Rolf Harris you are 84 years old. You have no previous criminal convictions or cautions recorded against you. You are no longer in the best of health. For well over 50 years you have been a popular entertainer and television personality of international standing – with a speciality in children’s entertainment. You are also an artist of renown. You have been the recipient of a number of honours and awards over the years. You have done many good and charitable works and numerous people have attested to your positive good character.
So began the sentencing remarks by Mr Justice Sweeney at Southwark Crown Court, London, before handing down a prison term of five years and nine months on Harris last week. Unfortunately for the star, who was massive in Britain and his native Australia, the rest of the judge’s 3,000-word speech was to be no encomium. Instead, he rebuked the man in the dock as a serial sex attacker of girls and young women who had abused the trust placed in him as a famous children’s entertainer.
Those who remember the TV shows of his heyday, as I do, will recall a man who was brilliant at his job. A speciality was rapid painting, so his young viewers could see a picture emerging before their very eyes in a matter of moments. “Can you tell what it is yet?” he would ask. It became a catchphrase. In his later years he was taken seriously as an artist, with an exhibition of his work at the National Gallery. In 2006 he was even commissioned to paint a portrait of the Queen on her 80th birthday.
The question for us now is somewhat different. Unlike Jimmy Savile, who was never put on trial, Harris has been found guilty by a jury. But is he really the monster painted by the media in their own post-verdict instant artistry? Can we see who he is yet? There are plenty of reasons to suppose the genre of painting going on here is one of optical illusion, like the famously impossible Escher staircase.
We can look at the Rolph Harris case, just like the staircase, and be struck immediately by an impossible disparity: the offences, even if the jury made correct decisions on the facts, bear no relation to the spin being put upon them.
The main facts are that Harris was convicted of 12 counts of indecent assault committed decades ago, between 1969 and 1986, against four females. These ranged from one-off incidents of groping in public to a long involvement in the life of his daughter Bindi’s best friend (Victim C). The youngest was an eight-year-old girl (Victim A) who asked for his autograph at a public event. He twice put his hand up her skirt and felt her vagina over her underwear.
In a Victim Impact Statement, Victim A said this incident had caused her “physical and mental pain” and that “in the space of a few minutes my childhood innocence was gone”. She said, “I became an angry child unable to express myself and unable to trust men. I took this with me into my teens and did not like to be touched. It made having normal relationships difficult….I have carried what Rolf Harris did to me for most of my life. It took away most of my childhood.”
Victim C and her family were friends with Harris and his family in the mid 1960s. In 1978 when C was aged 13 and Harris was 48 he was allowed by C’s parents to take her on holiday abroad with his wife and Bindi. That is when he started touching her sexually. After the holiday, and while she was still under the age of consent (not that she ever did consent, by her own account) there were further incidents at C’s own home. While his wife and C’s parents were downstairs he went to C’s bedroom upstairs, where he inserted his finger into her vagina, in the words of the judge, “for about a minute until she managed to get away”. Several further such incidents, the last when she was 19, were specified in the indictment, including ones in which he licked her vagina. The judge said to Harris “Whilst I do not sentence you in relation to what you did to C in the decade that followed that offence, I am sure that offences against her continued until 1994.”
Harris also faced four charges of possessing indecent images of children on his computer following a police raid on his home in 2012. This case was dropped following his conviction on the other charges.
So, in summary, we have groping incidents including one against an eight-year-old over her clothing which robbed her of her childhood and has been a cross she has had to bear for the rest of her life. And we have a series of assaults over a period of 16 years against one victim, several of them while her parents were in another room of the same house at the time, until she was 29 years old. And a porn case that was dropped.
Does anything begin to seem a bit unlikely, or even impossible about this, like the Escher staircase? Can you tell what it is yet? I’m guessing you can. But let’s go on. Let’s paint the final brush strokes of the picture.
In her Victim Impact Statement, Bindi’s friend Victim C said, “The attacks…made me feel dirty, grubby and disgusting. The whole sordid saga has traumatised me. I have panic attacks and suffer from anxiety. The effects of the abuse have been with me for many years. I started drinking at the age of 14 to 15 years old. This was to block out the effects of what he was doing to me. This had an effect on my relationship with my parents and people close to me. The slightest thing would upset me, I would get so angry, my reaction would be so disproportionate and over the top. As a young girl I had aspirations to have a career, settle down and have a family. However, as a direct result of his actions, this has never materialised. I have never had a meaningful relationship whilst sober. I have also never been able to hold down a job. This was down to the need to block out what he had done to me through drink. Rolf Harris had a hold over me that made me a quivering wreck….He made me feel like a sexual object. He used and abused me to such an extent that it made me feel worthless…”
So there we have it. Can you see the full pattern and paradox now? The pattern is one of relatively mild sexual impropriety, or even consensual sex with a mature adult: what else can we seriously suppose it to have been when the “assaults” on C continued until she was 29? The paradox is the huge, life-wrecking consequences that are said to have resulted from these acts.
