From a high vantage point, as though we are in a police helicopter in search of tell-tale signs of a crime, we find ourselves looking down over a bleak moorland landscape. The scene is dramatically cut through by a single salient feature, a winding road, its silvery surface a glistening snail-trail.

The cover photo of Nick Basannavar’s book Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965 is powerfully evocative of the work’s sombre contents, especially the Moors Murders – sadistic killings that became the most notorious criminal enterprise in later 20th century Britain, still regularly revisited in the media after well over half a century. The image of a snaking, silvery road primes us for a trail to be followed, as does the subtitle: Trailing Abuse.

Thus begins my recent review of the book for Sexuality & Culture, deliberately evoking the sensationalism of a lurid crime novel or red-top yarn. The style, I feel, makes a good fit with the author’s mentality. His first ambition was to be a tabloid hack (takes all sorts!), but then he opted for a posher version of the same thing, becoming an academic on a mission to expose and denounce sexual violence against children. No problem with that. Heretic TOC holds no defence brief for sadistic murderers or indeed anyone who perpetrates actual violence or coercive sexual acts on any sentient being, human or otherwise, of any age.

The sneaky thing about Basannavar, though, is that he never defines “sexual violence”. He merely implies, throughout his entire tome, that any form of adult sexual involvement with a young child, or with any minor below the age of consent, is necessarily violent, no matter what actual consent there had been. In a work otherwise very attentive to language, and how the meaning of words shifts over time, his own deliberate act of verbal violence against MAPs – libelling us all through guilt by association with killers and other real abusers – is glossed over, left in obscurity.

For me, this was personal. A big chunk of his book is focused on the history of PIE’s activism in the 1970s and 80s, including a critique of my 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case. He credits us with taking the word paedophilia out of psychiatric obscurity and making it a household word. And so we did, quite deliberately, only to see its meaning twisted out of all recognition in the media. He even claims our work was intellectually influential at the time, right up to government level. But he talks us up only to take us down, claiming we were cynical “entryists” within the gay movement and our championing of children’s rights was only for show, a ploy to justify abuse. These smears are made without a shred of evidence as my review indicates.

Quite properly, the editor of Sexuality & Culture decided that my personal involvement In the historical events reprised in the book meant I was not well placed to review it objectively. He nevertheless decided my views were of interest and should be offered to readers as a “commentary”, not a review, and that the author should be presented with my piece ahead of publication and given an opportunity to respond. Basannavar declined, which suggests he found himself unable to rebut my critique.

The full text of my article is available for download at ResearchGate, where my books and academic papers are all now available at the author public profile page. Do pay a visit! Apart from its appalling bias, Dr Basannavar’s book itself is actually not a bad read, and at least has the virtue of basic historical accuracy: he has done his homework. Unlike my work, though, you won’t get it free. The hardback is currently on offer from Amazon for £99.99, and the paperback and Kindle versions are not much cheaper!

THE GENIE IS OUT OF THE BOTTLE

Children are making “indecent images” of other children using AI image generators, we learned from a BBC report linked here recently by “Cyril”. Very enterprising of the smart little buggers (and fuckers)!

I responded with a comment saying “The genie is out of the bottle”, meaning the kids will keep  finding all sorts of ways of expressing themselves sexually despite every attempt to shut them down. This new development will be hard to blame on “grooming” by adults, albeit the killjoys will always come up with some excuse for censorship and suppression.

In the case of Omegle, reported here by “Prue”, the naysayers have scored a victory by getting the site closed down this year, ending a 14-year run in which it allowed users to socialise with others without the need to register, thus enabling kids to chat freely with other kids and adults – making sexual content an inevitable consequence (visuals, not just talk).

When Omegle was first mentioned in a Heretic TOC blog a couple of years ago, I noted the threat to such heady freedom from the UK government’s Online Safety Bill, which has since become law. But the fatal blow was struck elsewhere. Not by the BBC, despite the crowing of their cyber correspondent in an article headed “Omegle: How I got the dangerous chat site closed down”. No, the coup de grace was delivered by lawyers in the shape of a multi-million dollar “product liability” claim, settled out of court on behalf of a woman who had been (as an earlier prosecution had determined) coerced into online sexual acts for three years from the age of 11 onwards by a man who was later convicted and jailed for this offence and other similar ones.

