The admirably unshockable Mary Beard, Cambridge classics professor, must have raised a few eyebrows in her TV series earlier this year when she was talking about the scandalously early (by modern standards) age of marriage in Ancient Rome. As she also put it in the Guardian: Some girls were 12 or 13 when they married. We call it paedophilia; they called it marriage. That’s one of the exciting things about Roman culture. It’s different from ours. Only a woman these days, and one who is also an eminent historian, could express such a view without reputational damage. What male scholar, after […]

In its first 10 days Heretic TOC has passed 1000 hits. Whether this is a cause for celebration or commiseration is a mute point. According to today’s Guardian, Google people say half of all blogs have only one reader: the blogger. By that dismal standard, celebration is definitely in order. Online, I discovered that five million bloggers average only three hits per day compared to over 100 for Heretic TOC. So, much better than those losers then! It appears there are currently 80,000 “up-and-coming bloggers” at Heretic TOC’s level. Your A List bloggers, though, are way ahead, with 150,000 hits per

What’s in a name? The word “adultophilia” has its champion here on Heretic TOC (see willistina556’s response to The real silenced voices) to describe children’s sexual attraction to adults. Another commentator, Gil Hardwick, favours “teleiophilia”, this being “in uniformity with the original Greek”. The latter term is a bit of a bugger for those whose spelling isn’t great but is favoured (also part of the downside, some would say) by the psychological research wallahs. Actually, it was Ray Blanchard who coined the term, as recently as 2000, although Gil is right that the word is wholly Greek in origin. One of

What defines illegal child pornography? In many jurisdictions this is utterly unclear, because mere nakedness may in theory be permissible, but too close a focus on the genitals may constitute an illegal “lascivious display” or an “indecent” image. An allegedly suggestive pose can tip the balance from legal to illegal, even if the child is fully clothed. The recent high profile arrest of pediatrician, Dr. Richard Keller, who practised at Boston Children’s Hospital and taught at the Harvard Medical School, has foregrounded the conundrum. He and a string of others have been arrested in the past few months on suspicion of

The star victim whose false allegations were too readily swallowed by the BBC was a known fantasist. If you read nothing else today (except this blog, of course!), check out the astonishing detailed account in the Daily Mail. I despise that paper’s anti-BBC vendetta, and their motive of further embarrassing the beeb should not be overlooked. But the story speaks for itself. Briefly, Steve Messham – or “mess ’em about” as we should now think of him – had been given every opportunity at an earlier enquiry to air all his wild yarns of alleged abuse. He was never muzzled as

From the Guardian this morning: Children who have nothing to do with Bryn Estyn have also contacted [children’s commissioner for Wales, Keith] Towler wanting to speak about what had gone on there. One teenage boy told him that he had been struck by the diamond shaped windows above the front door of the home and said it appeared to him that the house was looking at him. “He said it should be knocked down. I hadn’t thought about that,” said Towler. He hadn’t thought about it? How remiss! But hang on a minute. What is being suggested here? That this teenager

The media must be desperate. Since the Jimmy Savile story broke they have been phoning me, of all unlikely people, in the hope of getting further revelations. The Daily Mirror‘s chief crime correspondent, Tom Pettifor, said “name your terms”; the Daily Mail‘s reporter Lucy Osborne offered “a fee”. Both were interested in whether Savile or any other celebrities were once in PIE. The Mail, true to its chronic anti-BBC agenda, wanted to know about anyone in the beeb who might be linked to child pornography. The Mirror made a second call, this time asking if I knew Peter Righton, named recently

Are we in the midst of paedogeddon? Not my question, but Suzanne Moore in today’s Guardian. She gets it right that all the Jimmy Savile brouhaha and panic over paedos in Downing St is wildly OTT, but then predictably comes out with the tired old feminist mantra that child sexual abuse (CSA) is largely an ordinary family thing. She’s right that abuse – mainly emotional, neglectful and violent – thrives in nuclear families as it does in other forms of closed institution. But after decades of supposedly “silenced” victims screaming constantly through every conceivable communications medium, the truly silenced voice is