Don’t get me wrong. Sexual harassment should not be tolerated. Heretic TOC is not calling for a groper’s charter. As we have discussed extensively here recently, mutual consent is a basic requirement of legitimate sex at any age. Where the courts and the abuse lobbyists, the politicians and the media are going wrong, however, is in giving too much credence to those who seek to put everything that has gone wrong in their lives down to child sexual abuse (CSA). It is an easy cop out from personal responsibility. One thing often overlooked by those who assume a direct CSA = Lifelong Trauma equation is that lurking in the background of these damaged people’s lives there is often a history of significant trauma and mental instability arising even before the CSA took place. Rind et al., in their famous 1998 meta-analysis showed that chaotic and dysfunctional family background was nine times more predictive of psychological damage in later life than CSA, to which such damage is usually attributed.
The public are also deceived by the utterly false dogma that victims always “courageously” come forward to tell the unvarnished truth, without exaggeration. It is hard to be sure from a short public description, but Victim A in this case said she suffered physical as well as mental pain. Really? From being touched over her underwear in a crowded public place where any cry of pain would surely have attracted attention? One has to wonder. Those who think victims are always honest should catch up on the Somaly Mam scandal, as reported last month in “Victims Can Lie as Much as Other People”.
Back to Rolph. Like Jimmy Savile, he was clearly no saint. A particular grouse of mine would be his hypocrisy. Whereas Savile was astonishingly open about his attraction to young girls, Harris shored up his respectability by presenting a 1985 anti-CSA video for the NSPCC, called Kids Can Say No!
Nor was he great at loyalty: apparently unbeknown to his wife, for several years in the 1990s he kept a mistress at the bottom of his garden!
That wasn’t as uncomfortable for her as it might sound: the lady was installed in a converted boathouse in the grounds of his mansion by the River Thames, and was supposed to be his housekeeper and chauffeur.
So, can we tell who he was yet? Was he the monster the media have painted?
What he was not is a paedophile if we use that term to mean someone preferentially attracted to prepubescent children. His offences point to a degree of hebephilic interest in teenage girls; but with a wife and a long-term adult mistress, his sexuality appears actually to have been rather normal in its direction. It’s just that its expression was a little over-exuberant. Not that this is any excuse: arguably his lapses were worse than those of someone, attracted exclusively to kids, who has no viable alternative outlet for his feelings.
What concerns us more urgently, though, is not whether one particular man meets with our moral approval here at Heretic TOC. It’s the societal response to these big, high-profile cases that counts. For the most part, that response has been really bad news, and we must brace ourselves for much more of the same in the coming weeks and months as the post-Savile cultural revolution cranks itself up to some sort of crescendo.
So much for the big picture. I’ll conclude with a few brief sketches:
‘LOVELY TOUCHY-FEELY ROLF’
Amanda Platell, a high-profile journalist, who used to be press secretary to William Hague when he was leader of the Conservative Party, said she had been among Harris’s fans and had invited him to her fortieth birthday party many years ago. Cheekily, she said she was so thrilled to see her childhood hero in the flesh that “I took him upstairs away from my other guests to keep him to myself for a while.” We are left to guess was happened, but she wasn’t complaining! On the other hand, that’s before she knew what a bad boy he could be. But now, she says, “I can deny it no longer: the man I adored betrayed me. More than that, I’ve had to accept that Rolf Harris groomed me, just as meticulously as he did his victims.” How did he do it? By being nice. “Lovely touchy-feely Rolf had this ability to make you feel as though you were the most important person in the world.” The swine!
A GRIM LONDON PRISON
Eric Allison, the excellent prisons correspondent of the Guardian and an ex-convict himself, reported that in the big van that would take Harris and other prisoners from the court to prison (HMP Wandsworth), Harris would be “insulted mercilessly by the other occupants of the sweatbox. At the grim south London jail, he will be segregated during the reception process although he will still hear torrents of abuse for his indecent assault of young girls.” As an old man, he would be put in the hospital wing, where patients “tend to be medicated during the day when they can present control problems, but left drug-free to scream and shout throughout the long nights.” This sounds bleak, and the scenario may have unfolded just as Allison says. But Harris should be OK if he can get out of healthcare and into the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit (VPU) which is the usual destination for anyone in need of protection from the hostility of other inmates – which these days means mainly sex offenders, quite a lot of them almost as old as Harris. I know, because I was there myself. In fact I was tried at Southwark Crown Court like Harris too. Ah, happy memories – not!
