POWER and CORRUPTION

To all but a vanishingly small number of people, the notion of sexual activity between a pre-pubescent child and an adult is about as repellent as a notion could be. The Plymouth nursery teacher Vanessa George and her internet contacts, who have admitted guilt to up to 13 specimen charges of child abuse, will be reviled and shunned in jail and will no doubt need to be isolated for their own protection. They will receive long sentences: keeping them from harm will be a tough job, even if the warders in whose care they will reside do not collude with those who would mete out to them the kind of rough justice that is the norm in prison.

Paedophilia is widely seen as the most despicable crime of the age, quite as bad as murder for gain, worse perhaps than drug-dealing, worse certainly than adult-on-adult rape, than crimes passionnels, than embezzlement and fraud, even than fiddling parliamentary expenses. It was not always so. When I was a child, scoutmasters and vicars “diddling” boys were apt to be taken as a mild hazard, almost a rite of passage for well-adjusted lads. The benignity and lightness of the term “diddling” speaks volumes. And in an era when it was thought acceptable for a man to administer a playful smack to the backside of a woman or a girl who was not his social superior and when young men talked easily about underage girls being “jailbait”, presumptuous intimacy, even to an advanced degree, was not the “hang-up” it became later, even though it was not thought to be a fit topic for public remark or decent conversation.

Of course, beneath this paradoxical veneer of unmentionability and relaxation, a great deal of vile and damaging abuse took place, particularly under the cover of religious instruction. It was hard for children to testify that such abuse took place because they were liable to be disbelieved or even assumed to be in large degree themselves culpable. Much misery and trauma was buried in the recesses of young minds, only to emerge later in replicative behaviour, in mental and/or physical self-harm and, for the lucky ones, in healing therapy.

The George case has raised a curious amount of bewilderment that women should have indulged in a crime popularly thought to be a monopoly of men. But it is necessary to understand what lies at the base of child abuse to begin to comprehend both how such abuse comes to be indulged and why it is indulged by both sexes. The key to it – as to rape, spouse-beating and cruelty to animals – is power.

All of us, women and men and indeed children, desire to exert some kind of power over someone or something. At a very basic level, it is an assertion of our humanity, our personality, our individuality. So we create little worlds in which we are absolute monarch. That little world might be a family or a team of players or an office or a vast corporation. It might be a “pack” of one owner and just one cat or dog, the latter of whom is obliged to obey and take direction. It might be an aquarium of tropical fish or a display of fossils or a wardrobe of frocks or a library of books or an array of cheese labels or a collection of dolls or an action man toy with accessories. It may be perfectly inanimate but it is still a dominion. All of these are “worlds” over which we wield the more or less kindly power of the benevolent despots of 18th century Europe.

Vanessa George from Anorak.co.uk site

Adults abuse children because, in a formulation you have encountered, “they can”. That’s what abuse of power is. Simultaneously, there is an utterly different impulse that informs this issue. There are, always were, always will be kids who themselves want to investigate the enticing world of sexuality, who go out looking to initiate encounters with older people, indeed with adults. A number of gay men of my acquaintance sought encounters with older boys and yes, with grown men, before they were themselves pubescent. Innocent beyond my years, I never imagined such things occurred until I was an adult myself and saw that it was so. But some kids, one way or another, get sexualised and respond to the stimulus with excitement and bravado. I submit that there is a vast difference in the nature of the experience of a sexual encounter between a child and someone older where the child is desirous to explore and more than willing to initiate an exploration in which that child’s parameters are respected, and an uncomprehending child being coerced into a sexual encounter by an adult who, whatever her or his rationalisation, is imposing desires upon the child. Don’t misunderstand this distinction. I do not advocate paedophiliac gratification. I merely submit that not all experiences are commensurate.

Some 35 years ago, when I was reporting full-time on the affairs of television, I had occasion to meet, in his capacity as a press officer for the Open University, a man called Tom O’Carroll. At the time that I met him, O’Carroll already had a public profile that overwhelmed his promotional function. He was the most widely known officer of an outfit called the Paedophile Information Exchange. I found him charming and articulate, perhaps (I may be projecting, of course) somewhat intense and hunted-looking. He was sacked from his post shortly after our meeting.

These were the early days of gay liberation. O’Carroll’s particular interest was in boys so he was, properly termed, a pederast rather than a paedophile. In the intervening years (it seems; I have not been in touch with him), he has not moved on from this enthusiasm. Indeed, he has served some time in jail and he has published a book called Paedophilia: The Radical Case. I have not acquired a copy.

Initially the gay community was uncertain how to react to its pederast sub-culture. The age of consent – then 21 for gay male congress, since the 1967 act that decriminalised consensual acts between two adult men in private – was a major issue and a proper cause célèbre, given that the magic number for females remained 16. At the same time, gay men, grappling with all the ramifications of the new obligation to "come out", found themselves having to fend off a common misperception, that a gay man was necessarily also a pederast. As the perceived public revulsion for homosexuality began to erode, it still seemed that “violation” of teenaged males gave greater offence (to women as well as to men) than the comparable advantage taken of females who (by women as well as men) were still viewed in an objectifying fashion.

Paedophilia, insofar as it was contemplated at all in the 1970s and 1980s, referred almost exclusively to boys who, the prevailing wisdom had it, required far greater protection from “predatory” men than did girls. Girls were very widely seen, in crude terms, as “asking for it”. After all, didn’t they all dress in a manner designed to provoke men? If they didn’t, they were frigid or lesbian. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t.

In recent years, the internet and, a long way afterwards, broadcast television have, between them, exposed children of even very young ages to the sort of sexual material that adults, let alone children, were denied last century. The onus to monitor this exposure has firmly been put upon parents, and parents have not notably accepted the onus. We have all learned a new term: “grooming”. This is the process by which paedophiles soften up children with whom they have made contact by email and webchat, frequently themselves posing as youngsters. There has been loud outrage, well fuelled by the tabloids, and people from estates who don’t even know what the word “paedophile” means – the office of a blameless paediatrician was attacked by one howling mob – have marched and yelled. Supposed sex offenders, named by the press, have their homes and persons attacked. At the same time, the children who are thought to be in danger frequently know – at a superficial level – more about sexual technique and specialised tastes than do their indignant parents.

Tom O'Carroll, a recent pciture from The Northern Echo

Then of course the health and safety movement has hung children about with so many supposedly protective restrictions that the streets, once the favoured playground of the urban young, are empty of anyone not in a gang. So the kids stay indoors, watch porn on their PCs, pass a sedentary childhood eating fast food instead of running around and are thought to be safe and … um … healthy. There’s a lot wrong here.

I return to the issue of power. Many pathetic but harmless individuals gaze longingly at children and images of children but will not impose themselves on some unwilling object of lust because the need to exert power doesn’t inform their inclinations. Looking at images of children, especially grossly pornographic images, is deemed to make an important contribution to the creation of such images because money changes hands, thereby giving the perpetrators of the photographed abuse the motivation to continue. There is clearly an argument for requiring that the customers for such material account for their patronage. But I maintain that the coercion of children, the use of subtle and not so subtle power over the vulnerable is the true offence in these transactions. The internet is full of material uploaded by boys of all ages (girls too, for aught I know) displaying and abusing themselves and their fellows for their own gratification and the gratification of anyone who cares to look at it. Not all children are in any or in every sense wholly innocent.