The first part of this two-part guest blog by “Marco” appeared under the main heading “Like cutting off my own limb” on 24 September.

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

In the first part of this guest blog, last month, I explained the devastating consequences that repression (self-inflicted) and oppression (exercised by others) of my homosexuality, had on me over the course of my adolescence, leading to several suicide attempts. I also explained that, as an adult, I had been chatting on Grindr with a 13-year-old boy who showed interest in a sexual encounter, and I told of the horrible experience I had in a legal consultation. I eventually decided not to meet the kid. Not because I would be doing anything wrong, but because I wanted to be free to tell my full story later, and to advocate for social and legal change.

I have come to the realisation that we are trapped in a system that is rotten to the core. The current debates on the age of consent are driven by the interests, expectations, needs, phobias, and prejudices of parents. Sex negationists deny youth sexuality, as if children had no identity, no preferences, and no sexual desire. It is as if youngsters were deemed incapable of taking the initiative, or as though being oppressed was just a minor inconvenience. Irrationality is cranked up by journalists who use the term “paedophile” in a sensationalistic way to generate click-bait headlines.

Adults suck, sometimes. The debate should return to what it should always have been about: the interests and needs of children themselves. However, our “justice” system doesn’t really care about what young people think, feel, or say about their sexuality. It takes them as mere legal artefacts, cute but innocent, silly brats, unripe fruit, or brittle China dolls we’d rather wrap in protective cotton wool and keep safe in a box. Youngsters are indeed immature, but, ironically, they are deprived of real experiences from which they would gain – guess what – maturity.

Sadly, legal consent involving minors and adults has been reduced to a completely dehumanised procedure for the convenience of a “justice” system designed to resolve cases through the brutal application of a simple “one size fits all” formula that fails to do justice to individual circumstances. It has become a bit like primary school Maths: “Tell me your age. Tell me ‘her’ age. Formula applied. We are done. Next.” This justice system is ostensibly for the protection of minors. But horny teenagers do not wait. Instead, they rush into furtive encounters, leaving them with a terrible fear of discovery and vulnerable to risks including abuse and STIs. I take sexual abuse seriously. So seriously that I don’t buy the utterly absurd idea that wanted relationships are the same for minors as unwanted ones. It is high time to rethink consent.

But, first, we need to lay a foundation from a philosophical and ethical perspective, to see what is at stake. In a way, oppression and abuse are two sides of the same coin. The common underlying principle is that you own your body, your intimacy is yours. The moment we are born, our body is ours, and we have an identity that will persist for the rest of our life. If our sexual intimacy is something so important, sacred, transcendental, ancestral, and which profoundly affects our dignity… then it must be so both in terms of inviolability and in terms of right to its use. Correct?

We can think of it this way: keeping innocent people out of prison is as important as putting guilty ones behind bars. The greater the punishment at stake, the more relevant that “as important” becomes, and the more necessary it is to correctly define what is an offence and what is not. In my view, any system that does not strongly recognise both sexual abuse and sexual oppression as core ethical concerns is flawed. In other words: Laws must not only exist to protect us from abuse; they are also there to ensure our freedom. And if you ask me how much sexual freedom is enough, I’ll ask you: How much gender equality do you think is enough? To put it in Foucaultian terms, sex shaming has an overwhelming yet underestimated power dynamic.

In the specific case of youth, to be fair, I do think they are more vulnerable to abuse. But people systematically overlook the fact that they are more vulnerable to oppression as well, since they are at a stage of life where they are completely dependent on their parents, do not have the right to vote, and are under high pressure to swallow pre-established social conventions. In the meantime, their libido increases along with their rapidly rising testosterone levels . Putting all this together, we can say that young people are highly impacted by both abuse and oppression.

Consequently, human rights should address sexual freedom both in terms of abuse and oppression. The right to be free from sexual abuse is recognised. But there is no recognised right to private intimate contact that is mutually desired. What is stopping this? One of the obvious pitfalls is child sexuality. By definition, human rights apply to all humans, so that if we recognise sexual freedom as a human right, we will inevitably have to address juvenile sexual freedom. However, the human rights conventions of the United Nations are still galaxies away* from such ideas . As a reminder, they still fail to effectively decriminalise homosexuality these days, even though ILGA surrendered in the debate on child sexuality three decades ago to satisfy the demands of the conservatives.  That was the price of acceptance into the UN club – an astronomically expensive price, I must add. I wonder when humanity will be mature enough to recognise sexual freedom as a human right.