NEXT SCANDAL: THE PAEDO POLITICIANS
News of fresh craziness in the cultural revolution keeps coming in so thick and fast that my last item here would be my lead story if this were a daily newspaper: a big scandal broke in the Sunday papers yesterday, when they reported that the British Home Office has confessed to losing or destroying 114 “potentially relevant” files relating to “the paedophile scandal engulfing Westminster” i.e. allegations that “paedophilia on an industrial scale” was rife among top politicians in the 1970s and 80s. This story is certain to get even bigger in the coming week and beyond. I got wind of it last week when the main broadcasting outfits (BBC’s Today programme and ITN) plus the Daily Mail contacted me to ask if I could tell them anything about naughty deeds in high places back in the day. Sadly, being more familiar with low places I had to disappoint them!
STOP PRESS
The very latest, Daily Telegraph this morning:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10948796/Paedophilia-is-natural-and-normal-for-males.html
Heretic TOC is quoted. Looks like I’m adding to the problem, rather than solving it. Should I stop writing this blog?
Hi Tom. As you correctly observe, Rolf Harris’ primary sexual interest is obviously adult women. With his secondary inclination being pretty “normal” for heterosexual men.
Much proof of this is found in his computer porn collection: only a handful (excuse the pun!) of images were of very young looking females. And these girls were eventually proven to be aged at least 18.
When the media hypocrits call Rolf a “paedophile”, they are much mistaken plus insulting to genuine ones.
I heard on the news that Rolf was spat at by another prisoner. Obviously a moron. And that his faceless accuser complained when he was appealing against the sentence. Has this woman got no mercy? Who is then the more “evil”?
I think it is appaling that Rolf has even been charged of a crime. A civil action and sincere apology should have been more than enough.
The case of Rolf Harris should be a wake-up call to all rational and sexually liberated adults: our society is much regressing!
I was listening to the radio earlier,BBC 4,women’s hour,they were interviewing
a woman who grew up into a cult,the interviewer mentions,there was free love
also involving very young people,which must’v been horrifying,then moved the
conversation on promptly.That’s the bit that caught my attention,It must’v been
horrifying REALLY? I’m not so sure,here is the book.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Born-into-Children-God-religious-ebook/dp/B00G1TPX8S
I just want to make clear,my oh shut up comment was directed at Maribel july 17th,I’m just sick of being compared to HUNTLEY,WHITING,JACK RIPPER ETC
Does she plan on visiting the Congo anytime soon? coz if she does she may
encounter child solders,god help her!
also allot of my childhood,revolved around farming,and i remember watching
a slightly older kid,reversing an articulated lorry in the market,yes a fucking
Artic! again GROOMING is just another word for seduction,the seduction
may be benign or malign,Its often in the eye of the beholder.
Grooming – it’s not even ‘seduction’.
In the public imagination it can just be someone treating a kid nicely because he likes her and respects her, and she likes him back. No thoughts or intentions of sex or sensuality need be in the adult’s mind.
If your a paedophile any interaction you have with a child that is pleasant for the child automatically becomes ‘grooming’.
Here we see how the battle of ideas often boils down to a battle about what words are used and how they are defined.
This reminds me of a campaign done a few years ago by some NGO’s in which they, among other things, thundered against the ”gentle pedophile”. Pedophiles, you bet, are probably the only category in the world that can be blamed for being gentle…
Good point…just a non family member smiling and laughing with a kid,and
the kid doing the same is enough,I’ve seen this first hand.It reminds me of
the comedy,men behaving badly,when he suspects his girlfriend,and sets
out with camera,photographing his girlfriend interacting with a man at work.
highlighting the smiles on both faces as proof of cheating.
I feel like responding to that last poster,with OH SHUT UP! ops i just did.
anyway,i just wanted to mention,as far as some past teachers,scout leaders
and priests are concerned,by the law of averages,many must’v been benign.
As I’m on page 101 of dangerous Liaisons,I have to say,michael jackson Is a
great example of how a consensual man boy relationship should be,because lets face it,there’s no literature,dramas or novels on man boy relationships.
mr. p,
Well taken! I did receive some professional criticism back channel that pointed out the standard for an adult and a child being persuaded should be different.