It truly is a Wild West out there. Some regulation is needed in order to avoid real abuses. Whether product liability law should be the deciding factor is not something I propose to tackle now – it’s complicated – but the demise of Omegle and what brought the site down should not be allowed to obscure what the kids are increasingly up to of their own accord.

The fact that adults cannot always be implicated in juvenile sexual expression online has long been evident from numerous published sources, especially (but not only) as a teen phenomenon. For instance, in one of a number of links posted here by “Happy Humping Pup” we are reminded that the police have long been aware of even very young kids “sexting” of their own accord – and in some of the earlier reports, such as this one, the authorities had not yet got around to explaining it all away by putting it down to “grooming”.

Indeed, a recent study based on young adults reporting their childhood experiences found a whopping 88% of “image abuse” involved youth-produced images. The report, by David Finkelhor (a name many here will recognise) and colleagues, in Child Abuse & Neglect, unsurprisingly puts a negative spin on the findings. But even these “abuse” professionals find they have to admit that “when youth voluntarily share self-made images with adults… the adults do not necessarily betray the intent of the sharer by misusing it in a way that was not anticipated.”

So “victims” are not necessarily victims and “groomers” are not always (or perhaps often) villains.

A recent LBC report based on Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) information, socks us with the zinger headline, “Children as young as three preyed upon online”. Predictably, the “preying” bit turns out on closer inspection to be largely speculative.

But their actual figures look more substantial. We learn, for instance, that while “the majority (57%) of images concerned children aged 10-13, the sharpest rise has come amongst 7-10 year-olds, who now comprise 40% of all cases. Also, a staggering 95% of reports were self-generated photos and videos (topping even the Finkelhor et al. figure) and a fifth of these images, no less, were “Category A”, the naughtiest level, which includes penetration.

As I was saying: Little buggers! Little fuckers! Little darlings too, of course: they can be lovely without being “innocent”!

NOT A STAIN ON HIS CHARACTER

When the headline “Paedophile priest’s windows removed” presented itself in The Times to my astonished eyes, I didn’t exactly choke on my cornflakes but that may have been because I was in the pub at the time, as is my wont, sipping ale and munching peanuts as I read.

In truth, though, I was intrigued rather than shocked. Windows? What could this mean? What did it portend? The Times version of the story explained the basics, but I later found the French paper Libération offered a far more luxuriant, beautifully illustrated account. A scandalised account, to be sure, but what a classy scandal!

For these were no ordinary windows and this was no ordinary priest.

Known as the “Picasso of churches”, Father Louis Ribes was a prolific artist and craftsman who was for many years a priest without a parish who “moved as he pleased” in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, creating stained glass windows to his own designs for numerous churches, bringing to the work a touch of sly humour that is now seen by his detractors as an irreverent and even profane intrusion into a sacred task.

His much worse profanity, of course, to the conventional mind, was that he was an active MAP, eventually exposed as a prolific, unabashed and celebratory lover of children, who dared to express his enthusiasm through his art, which had been inspired by his multiple liaisons dangereuses with scores of children, or possibly hundreds (boys and girls), during artistic workshops he laid on for decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

A number of them are now calling themselves “victims”, unsurprisingly, and looking for monetary “compensation”, but a photo in Libération of a couple of his young companions with him does nothing to suggest they felt remotely traumatised at the time.

What has certainly been traumatised, indeed vandalised, is the churches themselves. In a stupid, philistine concession to victim culture, all of the churches have now been stripped of his creations, the stained glass seen these days no longer as art but merely as crime-scene evidence. Quel vrai scandale! Quel dommage!

A RELENTLESS TRUTH MACHINE

A couple of blogs ago I mentioned a “fantastic” new paper by Bruce Rind based on German survey data, saying it was worth making a song and dance about, but that would have to wait until another time.

Well, another time has now come and I have changed my mind. Yes, his German study is top quality, as usual, but without a lot of fresh take-away points, so I’ll keep this brief. His data this time mainly reinforce the truly ground-breaking findings based on a huge study of school children in Finland – youngsters who substantially reported, in flat contradiction of “child sexual abuse” (CSA) dogma, that they had not felt victimised or abused by early sexual contact with adults.