But, hey, wait a moment! It would be totally wrong to treat adolescents just like adults, as they don’t have the same capabilities. I especially refer to the capacity for rejecting sexual propositions. Saying “no” is not that easy. Additionally, receiving a sexual proposition may come unexpectedly to a teenager, and this poses a problem. In other words, adolescents are not adults. They don’t start from a level playing field. Agreed. But adolescents are not toddlers either! In fact, a 5-year-old infant is not the same as a 10-year-old pre-teen, or a 15-year-old teenager, or a 20-year-old young adult. In my opinion, establishing a single age of consent (before which you are deemed sexually disabled, and after which you are deemed autonomous) doesn’t make much sense because it is poorly adapted to our nature. We don’t become autonomous overnight. It is more of a gradual process, isn’t it? Laws should strive to adapt to human nature, not the other way around! Therefore, for a start, we need a system that recognises different “stages of consent” (rather than a single “age of consent”).

Adolescents cannot consent autonomously. But this is by no means an excuse to oppress those who do want to have an intimate contact with someone. If you simply say “they can’t consent” you are basically saying you don’t care about their feelings and dignity, since you have already decided for them, but without them. They are not objects! Let’s not forget that we are talking about humans. Also, the “they can’t consent” rhetoric creates conflicts with sex education. How come we can have sex education activities below the age of consent? How come we can ask youth to respect the will of others if we don’t respect theirs?

Rather, we have the moral duty to respect their feelings and help them have contacts safely. Legal consent should establish guarantees, not limits. In the case of minors, I think two things should be added to the law with regard to age gaps, as strong indicators of consent: whether the minor is supervised by parents who knew about the intended contact, and whether the sexual encounter is explicit and organised on the initiative of the minor. I consider parental supervision especially important. Parents have the responsibility to safeguard the sexual freedom of their children as much as they have the responsibility to feed them.

We cannot sacrifice the freedom of some in order to protect others, as this creates a new injustice. The fact that real sexual abuse is rightly treated as criminal does not mean non-abusive acts should also be criminalised. In my view, it is an ethical perversion to curtail the sexual freedom of teenagers because “we hate abusers”, since this directs part of the punishment onto innocent youngsters and their partners. Also, restrictions cannot be based on “risk of abuse”, since this immediately establishes a prejudice. Instead, the goal of a fair system of legal consent is to make sure, to the greatest possible extent, that the will of every individual is respected. That’s what consent is in its essence: profound respect for the individual will.

*  Except for a remarkably bold development in a report two years ago sponsored by the UN but never endorsed by that organisation, which timidly rowed back when the proposals came under attack from then Senator Marco Rubio, who is now the US Secretary of State. This was a report by the International Commission of Jurists, as featured in a downpage Heretic TOC item headed “Let’s march to the 8 March tune”.

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Your regular heretic host resumes here:

GROOMED, BY MUSK AND ROBINSON

We have been around the “grooming gangs” block before. There have already been inquiries in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham and Bradford. And of course there was the vast, sprawling, multi-year, no-expense-spared Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) to which I testified when they wanted to hear about my involvement (which was zero) in the alleged VIP child abuse ring (also zilch), in parliament and government.

The so-called “Westminster strand” of the inquiry was founded entirely on the lies of a few fantasists, one of whom was later discredited and jailed – unlike the hacks and pols who chose to believe what common sense should have told them was ridiculous. They believed all the fake news, or said they did,  simply because it suited them to do so: it promoted a sensational narrative that promised to advance their own careers while kicking political opponents in the teeth, with one side denouncing Labour’s association (think NCCL, Harriet Harman) with people like me while the other side knocked fantasy Tory child abusers such as former prime minister Edward Heath.

“Strat”, in a recent comment here, rightly said a new grooming gangs inquiry will be a “useless and expensive” exercise, noting that Jim Gamble, a high-profile police figure who had been tipped to lead it, has pulled out. This, too, brings back that déjà vu feeling. Gamble’s withdrawal came when “survivors” expressed no confidence in a police-led inquiry. Likewise, IICSA had a rocky start when the alleged victims/survivors at that time refused to accept several experienced and respected figures as the inquiry head, finally settling for Prof. Alexis Jay, who had been charge of the Rotherham inquiry.

If anything needs to be done to prevent genuinely coercive or violent sexual behaviour towards children, yet more inquiries are not going to help. When self-appointed victim/survivor leaders are given the “voice” they constantly claim is being ignored, they tend to end up squabbling among themselves, scrabbling to grab hold of the biggest megaphone and denouncing any voice except their own. Why is it, I wonder, that these so-called “vulnerable” people, who have allegedly suffered so badly at the hands of abusers who “have all the power”, all seem to be so stridently assertive, aggressive, noisy, and, well, incredibly powerful?