He said and I am thankful he said, “we can’t go so far as to hold children to the adult standard of having no right to complain unless “physical force or threat of physical force” is used. There are other reasonable threats to children by adults that should not be tolerated: threatening a child with loss of privileges; with severe, but non-physical, punishment; with all kinds of consequences (unless the child “comes across”) —all these are wrong. I would say that, in general, anything an adult does to make a child feel that he or she MUST do what the adult wants, or face some specified or unspecified negative consequence (even simply saying that that adult will never want to see him again, for example) is reprehensible.
The child must feel free to play or not to play in all circumstances. (And I’m sure you might agree —but I just have to make sure we don’t get too focused on the rights of pedophiles and not enough on the rights of children (i.e. their right to be sexual or not).” Maybe that gives us a good guide, as good as Michael Jackson who was a GREAT Guide, IMO. A Great Man.
About Tom admitting to maybe being in denial my criticizer went on to say, “Those seeking to fairly address the pedophile issue, i.e., the person interviewing Tom must first confront their own issue of being “in denial” about the reality of child sexuality, and the clear fact that children are capable of enjoying sex contact —not only in experiences of sex-play with their age mates, but also in a great many cases involving intergenerational contacts. That children are sexual beings has been understood by most all serious sex researches since the time of Freud, with the founding theory of all modern psychology being his 1905 “Theory of Infantile Sexuality”. And that we would still be talking today about what science has so clearly established, and thus continue the legacy of over a hundred years of steadfast “denial” about child sexuality is, clearly, the more heinous and persistent disgrace!”
Linca
Good point, but wait till you hear what I DID say about children’s sexuality in that interview, which was cut out. I’ll be posting soon.
Just caught the last of your conversation on channel 4 news TOC
You make a fair point about institutional power structures,but look at the case
of FOREST,how benign and consensual it was,I could never support a prison sentence for someone like him.
Of course our side of the story never gets a fair airing.
make war not love…)
Dr Wilson was great, wasn’t he? Oh, but you must have missed that. You can see it here:
http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/
It’s under this heading: “Did taxpayers’ money fund paedophiles?”
They cut out all of my best stuff! I might blog about the show.
I suspected that…((
Please do.
I would have thought they could have found some more recent portraits of you. 😉
>I would have thought they could have found some more recent portraits of you.
I’m glad they didn’t. I looked more presentable then!
I was delighted that they kept in you condmening what happened in the children’s homes and saying ‘kids didn’t really have any choice’ – those 5 words communicated so much about what we really believe.
I wonder how many ‘antis’ were stopped short by those words and thought something like “What! Paedophiles care about what children want. Can that be right?’
Lensman,
I don’t think the antis will ever understand. I think it is beyond their damaged thought process to ever understand sexuality. As Will McBride so well says and tries to say over and over and over and over: “The reason boys go to war is their sexuality has been disturbed.
If the boys approached by pedo priests/counselors had not had their sexuality disturbed by their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents from their very beginning they would not interpret the actions of priests/counselors as something awful. When asked to strip and stand naked as a 7-years-old they would have gladly done it with great fun and walked to the priest for a good feeling up and joy.
We all suffer from the effects of our own disturbed sexuality caused by millennia of false teaching. We must bring good teaching to the world. We must put all the effort we can into finding out what good teaching is.
The last couple of days I have been watching the movie “Howl” directed by the same two persons who directed “Paragraph 175” and “Milk”. The common theme I see between these movies is be proud of who you are, tell the world with NO APPOLOGIES whatsoever. We must defeat/neutralize Moloch the god of war, the god of child sacrifice. We have the secret weapon: Pedosexuality.
Moloch is who we are up against as Allen Ginsberg so well put it in his “Howl” that he wrote as his naked housekeeper dusted.
Moloch from “Howl”:
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM9BMVFpk80 Eric Drooker ( http://www.drooker.com/ ) animation designer for the movie “HOWL” was a boy born (1958) and raised two blocks from Ginsberg’s Lower East Side neighborhood of NY. He had read Ginsberg’s poetry connecting with it. They finally met and had a conversation in Tompkins Park on the surrealistic night of the riot there in 1988. Drooker talks about his connection with Ginsberg and “Howl” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUyrucADz6Y
Linca
The Ten Commandments of Movement Solidarity:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6u0ysizlep1g5p2/The%20Ten%20Commandments%20of%20Movement%20Solidarity.pdf
Tom, I should have mentioned this before your interview but, for the future, do what others have done: carry a small, digital recording device into the interview with you and record EVERYTHING. The comparison of their “product” with the entirety of your recording will be, by itself, undoubtedly fascinating as well as USEFUL.
