“Britain’s worst paedophile,” we learned earlier this month, “who abused up to 200 Malaysian children and posted videos of his depraved acts online has been given 22 life sentences.”
The Daily Mail version of a news story splashed globally said “Richard Huckle, from Ashford in Kent, admitted an unprecedented number of offences against children aged between six months and 12 years from 2006 to 2014.”
The judge, Peter Rook QC, was quoted: “You had become consumed with paedophilia. Your life revolved around your obsession with your own sexual gratification”.
We heard that as Huckle, aged 30,  was taken down to the cells, a woman sitting in the public gallery yelled: “A thousand deaths is too good for you.”
The Mail’s Richard Spillett reported that Huckle had “masqueraded as a devout Christian, photographer and English teacher to prey on poor children in Kuala Lumpur over nine years.
A stream of pictures and videos of his rapes and assaults on children were shared with paedophiles worldwide through an encrypted website.”
Huckle, it was said,  committed offences in orphanages and care homes in Malaysia and Cambodia, including “rape and assault against up to 200 pre-pubescent children as young as six months old”.
Britain’s worst paedophile? If it were clear he had been violently raping infants I wouldn’t dispute the claim, especially if the guy had also been a sadistic child murderer. But this is surely not a scenario where a large penis has been rammed into a small orifice, and there is mercifully no need for post-mortems. There is no hint in the court reports that any of his acts were violent, coerced or physically injurious.
On the contrary, Richard Huckle appears to have been welcome in the communities of the South East Asian countries where he lived. He didn’t just ““masquerade” as an English teacher: he obviously was an English teacher; there is nothing to suggest he was a less than sincere Christian either.
We will come back later to the unfortunate Mr Huckle, after switching our focus to another recent news story from the same region, the Philippines. The Guardian’s main headline was “How child sexual abuse became a family business in the Philippines”, with a sub-heading “Tens of thousands of children believed to be victims of live-streaming abuse, some of it being carried out by their own parents”. The United Nations is reported as saying that in some areas, entire communities live off the business.
There is the usual hyperbolic bollocks about the scale of the money involved and talk of children being “made to perform around the clock” as though they are sweat shop slaves – places that are really abusive but which go unregulated because global corporations like GAP, Zara and Primark profit from them. Anyway, despite all the spin designed to create a false impression, this was a big story – literally so, as the Guardian’s account ran to well over 2,000 words.
Yet the tabloids ignored it. Why? Because it was complicated. It was nuanced. Unlike the Huckle case, this one could not be made to fit the simple Evil Monster narrative. But it is precisely in the detail and the nuance that the real significance of the story is to be discerned. So let’s look at that.
We are told an undercover agent infiltrated an impoverished village pretending to be a Filipina sex worker earning her living in Japan. It was cover that enabled her to become friendly with the villagers and their children without arousing suspicion. After discovering the kids were doing webcam sessions police raided the village. This was back in 2011. At least one family were caught with their pants down, and that’s more than a metaphor: three girls were naked on a bed while their mother was typing on a keyboard in the same room, where a live webcam feed on the computer screen showed the faces of three white men watching the action.
After the raid, the family was broken up: all six children were taken away from their home and into a “rescue centre”.
And this is where we get to the heart of the real story: the kids did not feel they had been “rescued” at all. Instead, they felt betrayed by the undercover agent they thought was a friend. While the mother was jailed thanks to having been caught red-handed, and still languishes in prison five years later, the children “proved unwilling to incriminate their parents”.
The police were quite candid. They said they thought the children would welcome the operation, only to discover they were very much mistaken. Referring to the oldest child, the undercover agent herself admitted the girl felt betrayed, saying  “I know that she is angry with me”.
At the “rescue” centre, the six children – three boys and three girls –  “appeared oblivious to the fact that they had been exploited”. The three-year-old, it was reported, continued to do “sexualised dancing” in front of other children. A psychologist said that the eldest child, a boy of 16, was in shock after the arrest, but not from the abuse: “He was quite traumatised by the rescue operation.”
The Guardian story continues:

The two younger daughters had no idea that the abuse was anything but normal. “They said it was a business in the neighbourhood. It seemed natural to be involved in this as the other children were doing it,” she said. Police found that it was the children who first heard about live-streaming as a money maker when playing with their friends.
While the children have flourished – on the wall are photos of them, the two eldest beaming while wearing graduation hats and gowns – they are still unable, five years later, to understand the crime…
…The social workers, doctors, police, legal team and psychologists working with the children initially assumed they were trying to protect their parents out of love. But it became apparent there were other reasons for them holding back, especially the eldest.
And in therapy sessions, the eldest boy said their lives had changed for the better since they started the “shows”: the family had more money, they could eat at the local fast food chain Jollibee, and their mother could stop working in a factory.
Slowly, what had happened became apparent. “They saw the neighbours making money. They suggested it to their parents,” the prosecutor said. And at 13, it was Nicole who spoke to the paedophiles online, not her mother.
There were even times when the children did it without their parents present, the prosecutor said.