Real victims would be better served by resolute police action, not inquiries. Why doesn’t that happen? My suspicion is that the police understand quite well that the only reason “grooming gangs” are such a hot issue is that those who have pushed it to the top of the political agenda are the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson, whose target is not so much groomers as Muslims, especially Muslim immigrants. The “Muslim grooming gangs” motif hits two hot-button emotive issues at once: Pakis and paedos!

The police have plenty of real work to be doing, some of it against genuine child abuse, including neglect and cruelty (the original focus of the NSPCC), and we are all aware of how bogus abuse work and pursuing ridiculous woke hate-crime complaints has distracted them from real and urgent tasks such as tackling knife crime, county lines, the epidemic of industrial scale shoplifting, having a visible presence at known trouble hotspots before it all kicks off, and upping their game against devastating online scams that can wipe out life savings, to say nothing of major cybercrime: the JLR job alone has threatened thousands of livelihoods and cost the economy billions. The cops should focus on this important stuff, and we (the public) should let them get on with it.

 

DISLODGING PRINCE ANDREW

Having been forced out of my own home back in the day for no better reason than being unpopular as a MAP, I have some sympathy for Prince Andrew, who is under pressure not just to give up the roof over his head but to banish himself to some other country, just for the “crime” of once having had an unpopular friend, many years ago.

The claim is that he has been sponging off taxpayers by living rent-free for over 20 years at Royal Lodge, Windsor, which is admittedly more “des res” than your average  asylum hotel. But the “sponging” allegation ignores the fact that Andrew’s lease committed him to paying an initial £1 million and spending £7.5 million on refurbishment plus maintaining the house and estate, which must cost a bomb – the grounds alone need four full-time gardeners, and total outdoor costs would be around £150,000 each year, to say nothing of the 30-room building’s upkeep.

We might feel, especially if we are republicans (as I used to be and might well be again if we were ever landed with Prince Harry on the throne!), that fairness to Andrew is just a side issue and that we should take this wonderful opportunity to weaken the monarchy by undermining its finances. I would push back against that, not least because fairness to individuals is always important but also because such an attack stands to undermine not just royalty but also the rule of law. Andrew has a legally binding agreement to stay in his own home. If that is to be trumped by public pressure forcing him out, we are left with the law of the jungle – much like in America, where Trump is having a ball trumping (or Trumping) his own country’s laws. And speaking of King Donald, we might note the growing strength of the No Kings movement in America. In my estimation, our own country’s constitutional monarchy far less of an evil than the increasingly lawless one in the US.

 

A HINT OF HOPE FROM ECUADOR

It is always darkest just before the dawn, as wise man Thomas Fuller observed a few centuries ago. Was he right? I have no idea. I have never checked. But we must hope his metaphorical wisdom works in the case of Marthijn Uittenbogaard and his partner Lesley, the Dutch duo who fled their country’s increasing intolerance against MAP activism only to end up baselessly imprisoned in Ecuador in 2022 under appalling conditions. Their story, starting in the Netherlands, has long been followed by Heretic TOC when there have been major developments. See, especially, here, here, here, and here.

What we must hope was the darkest point, following a long-delayed trial, conviction, 10-year prison sentence and failed appeal, was an awful period this summer when the pair had reduced access to food, leaving them weak and increasingly vulnerable to TB, from which many prisoners were dying. As their compatriot and stalwart supporter Anton Dautzenberg, a famous writer in the Netherlands, put it, “the president of Ecuador thinks that [food] is an unnecessary luxury for the time being”. Last month, though, Dautzenberg brought some more encouraging news:

The men have been moved to another cell. They feel safe there, because they were already friends with two of the three cellmates. Moreover, they finally have access to the prison shop again, the credit (for three months) has been replenished. They also managed to transfer extra money so that the men can purchase vitamins and nutritional supplements. Finally, the process for transfer of sentence to the Netherlands has been set in motion – WOTS, Transfer of Enforcement of Criminal Sentences Act.

I’m not sure what’s WOTS. Maybe it’s an Ecuadoran or Dutch acronym. But the important bit is in bold. They could be coming home to serve the remainder of their sentence. No further news on that yet, but a week ago Dautzenberg reported that things are still going relatively well and that the prison regime has been relaxed somewhat.