>carry a small, digital recording device into the interview with you and record EVERYTHING
I did! Watch this space – or, rather, my next blog. Thanks, David.
And now, having given the highly edited interview a listen, all I can say is that they keep trying to reveal you as a monster and you keep terribly (I would think) disappointing them!
Oh, and one other thing: the psychologist ahead of you to whom PIE had granted entrée (in the last century) was very good. My hat’s off to him for having the fortitude to not be baited by the interviewer into proclaiming himself “reformed” through subsequent cultural reeducation.
I just want to comment about the 8 year old girl whose childhood innocence was shattered because of a groping (that sounds like it never happened in all honesty).
No way, that’s all I got to say, unless their parents mentally abused them by making them scared of their own genitals a child will not be ruined because of a three second grope. It just doesn’t psychologically make any type of sense. Should it happen? Absolutely not, it is disrespectful and a dick move, but is it life shattering? No. My younger cousin was “groped” by her aunt and she did nothing but recoil and say “stooooooooooooop” and punched her aunt and then went on being her normal firecracker self.
Indeed, no child, regardless of age, has ever contracted leprosy after having been touched by a man.
The only reason why a little girl can be severely psychologically damaged by such an “incident” is when she, from a very early age, has been systematically inculcated the principle that groping is just the first step, and further steps will necessarily include infanticide.
Lensman made the point I was going to make,About the daily telegraph,so many angry responses to what seems to be ghosts,well deleted comments.
Free speech my ass! Also was listening to 5 live,they had peter saunders from
NAPAC what an asshole! would love to stick one of those penile gadgets on him.He Kept repeating over and over again how heinous CSA is,the rest of us must’v got the message,but he seemed to be slipping into redundancy.
Good God! Another “Night of The Long Knives” is here. Tom, I am glad you referred to Bruce Rind. The academics need to be reminded of him, not only his 1998 work but his recent work.
Linca
Yes, Rolf’s crimes really do seem very minor in the cold light of day – Victim C, after all, was only under the age of consent for 2 to 3 years during the course of this affair. After that the law has no right to interfere unless some other crime was signalled. And as to being groped – well, yes, he shouldn’t have (unless she had wanted it) but to build it up into a life-shattering event clearly is hugely disproportionate to the act itself and says more about the accuser than the accused.
It’s a lose/lose situation – if you’re a paedophile ‘talent’, ‘kindness’, ‘affability’, ‘childlikeness’ all are represented as parts of a carefully constructed front – even as a celibate paedophile I’ve been accused (online), because I’ve treated a child with a degree of respect that she would not have been accustomed to receive from a ‘straight’ adult, of doing so as an act of ‘manipulation’. Well, by my track record I’ve been singularly unsuccesful in my ‘manipulativeness’ if my goal were some sort of sensual or sexual contact.
I’ve even been accused (online, of course) of hating children because of being a paedophile.
What they find hard to imagine is that if a paedophile treats a child with special attention and respect it’s not usually because he or she is working out the fastest route into his/her knickers, but simply because they LIKE the child more than your ‘straight’ would, find the child more interesting, and want to be part of the child’s world.
For them to admit this would shatter their comforting illusion that the paedophile is a predator whose only wish is to hurt and harm the child, force intercourse on her and dump her, before setting out to find the next victim. The idea that paedophiles really can LOVE children and that they dream of caring, gentle, age-appropriate, reciprocal sensual/sexual engagement are probably the things that scare them the most. If they knew this the debate would have to become nuanced and evidence-base and that, for them, would be the top-end of a slippery slope.
The Daily Torygraph ariticle is a descent into a hell of ignorance and dishonest reporting. As to the comments, there seems to have been a few comments that have tried to redress the balance but they have all been deleted – one can get a clue as to their content since the replies to them have not been deleted and these replies are all filled with the spluttering outrage of an ‘anti’ who’s had their assumtions questioned.
The same, I think, would happen to a lesser extent in the Guardian and in all other news website – baring Spiked-online.
How bad are things going to get? Just when the nausea seems to have reached a new peak, and I think ‘it can’t get worse’ – it does. Maybe this will all end with a metaphorical bout of prolonged vomiting – and society, calm at last, will look down at the parquet flooring at the stinking mess of its own half-digested ignorance and hate and, at last, see what it had been feeding on for the willful ignorance and hate that it is.
The metaphorical ‘vomit’ would have to be something quite terrible – I’m thinking of a mob breaking into a conference of paediatricians and taking their righteous anger out on the assembled doctors and researchers.