Bearing in mind this active engagement of the children as free agents, it’s time to get back to Mr Huckle.
Based on the grooming theme, and on the so-called abuse of trust, James Traynor from the National Crime Agency said: “Richard Huckle spent several years integrating himself into the community in which he lived, making himself a trusted figure.”
Now the thing is, you don’t get to be integrated and trusted unless people know and like you, including the children. We are told that Huckle dreamed of marrying one of his victims so they could jointly become foster carers for children. That was never going to happen without the continuing support of the community and of a woman who wanted to marry him. It is not as though he was betraying anyone’s trust as a fraudster does, conning them out of their money and making life worse. He was not making life worse. In the children’s view he was making it better, and who can really argue with them? Well-heeled western do-gooders who have no idea how tough and limiting Third World poverty can be?
Looking at it realistically, it would also be naïve to assume he was deceiving anyone. You cannot betray trust if a community already knows what is going on, as is clearly the case in the Philippines where families are actively involved on a significant scale. Huckle claimed in his own defence that sexual involvement with children was “endemic” in the region. The judge brushed this aside as being no excuse, but he did not deny the fact of the matter; he preferred to turn a blind eye, but that is no reason for us to do so.
The judge was also scornful of a 60-page manual Huckle had written and planned to publish online called Paedophiles and Poverty: Child Love Guide, which is said to have been about how to select deprived victims and avoid detection. The judge described it as a “truly evil document”, saying “It speaks volumes about the scale of your self-delusion, describing your conduct as child love.”
As we have just seen, though, it was the judge, not the defendant, who set his face against the facts. He is the one deluding himself if he thinks that children’s sexual “innocence” is anything more than a self-serving myth concocted by those who seek to control them. He deludes himself, too, if he dismisses Kind people as necessarily unkind and incapable of loving children, especially when the evidence suggests, as in Richard Huckle’s case, that he was well liked by the kids and was well regarded in the communities where he lived and worked for many years.
Not that Heretic TOC is suggesting Huckle should be imitated. Absolutely the opposite. The message from the courts is loud and clear: do as he did and you will be crucified, no matter what the rights and wrongs of the matter. The sentence, after all, was savage. Decades, at least, will pass before this tragically-fated young man has any hope of release.
Nor should we ignore the fact that his “how to” guide was so excoriated by the court. One shudders to think what the judge would make of Heretic TOC’s heresies. There is a big difference, though: it looks possible that the Child Love Guide could well have been interpreted in some quarters as inciting its readers to break the law; and so, once it was published, that could have amounted to grounds for a criminal prosecution in itself. This site, by contrast, much as we wish to see radical changes in our culture and law, emphatically rejects the view that the present laws should be defied. Apologies for finishing on this dreary but necessary note.
 
FROM BREXIT TO REGREXIT IN ONE DISMAL DAWN
Within sterling and the stock market plummeting and voices of alarm coming thick and fast from all around the planet, dawn had scarcely broken on the result of the Brexit referendum before the demos was thrown into doubt.
Suddenly the sovereign people’s distrust of the experts was turned on themselves, as they woke up to the awful possibility that they might have got it wrong. What a shame most of them hadn’t read Heretic TOC, where they would have learned that the people are always wrong!
Proof of the unpreparedness of many to make such a momentous and complicated decision was all too apparent, albeit too late: the most frequent Google search was the alarmingly basic question “What is the EU?” Many tweeted to say they hadn’t thought their vote would be all that important, what with so many other people voting! They had just wanted to tell the politicians they were fed up. It hadn’t occurred to them they might actually win, and now they regretted it!
This Buyer’s Remorse, or Regrexit as it was quickly dubbed, even appeared to be shared by politicians leading the Leave campaign. Instead of simply obeying the will of the people and getting on with getting out, the ruling elite on both sides of the great debate are effectively saying hang on a minute (or a few years), let’s not be hasty. Maybe we can fudge things a bit (or a lot) so that we can somehow keep free access to the EU market while also quietly ditching our promise to the people that immigration would be controlled. Plus ça change…