 

THREE NOT-SO-WISE MEN

Less wise, no doubt, than Thomas Fuller, but probably a good deal more interesting to heretics here, are three figures who have been in the news.

Let’s kick off with naughty former Premier League football referee David Coote, who was unwise enough a few years ago to call Liverpool’s manager at the time, Jürgen Klopp, a “German cunt” and “fucking arrogant”. It got him a Red Card that saw him suspended from his job for a while, but that’s not the half of it. He has since been accused of “gambling misconduct”, caught snorting “a white powder through a bank note”, and – here’s the really naughty bit – in possession of child porn. Wow! What  a gloriously colourful badass! Coote’s a hoot!

In January, he came out as gay in an interview with The Sun and said a lifelong struggle to hide his sexuality had contributed to the rant about Klopp. He is reportedly due in court again in December for sentencing in the porn case. Can’t wait to see what excuse he comes up with this time. I suppose it could be, “Sorry, Your Honour, I was off my head on coke while trying to forget about my disastrous gambling losses.” Whatever he tries, good luck to him!

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Next up, someone for whom we may have less sympathy, former Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins, who was found dead earlier this month after being attacked in Wakefield prison. On the face of it, his criminality had been truly awful, as he had been serving a 29-year sentence for a number of child sex offences including “the attempted rape of a fan’s baby”.

We always need to be careful with rape allegations, though, bearing in mind that the word “rape” has been so diluted in meaning. At one time it was confined to forcible penetration of the vagina, which would have been truly horrific in the case of a baby – and perhaps also impossible bearing in mind that a baby’s genitals could not accommodate an adult penis. As for “attempted”, what might that have amounted to? Even gentle rubbing of a penis against a child’s vagina, anus, or mouth with only the very slightest intromission, would legally constitute rape these days, and for a charge of  “attempted” rape to succeed it would be necessary only to show that the accused intended to penetrate the victim and had started relevant preliminaries, such as undressing a child.

What makes me doubt that he ever did anything that would have frightened or hurt a child is that he made little secret of his sexuality, and was able to recruit two women “who donated their babies to him”, as Watkins’ defence barrister Michael Wolkind put it. These women were jailed as well. Also, even though there was video evidence of his “attempted rape of a baby” he did not initially plead guilty. Did he imagine he might be able to persuade a jury, based on this visual record, that he was not guilty of such a serious charge? In the end he changed his plea, doubtless based on legal advice, so no jury ever saw the evidence.

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Our third unwise man drowned after falling into a marina on his way home from a pub. CCTV cameras captured the 66-year-old walking “unsteadily” along a pontoon before falling over a railing and hitting his head, a coroner’s court heard earlier this month. It was not unknown for him to drink two bottles of whisky per day, the inquest heard.

But this wasn’t just any old drunkard. He was also a double murderer who spent 20 years in prison after a difficult childhood and an early life spent as, in his own words, “a liar, a thief and a cheat”. Some say he drank out of remorse, which is believable because in most respects (not the excessive drinking, clearly) he became a reformed character and a distinguished writer.

I refer to Erwin James, who wrote a regular column about prison life for The Guardian while he was still serving his sentence, and who also edited the prisons newspaper Inside Time until 2023. As a Guardian reader back then, I remember reading a number of his articles, and very good they were too.

Of particular interest to us heretics was his enlightened attitude towards “nonces” – not his word, I hasten to add. Rather, as an abusive prison slang term all too often on the lips of inmates who fancy themselves as superior to sex offenders, it’s what we would expect to hear from the killers of Ian Watson.

James wrote about such bullies several times in his columns. In one article, headed “The hypocrisy of prison barbarism”, he wrote:

But who are these self-appointed judges and executioners who take it upon themselves to dish out extra-judicial violence on fellow prisoners of whom they disapprove? Either they are just nasty sanctimonious bullies, so ashamed of their own failings that they prey on anyone they see as more vulnerable than themselves. Or they are inadequate dullards, vulnerable and easily goaded into senseless assaults on strangers by their sharper neighbours, “the chaps” who get their kicks by playing the morally bankrupt “prison code” game. And cowardice always looms large when attacks are being considered. As the wise heads on the landings say, “If a man five feet nothing is convicted of something to do with sex or children he’s a nonce – if he’s over six feet, there might be some doubt about his conviction.”

Exactly! Well said, Erwin, and R.I.P.

James, whose full name was Erwin James Monahan, died in January last year. The Guardian ran an obituary that is worth checking out.