I hope not. I have faith in rational debate – when I’ve been able to have a sensible discussion with antis and ‘nons’ I’ve generally found that they move to a better understanding, and one or two have actually changed their minds and come on board. But it’s so hard to get these rational debates. Everywhere we’re censored.
It only takes the clearing up of three or four quite grotesque and quite evident misundertandings in the minds of ‘nons’ (that paedophiles DO love children, that sex for a paedophile doesn’t mean ‘intercourse’ but means doing what the child likes, that children can and do enjoy sensual/sexual activities, that trauma kicks in when the child becomes aware of stigma, that children can ‘consent’ and do so everyday to a huge range of activities…) for them to start seriously questioning the orthodoxy.
Well, thanks Tom, again, for the haven of sanity you have created here.
I hope that all this attention you’re getting, your photo in the papers, having your words quoted out of context and having their manufactured outrage attached to your name etc isn’t too much of a negative experience for you. I daresay you must be quite used to it by now.
I trust that one day you will be vindicated by History.
Thanks, Lensman, for your support and concern. Personally, I can cope. The biggest problem is maintaining the conviction that “shining a light in the darkness”, as Kit Marlowe put it, is a useful function. If the light guides one along the path to a desirable destination, that is one thing. If it merely allows the enemy to see you and take aim, that is another.
Kit perhaps had a different thought in mind: showing the awfulness of things for what it really is. “Et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt” (Vulgate Bible). In the Authorised Version with the preceding verse: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:4-5 KJV). I have a horrible feeling that the most significant bit is “and the darkness comprehended it not”.
It’s very easy for me to counsel steadfastness – I don’t have a lot of skin in the game and it’s not my picture being published or my words travestied in the daily papers. I’m the last person who should lecture anyone here about courage. But I did mean that passage more optimistically than you may have interpreted it. “Comprehendere” in Latin doesn’t just mean “understand,” but primarily it means “seize” or “capture” (the English “grasp” might convey both the literal and figurative meanings). “The darkness did not lay hold of it.” One way or another I suppose we have to believe that, even if the darkness does seem to have all the advantages right now.
I suspected as much. Thanks for the elucidation (more light in the darkness!)
The only light we have is Bruce Rind (Science) and my friend Dale. I will do all I can to get him to come forth with Science for you. He communicates with Rind; their Sciences are different. The time is now. In fact for us it might be too late: This time could be lights out.
Linca
You are so, so wrong. Everything about your statement is sick and twisted, as are most of the ramblings I have read in posts on this site.
I was sexually abused as a child. The PTSD that I suffered had nothing to do with the “stigma” associated with the act. You sick people have no conscience, no desire to understand what it feels like to be coerced into a sexual relationship with an adult. You have no idea what it is like to close your eyes at night and relive those scenes over and over again until you wish that you were dead. You have no idea how it feels for your body to react one way while your brain screams, “No!” You have no idea how it feels to be completely powerless while an adult has his or her way with you in a so-called consensual relationship.
You say you want rational debate, but what you really want is for society to assist you in grooming children for sex. The fact that you even mention “dumping” a child or your “love” for a child shows how utterly twisted you are. Any victim out there who has been groomed (or given “special attention,” as you put it) can tell you that they were aware the abuser “loved” them. That is what is so horrifying when trying to make sense of your actions. This person loves me, so I can’t tell anyone. He is hurting me, but to refuse him or report him would be a betrayal to this person who has otherwise been so nice to me.
You speak of nausea–that is exactly what I felt the first time I was abused. Did my attacker know, or care? When he was pleading on his knees for forgiveness shortly before his arrest he said, “I thought you wanted it.”
And that is what you are all here to convince yourselves of. That a child who you would never allow to drive a car, drink a beer or mind a hot stove will always be capable of screaming and running at an unwanted sexual advance. You think that when we close our eyes at night we hear our friends and family chiding us for allowing such disgusting behavior to go on. That is not what we see. We see your filthy hands, your filthy mouth, your filthy penis violating us and stripping away the few years that we should be free to run, play and laugh–to be children.
I don’t believe in God because I can’t accept that an omnipotent being would allow people like all of you to exist. I hope that I am wrong and there is a hell so that you all can experience exactly what you are propagating here–infinite suffering.
I may in due course respond to this more fully myself. In the meantime, Lensman and others should feel free to do so but I would ask that any reply be temperately and considerately expressed. Heretic TOC does not usually accept abusive posts but there are reasons to treat this one as exceptional.
