, think sexual force or coercion is OK under some circumstances. See, for instance, the Adolescent Dating Attitudes Survey: http://www.dayoneri.org/datingattitudessurvey.htm (6th to 9th graders are typically aged 10/11-15.) Sure, many of the kids will likely grow out of those attitudes when they start having sex and discover how it can be both fun and mutually respectful, but on the other hand, many will likely be prevented by those attitudes from having fun, mutually respectful sex.
Boys who’ve been interviewed about their sexual relationships with men, however, don’t seem to have this problem. Take the ‘Interview with David’ from the Danish Paedophile Association’s book ‘Crime Without Victims’, which somebody posted on BoyChat a while ago: http://www.boychat.org/messages/1197709.htm David, sixteen, has been friends with Christian, thirty-seven, from age eleven and has been having sex with him from age thirteen; he now also has casual sex with girls. Near the end of the interview he is asked, “Do you think he [Christian] exploited you?” He replies: “No. Because when there’s no sexual desire, nothing happens. One of the things essential to a pedophile relationship surely is respect. And when one of the partners says no, that means no. You don’t put pressure on each other. You cannot do that.” In Theo Sandfort’s ‘Boys on their Contacts with Men’, Peter, fourteen, was asked how often he ‘played the boss’ during sex with Karel, thirty, and replied, “Never. I never play the boss. We’re both bosses: bosses of our own bodies.” Those are the kinds of attitudes around sex that any reasonable person would surely want to see adolescents growing up with.
According to the wiki entry on Will Self he claims the life-long bachelor Lewis Carroll as one of his influences.
Doubt that will have any bearing on his sympathy. Many people are in complete denial about Carroll’s love for little girls, just like they are with Michael Jackson’s love for boys.
I wonder if they even care that Carroll’s photography surely would had him thrown in prison today. Today people go to prison for even less (or more if we’re talking about the amount of the subject’s clothing.)
What with Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, J. D. Salinger, John Ruskin, Edgar Allan Poe, Elvis, Gauguin and possibly Dostoievsky, it’d be hard to find someone who wasn’t inspired by a girl-lover! Most people I’ve spoken to about it (not very many) have some awareness of Carroll’s feelings for prepubescent girls but say something vague about sulimation, ambivalence or just ‘a different time’. Nothing ambivalent about it, though: as you say, today Carroll would be in prison for child pornography. But I have an awful feeling that when the average person in the street thinks of child pornography, they think of mainstream pornography only with child stars: GangBang 3 with eight-year-olds. But a quick look through Newgon, for instance, reveals that a plurality to an outright majority of ‘child pornography’ simply depicts children playing or posing naked — exactly like Carroll’s photos: https://www.newgon.com/wiki/Research:_Child_Pornography The papers call these ‘child abuse images’, everyone imagines the worst and the madness continues.
I don’t know much about Orr. Sometimes, though, I start reading things from other feminist commentators whose views I normally respect and suddenly find myself in tinfoil hat land, surrounded by suggestions that abuse not only can, but regularly does, happen without someone recognising it for years and years. I then look into the background of whoever wrote the blog of the moment and things make more sense, because it’ll turn out that, for example, she was raised in a family which mistreated her and wasn’t able to get a good grasp on the notion that she was being mistreated until well into her teens. But this is surely a pretty distinctive kind of situation, not one we should be generalising from.
I think articles like Orr’s stem partly from a cultural shift of sorts that’s seen the imposition of stricter and stricter rules about what is ‘healthy’ and not in all kinds of relationships, not just in sexual encounters. To love too much, for instance, to long for someone and feel bereft without them, is ‘codependence’ these days; if your feelings of love are too intense they become ‘enmeshment’ and you must take yourself off to a therapist at once. In the 80s Melody Beattie came up with the notion of codependence to describe, if I recall correctly, situations in which people close to alcoholics derive emotional benefit from being the ones leaned on and needed. This struck a chord, and Beattie realised she’d hit the jackpot and kept on churning out book after book. Now the word codependence is being thrown around everywhere, particularly in the US. I get the basic point that nobody can rescue anybody else from all their problems and that people should ideally know how to stand on their own two feet. But in recent years, several acquaintances have informed me solemnly that love is not a need, and that people cannot find love until they stop looking. I’m left scratching my head wondering how they came to believe that. Needing love is part of being human. It hurts, but for the vast majority of us, there’s no way round it
On sex, alcohol and sexy outfits: It does appear from the work of David Lisak, Paul Miller and Stephanie McWhorter that a majority of rapes are committed when the victim is incapacitated from drugs or alcohol or both, *whereas the rapist has remained relatively sober, watching his chance — these are not drunken misunderstandings*. But we’re talking young women who are blackout drunk here, or nearly — a classic situation is getting drunk with friends, collapsing on the couch to sleep and waking up to find an erstwhile friend raping you — not a bit tipsy with inhibitions lowered somewhat. I know of few people who would seriously argue that having sex in the latter condition after a successful party means that both people are raping each other. But there’s always someone, isn’t there. I should point out also that you do hear of some rape cases in which a man passes out drunk, or just falls asleep, then wakes to find a woman on top of him. In one recent such case in Norway, the woman got nine months in prison and a fine: http://blogcritics.org/woman-convicted-of-rape/
I completely support the feminist effort to make clear that a sexy outfit does not equal ‘asking for it’. I’m a lifelong tomboy: sexy outfits have never been my style. Well do I remember, though, the undergraduate evening when friends prevailed on me to get dolled up and come out with them for once. The friend I had been going to go home with then disappeared with a young gentleman whose acquaintance she had just enthusiastically made and I was left to make my own way home. I’ve lived my life doing the things women aren’t supposed to do, such as travelling alone, camping alone and walking home alone in the dark, and though I’ve probably escaped unscathed thus far merely through dumb luck, I’ve seldom felt particularly frightened. But I felt frightened then, and cursed my decision to make my pals happy by getting into my fancy rig. I knew that if this was the night my luck ran out, I’d get a lot of the blame, because of the way I was dressed.