The boys, especially, had been very positive: nearly eight out of 10 had reacted positively at the time to their first “minor-older” sexual experience. The girls had been more ambivalent, but even among them, more had felt positive rather than negative at the time.

Among German youth too, the findings were at odds with the CSA paradigm. Notably, positive reactions were just as likely when a minor had coitus with an adult as with an age mate. The overall rate of positive reactions was lower in the German sample than the Finnish one though – which Rind attributes, quite reasonably we might think, to the fact that Finland has a generally more sex-positive culture. Quite simple really: stop telling kids sex with a grown-up will scar them for life and, guess what, they stop saying later on that they were “traumatised” by it.

Brevity is also called for to make space for mentioning another new Rind paper! The guy is amazing, a relentless truth engine, coming up time after time with figures so robustly indisputable the only thing the antis can do is ignore them. Which they increasingly do these days, unfortunately.

But Bruce’s latest isn’t about numbers. It focuses instead on sources of bias and consequent error in psychological research – a subject of much consternation in the business for years now in the wake of a “replication crisis” that has afflicted wide areas of science, especially medicine and psychology. Whereas Rind’s German study resulted in significantly similar findings to his Finnish one, thereby supporting the earlier findings, adding to their credibility, the same has not been true for a lot of other work in the field, including some famous papers. Results have failed to be repeatable, putting their validity in doubt and leading to a loss of confidence in the whole discipline.

But the great thing about science is that it takes its own shortcomings very seriously and addresses them methodically, looking for ways in which to improve. Bruce’s latest contribution to this noble endeavour is a chunky chapter in an enormous new book (nearly a thousand pages!) called Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology. Having read a number of its 33 chapters since it came out in September, including Bruce’s, I am impressed by the earnestness of the approach. Currently offered by Amazon at £119.99, it is hardly going to be a best seller but that isn’t the point.

What matters is that research psychologists are setting their sights on higher standards. Perfection will remain out of reach, us humans being what we are; but gradual improvement is a worthwhile and achievable goal.

HUNTERS BECOME THE HUNTED

When Dieter Gieseking, long-time leader of Germany’s MAP group K13, got in touch with me recently, he took the opportunity to alert me to a report by a media platform in his own country about anti-MAP vigilantes operating in the UK.

The article in Epoch Times, a Berlin-based paper started in America by exiled Chinese dissidents, turned out to be extensive and interesting. It credibly if dispiritingly reported that “paedophile hunters” in England are now “catching 1,500 suspects a year”, their success facilitated by a Supreme Court ruling  made in 2020 over whether the activities and evidence collected by vigilantes are lawful. The court determined that such evidence can be used in criminal trials without violating the rights of the accused.

What also caught my eye in the story, though, is the fact that the hunters do not always have it their own way. They can get into big trouble if they do not follow the rules. In June, we are told, 29-year-old Sam Millar was arrested after ambushing a man he falsely accused of grooming a child. The man was pinned to the ground and had a flashlight shone in his face for nearly 15 minutes. The entire incident was broadcast on Facebook. A jury found Miller guilty of false imprisonment and he was sentenced to a nine-month prison term.

An even bigger development along similar lines came just last month in Canada, where Jason Nassr, the guy who had been behind the vigilante channel Creeper Hunter TV, got his come-uppance after about a hundred video episodes of ritual public humiliation for his victims, smashing their lives in every conceivable way including their death by suicide.

He is now subject to house arrest for 18 months, having been convicted of harassment, extortion, and, in a nicely ironic touch, “production and distribution of child pornography”. Court documents said the child porn charges arose from Nassr’s communications with his “catches”. The prosecution argued that his sexually charged texting in the persona of an underage individual constituted child pornography.

His method had been to communicate with men on dating sites and social media platforms, initially portraying himself as an 18-year-old female. Once the correspondence turned sexual, he would tell his targets he was actually younger, even as young as age 10. He would entice them in phone conversations, adopting a high-pitched, girlish voice. Trickery of this sort, sometimes called “entrapment”, is legal in some jurisdictions and is used by law enforcement, but even in these countries freelance operators such as Nassr may go beyond what the law allows, putting themselves at risk of prosecution.

It’s good to see a few of them beginning to have their wings clipped in this way.