Maribel, Heretic TOC is totally against anyone causing pain and harm to children and I am sorry you have experienced both. You say you were coerced into a sexual relationship. I am totally against that. What you are describing was plainly not consensual. I have always maintained that prosecution and punishment should be available in such cases. In law reform proposals I once supported (via PIE), we advocated non-prosecution in cases where the CHILD, not the adult, said they had been a willing participant i.e. when the CHILD steadfastly maintained that position when asked about it by other concerned adults, such as their parents or teachers, etc., upon a relationship being discovered.
As you have been unimpressed by what you have read elsewhere on this site, you will probably be unconvinced by what I am saying. That is your prerogative. I will post any further responses you may wish to make but only if they are in line with this site’s policy. See the note on Comments on the About page, especially with reference to Courtesy.
First of all, for what it’s worth (and I expect that it won’t be worth much to you), I’m sorry to read about your bad experiences.
Tom covered most of what I’d want to say in his comments – quite simply that from what you say your experiences were far from consensual, indeed you use the word ‘coerced’. Please understand that there is as much difference between a coercive and consensual ‘relationship’ with a child as there is between a coercive and consensual ‘relationship’ between adults.
Any sensitive adult should have immediately noticed that you were unhappy with what was going on and stopped. If the adult in question coerced you then it is right that he be answerable to the law.
You use the phrase ‘so-called consensual relationship’. Why ? Was your ‘relationship’ with this man ‘so-called consensual’ ? If so, what does that mean? Do you feel that at the time you ‘consented’ to what was happening? Or did you just not protest? The latter certainly doesn’t amount to consent.
« You say you want rational debate, but what you really want is for society to assist you in grooming children for sex. »
No, I know what I want: I want rational debate. If after a rational debate it is clear that adult/child sexual interactions are harmful to children I will accept that conclusion and go on living the celibate life I live – nothing will have changed for me.
But be assured that what we have today is not a ‘rational debate’. If one side of a debate lives under the threat of ostracism, stigma, prosecution and death for merely questioning the other side’s position then really there cannot be said to be a ‘rational debate’. I repeat – I know what it is I seek – I seek a rational debate.
« Any victim out there who has been groomed (or given “special attention,” as you put it) can tell you that they were aware the abuser “loved” them. »
It’s interesting how you refuse to accept that a paedophile can actually like or love a child without bringing a sexual element into the picture. As I stated in my post – I’ve had close and strong friendships with a few children – all of them have been absolutely chaste.
The fact that you put a lurid interpretation on the words ‘special attention’ says more about you than it does about me. if I hadn’t given this child ‘my special attention’ she, for lack of a father, would not have learnt how to ride a bike, swim, skate, play the violin, read as many books as she did, have visited art galleries and gone to concerts, or risen to the top of her class academically – nor would she have known that she was a beautiful, wonderful, fascinating and funny person – that is the legacy of my ‘special attention’, and not one element of sex entered into our relationship.
And no, I strongly suspect that if I hadn’t been a paedophile I would never have been as devoted to her as intensely and for as long as I was. No, she probably would have just been some annoying, scrawny little six year-old getting in the way.
This might read as smug and self-congratulatory of me – but this is something I’m proud of and when people tell me that my ‘special attention’ was me ‘grooming’ her, I remember that friendship and realise just how wrong they are, and that those people throwing out that lazy accusation would have deprived that child of a love that made a positive contribution to her life.
« That a child who you would never allow to drive a car, drink a beer or mind a hot stove will always be capable of screaming and running at an unwanted sexual advance. «
Ironically what you say may be true – this society keeps children so in ignorance of their bodies and their feelings that many children will be so confused by an adult’s sexual advances that they may not know how to respond.
The NSPCC and other such organisations repeatedly tell children – ‘you have the right to say ‘no!” but, really, children don’t.
We choose to give them a slogan that they can hardly understand as their means for defending their physical integrity because ‘we’ prefer that to actually giving them a proper education about sex, relationships, pleasure and desire.
I’m all for children being able to say ‘no’ – but for it to be effective it has to be taught in the context of ‘consent’ i.e. the children having effective control, and the tools for that control, over their bodies. But to do this would be to risk our children’s ‘innocence’ (which is just another word for ‘sexual ignorance’) – it would be to risk children taking control of their own bodies and realising that alongside the right to say ‘no’ came the right to say ‘yes’.
At the moment we give them the word ‘no’ and hope they they will recongise the right context to use it in. We teach them that this context is one of a man in some vague way behaving inappropriately towards her. Well, that’s great, and I hope that if the man is forcing himself on her she says ‘no’, kicks him in the balls and gets the police. But the campaigns have been so vague and meaningless that they amount to nothing.