Kit writes, “I don’t think it’s ‘anti-sex’ to say that basic principles such as not taking advantage of other people’s vulnerabilities for your own pleasure should certainly be part of such an ethic. Civilised paedophiles already know these things, of course, but I suspect they might come as news to many young heterosexual men (some of them little more than children themselves).” Again I very much agree; indeed, studies of MAPs provide us with a picture of generally (with plenty of exceptions, of course) restrained and considerate sexual behaviour, which gives the lie to the notion that Men are Pigs who just can’t help themselves.
Finally, Tom’s second link, about the twelve-year-old girl, is pretty heartbreaking. I knew of a case in which three boys were being raised by a female relative who beat them and didn’t give them quite enough to eat. The eldest boy, about the same age as the girl in this case, resisted telling for a very long time, because he knew that if he did, he and his brothers would probably end up in separate foster homes. Finally he did tell, and the brothers were indeed split up, whereupon the eldest boy fell into a suicidal depression.
Well said but… according to the Mail she hadn’t refused to give testimony but was just bored to be kept waiting. She was probably conned into giving the testimony earlier. The police techniques are well up to date (threats and promises), they usually don’t need to lock up the “victim” overnight to make her say what they want to hear.
When I read the “Orr-ful” screed several weeks ago, I was barely able to finish it given my overwhelming disgust. After your piece, I forced myself to re-read it and to more fully appreciate its loathsome significance.
It is really the next logical step, isn’t it? That is to say, the public rationalization of the tactics, not the tactics themselves. The actual practice has been with us forever. Indeed, we have been seeing protracted and grueling inquisitions of kids by law enforcement for as long as I can remember – more than thirty years now. It’s not as though we who have been on the front lines of this seemingly endless depravity of human suffering have not seen the CPS tactics of “breaking the child” before.
What’s different, perhaps, is the attempt to acknowledge and publicly articulate (what must sound to Deborah Orr’s faithful readers as) a reasonable-sounding justification for the criminal coercion of children and adolescents.
Yes, to be clear, our adversaries have not only advanced a theory of “enhanced interrogation techniques” every bit as cynical and legalistically allowable as those employed by the Bush/Cheney/Blair/Obama administrations, but have also made – what they believe to be – a public case for its deployment.
This emerging fact of child abuse prosecutions, previously considered too sordid for public consumption and, for their practitioners, decidedly inconvenient arcana, (much like the metaphorical interiors of the sausage factory) we can hope will send shock waves through a previously compliant but liberal-minded constituency.
Perhaps that constituency is still too small to matter but, with this piece and Deborah Orr’s own words (as well as those of the exquisitely-named “Betsy Stanko”, a “criminology” professor who moonlights as a cop for “The Met”) you are clearly helping to remove chinks from the hysterics’ armor (or “armour” to our friends who inhabit the Sceptred Isle).
As these pieces continue to fall and accumulate into a growing and undeniably embarrassing pile, I believe the reality of this grotesquerie of injustice will begin to be correctly perceived amongst the fair-minded and influential.
Part of what needs to be done is a thorough inventory of those pieces of fallen armor, and of the pertinent body parts thus left vulnerable – in total – followed by their contextual revelation. Such a “catalog of horrors” is a project, by the way, which is greatly needed and would be appreciated by everyone victimized by these terrible laws.
Don’t want to write it up? No, problem, do the research and hand it off to those of us who would be happy to string the pieces into a coherent whole. But, and I know I can speak for Tom and others in this, please contribute!