I remember the ‘stranger danger’ campaign from when I was a kid – it taught me nothing I needed to know and simply made me xenophobic – if some ‘stranger’ or, for that matter, a family friend, had started touching me up I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on or how I should respond – the campaign tried to by-pass the real issues because society is squeamish about telling kids the truth about sex.
But the research shows (Clancy – the Trauma Myth) that most ‘child abuse’ isn’t some strange adult forcing himself/herself on an unwilling child, but something which the child participates in willingly, even consensually with someone she knows – so how does a child who’s been taught to say ‘no’ to a predatory stranger know that this is also a situation where she should say ‘no’ to, especially if she doesn’t feel like saying ‘no’, but rather ‘yes’ ?
See the problem? ‘Just Say No’ really doesn’t work for the majority of cases. What would work is proper empowerment, proper sex-education (one which starts well before puberty and which is taught by people the child loves, respects and trusts) and one which addresses the main facts about sex i.e. that it’s about pleasure and that it’s about Love.
I don’t really feel disposed to defend Rolf Harris, even if I do feel a bit sorry for the man and a little annoyed at the flurry of anguished self-righteousness the case has provoked. The best that can be said of him is that he is a cad and – even worse – a purveyor of terrible art. If 5 years 9 months in the nick seems a bit harsh for a series of unsolicited lunges at young girls and women, a brief perusal of his catalogue might well leave you thinking that hanging’s too good for him.Yet Sarah Lucas and the Chapman brothers are allowed to walk the streets. Where’s the justice?
Nor am I disposed to be too dismissive of the idea that seemingly trivial acts can have disastrous consequences for other people. It might appear irrational, but of course events that are of no consequence for one person can be perceived and experienced in life-altering ways. I suppose if any of us think back to our childhoods and to the wounds we still feel deeply (don’t we all have them?), most are events that the people responsible would have forgotten about in a moment. I’m sympathetic to a sort of ‘chaos-theory’ of the psyche – do you remember that once-fashionable axiom that the motion of a butterfly’s wings in one place may set in chain the random and unpredictable sequence of events that produces a hurricane elsewhere? Harris’ wandering fingers may seem butterfly-like from the position of a detached observer, but I can well believe they might produce a storm somewhere else, no matter what other factors might be involved. I don’t think that’s paradoxical at all; it’s simply tragic.
From that depressing note I can only congratulate you on coming to the notice of the Telegraph. I’m almost old enough to remember when it used to be quite a respectable paper. And how far Andrew Gilligan has come since the days of the Hutton enquiry! These days he seems to spend most of his time beating up a moral panic about Muslim schools and creeping Islamism. As I’ve said here before, to be slated by such individuals is a badge of honour. And who knows, maybe his little hit-job will draw some sympathetic readers here. Anyway, no question of whether you should keep writing. Lux in tenebris lucet.
‘Paedophilia is natural and normal for males’
In reference to your endpiece, any idea why The Telegraph waited nearly a whole year to report this conference? I don’t recall any other mainstream publications mentioning it at the time either.
It was the Harman/NCCL connection that revived interest in PIE back in Jan/Feb this year. See link below. Gilligan did a piece at that time in which he showed he was heavily on my case to the extent of reading my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, or at least raiding it for anything “shocking” rather than engaging with the arguments on consent, children’s rights, etc.
It looks as though, since then, Gilligan has been doing more probing (of sources clearly including Heretic TOC) and just biding his time for a good moment to have another go. This is clearly just such a good moment.
Actually, I emailed him following his earlier piece. He wrote this:
>PIE’s members, mostly educated and middle-class, were good at finding “progressive” academics – some useful idiots, others rather more sinister – to fight their cause.
I asked him a question:
>Did you have any particular “idiots” in mind? If so, what makes you feel they were idiotic? Or sinister?
He did not reply.
Tom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10653944/The-right-to-sleep-with-children-was-one-civil-liberty-that-NCCL-supported.html
The ‘right’ to sleep with children was one ‘civil liberty’ that NCCL supported
By Andrew Gilligan
Daily Telegraph
21 Feb 2014
Only the briefest of comments, Tom other than to join you in trying to imagine the necessary dimensions of any dénouement doing justice to such fever-dreams as these. It almost compels me to continue living if only to witness what must surely be an unprecedented mass spectacle and probable cultural self-immolation. Oh, the drama! The drama! If not for this then for what?