It is only through diligence, struggle and courage that our own holocaust will eventually join others in the actuarial table for bad ideas.
Good things never come to “lye-abouts” (a quintessentially English term I learned from watching David Mitchell).
Great work, Tom!
It should have been spelled: “lie-abouts”!
[TOC adds: Or layabouts? In your original version I thought you might have been referencing some ancient and venerable literary source. In this Sceptred (or Septic!) Isle the old bards just spelled/spelt things any way they fancied.]
Ah yes! “Layabouts”. That’s it! You just never hear that in the States, although we really should. I should, I’m afraid.
I would not hold out too much hope, Tom, that Will Self’s views depart markedly from those of his wife. I do recall an Observer article a few years ago (which I can’t seem to lay my hands on now) in which Self reflects on the irony of ‘paedophilia’ meaning ‘love of children.’ And I suspect Self’s indignation at his treatment has more to do with an **innocent** man being accused of child-snatching; something tells me he’s not too bothered about what happens to real paedophiles. The Daily Mail, which made much of the story, manages both to beat up hysteria and to feign outrage when innocent people are made victims of that hysteria.
Deborah Orr is interesting; I agree and disagree with her columns in roughly equal measure. Even when I disagree with her I often think she has a decent point. In this case I certainly agree that the subjective condition of ‘consent’ is an extremely tenuous foundation on which to establish proof of rape; I’m not sure that the equally subjective condition of ‘exploitation’ is likely to prove any more tenable. It strikes me as an excellent basis for establishing a sexual ethic, but a problematic grounds for potentially sending people to prison. These are certainly the right things to be worried about (in my view), but a legal-forensic context is probably the wrong forum in which to consider them. I wonder if we will ever be able to deal with rape and sexual assault primarily as social problems outside of the criminal justice system. Indeed, some days I wonder whether we should even treat ‘rape’ as a criminal offence at all, given the public opprobrium surrounding the charge, the heavy sentences imposed, and the extreme difficulty of demonstrating guilt (or even deciding what would be grounds for a guilty verdict) in many cases. Compelling victims to testify against their will merely exemplifies the absurdity of the present system. I tend to think we need a better solution to irresponsible and selfish sexual activity among those incorrigible teliophiles. A new post-Christian sexual morality would be a good start; I don’t think it’s ‘anti-sex’ to say that basic principles such as not taking advantage of other people’s vulnerabilities for your own pleasure should certainly be part of such an ethic. Civilised paedophiles already know these things, of course, but I suspect they might come as news to many young heterosexual men (some of them little more than children themselves).
But in answer to your question, yes – Deborah Orr is the kind of person I think it would be useful and hopeful to engage with. She is a newspaper commentator rather than an academic or a professional writer, so she’s paid to have strong opinions rather than well-thought-out ones (was ever a culture so beset with ‘commentators’ and so bereft of wisdom?). Still, I think she’s generally intelligent and thoughtful – she’s certainly not ‘beyond redemption.’ As you note, however, she is a mother of young children. In my view it is parents, rather than feminists, who are the most visceral and unreasonable opponents of MAPs: some of my dearest friends have been transformed instantly into paranoid psychos the moment they pop a sprog. There’s not much you can do about this; after all parents are naturally protective of their kids and jealous of their children’s love. As I think Professor Cantor has pointed out, paedophilia and parental love aren’t all that dissimilar. And, as someone at boychat brought to my attention, Self and Orr’s smoking-hot golden-haired eleven-year-old son is devastatingly lovely (do the image search yourself). If I were his dad I’d probably be mounting a full round-the-clock heavily-armed anti-paedo vigilance patrol.
We’ve disagreed on a thing or two in the past, but I’m with you 100% on this.
I wonder how this compares with compelled testimony in other crimes. Are women compelled to testify against boyfriends in domestic violence cases? Are men compelled to testify if somebody is clearly the aggressor and beats them up in a bar fight? Somehow I don’t think so.
It most definitely does happen. Wives and mothers have been subjected to every kind of blackmail available to law enforcement (which includes CPS, of course). Loss of custody, loss of welfare benefits, trumped-up criminal charges, threats of charges against other relatives and friends, and more.
One of the most gratifying developments in recent years has been the revelation of government agents as ruthless actors able to destroy lives with impunity and the growing recognition by the general public of the extent of their depravities.
Many of us know of specific investigations where parents (often single mothers) have been threatened with loss of custody of their children or even with criminal charges being brought against them, unless they cooperated fully in the frame-up of their children’s alleged abusers.
This is nothing new. As I said in my other response, it has been going on for at least thirty years.
As with all of the dirty work which has long accompanied the discharge of criminal justice, it remained invisible to all but its victims and its perpetrators.