Paedomania, and other distractions
(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)
The massed angry ranks of Little England found themselves a new cause and a new figurehead this week. Still riding the wave of popular acclaim that her News of the World campaign to name and shame paedophiles brought her (claim to fame: the famous attack on a paediatrician from confused nonce-hunters), and having pretty much picked clean the bones of Heather Mills McCartney, The Sun’s editor Rebekah Wade kicked off a new venture naming and shaming judges giving ‘child sex beasts’, crack addicts, muggers and other scum ’soft sentences’.
Heading the reasoned debate was Home Secretary John Reid who pronounced that the sentence given to child sex offender Craig Sweeney was ‘unduly lenient’. (The widely reported announcement being everything to do with concern for public safety and nothing to do with distracting from the fact that, right now, the Home Office looks like a scene from ‘The Poseidon Adventure’.)
Picture the scene. Ranks of concerned citizens march on the Old Bailey waving placards that read ‘NO TO NONCE JUDGES’ and ‘NO MORE CUNTY COURT JUDGEMENTS’ (a pedo/paedo-style spelling mistake or play on words? We’ll never know). They chant ‘MAGISTRATES OUT! MAGISTRATES OUT!’ (a woman having her period is later severely beaten – somebody said ‘menstruate’ and things got out of hand). On the steps of the court, megaphone in hand stands John Reid. ‘What do we want?’ he shouts. ‘Longer sentences to placate over-inflated public fears!’ roars the crowd. ‘When do we want them?’ ‘Before the Tories get any further ahead in the opinion polls!’ A group of bereaved parents are then ushered in to have their unbearable grief mawkishly exploited before being despatched back to their obscurity.
This despite Sweeney being given a life sentence and the Government’s own laws dictating that he should be eligible for parole (or is it the much stricter ‘release on licence’? Nobody seems to care) after five years. It also remains to be seen if Sweeney will be released after five years, that being the date when his case will be *reviewed* not when he’ll definitely be put back on the street. It’s quite likely that he will be deemed unfit for release particularly when you remember that the treatment and rehabilitation of paedophiles as an issue is about as popular as, well, paedophiles.
It’s at this point, and in deference to the chimps’ tea party that passes for intelligent discourse in this country right now, with its terms dictated by the mutton-headed and over-emotional, that we make the obligatory proviso that we at The Friday Thing are not pro-nonce nor think this is a problem that should be ignored. (It’s much the same way that you can’t moan about the Labour Party having the morals of a tomcat without being accused of being a Tory provocateur, or wish out loud that American troops would shoot fewer Iraqi civilians without being called anti-American and pro-suicide bomber or accused of wanting Saddam back.)
The thing is, Reid’s attack on so-called lenient judges (like Tony’s smackdown of the Human Rights Act the other week) is an attack on a problem of the Government’s own making. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows prisoners to be released halfway through their sentences. Its sentencing guidelines give offenders a discount on their sentences if they plead guilty. Reid going off on one is like Darth Vader going on the record about the barbaric practice of blowing up planets with giant space stations. The solution is to either fix things or stop whining.
It’s also galling to see Rebekah Wade pronouncing on this kind of thing. If her husband, SAS EastEnder Ross Kemp, had decided to press charges after her alleged assault on him last year, Wade might have been looking for a little undue leniency herself. The Sun’s (laudable) domestic violence awareness-raising campaign seems to have been buried in the same grave as the story of what lead to Wade spending a night in a police cell.
Doesn’t it seem that moral panics are coming thicker and faster? Like Government scandals, you wait for ages for one and then loads come at once (only a cynic would suggest that the timing of both are linked). Just when paedophiles thought they were off the hook as Public Enemy No. 1 with the advent of the knife murder as this summer’s reason not to leave the house. Now it seems that nonces are back in the frame, hand in hand with high court judges. The kids with the blades can get back to their shankings, undisturbed by the Government’s and the tabloids’ attentions just as they were the week before last.
And as ever, the hysteria involved in these panics is inversely proportional to the number of facts used in the screaming headlines or fat-headed, bandwagon-straddling ministerial announcement. Children are four times more likely to be murdered by – often mentally ill – family members or carers than by marauding ‘child sex beasts’. Don’t tell anybody though, we don’t want to undermine the ‘preferred model’ of the family, do we? That’s the job of co-habitees and homosexuals wanting to put their relationships on formal footings.
The figures surrounding ‘undue leniency’ similarly don’t support the calls for tarring and feathering high court judges. In his five years as the Government’s top lawyer, the Attorney General has referred just 339 cases of ’soft sentencing’ to the Court of Appeal and almost all of those cases had their sentences increased. This in a country, as Jonathan Freedland put it in the Guardian on Wednesday, where ‘proportionally, we are the biggest jailer in western Europe; we imprison more people per capita than China, Saudi Arabia or Burma’.
Still, this hysteria whipped up in the name of headlines and misdirection is not a new phenomenon. In the newly translated Gospel of Judas, when Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are the meek’, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, etc), a heckler is quoted: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy? Get to fuck you unduly lenient bastard! Oi Magdelene, show us your tits!’
Posted on June 16th, 2006 at 1:34pm under Miscellaneous misanthropy, Off Yoghurt, The Friday Thing, UK politics
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• 16 Comments |
I completely agree with the ‘moral panic’ bit. I’ve lost count of how many we’ve had over the years (is it my imagination or do they seem to pop up when the weather gets warm?) But may I ask you to join me in refusing to use the term ‘paedophile’ (a term invented in the seventies by child abusers to lend credibility to their activities) to refer to what used to be called child molesters. There is no ‘love’ involved.
Mike – re. the naming of kiddy fiddlers: may I ask you to join me in reading this article and ploughing through the comments?
But may I ask you to join me in refusing to use the term ‘paedophile’… There is no ‘love’ involved.
Unlike for “coprophiles”, “necrophiles”, etc.?
Justin, thanks for the invite. I did try, honest, but I’ve heard it all before. It was child molesters themselves who popularised the term paedophile (The Paedophile Exchange) and it is for this reason, with all due respect to Tim Worstall and others, that I would prefer we chose not to use it. Simple really, rather in the way I don’t use the term ‘collateral damage’.
It is well established that homophobia derives from a repressed homosexuality and self-loathing. I wonder whether persons who exhibit a pronounced, irrational paedophobia are repressed in a similar way? I am not comparing homosexuality with paedophilia, only the phobias.
Brain tumour causes uncontrollable paedophilia:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2943
Though I’m no neuroscientist, a good mate of mine is. As such, I have been in the same room as various books on the human brain, and even read some of the spines. This makes me more than qualified enough to state that brain tumors can cause pretty much anything, depending on their position. Probably superpowers and everything. FACT.*
* may not be fact.
Larry T:
Even I worked out that -phile means love – Doh! I was rather referring to their activities, you know, like shoving a big sweaty middle-aged cock down the throat of a six year old child. Call me old fashioned but I just don’t see the love there. Mind you I don’t see the ‘love’ in having a frozen stick of shit shoved up your arse either, or shagging corpses for that matter but, hey, each to his own. As for paedophobia, (fear of children?) I can only say (as a father of six) you should be afraid, very afraid.
Mike Power, as a father of 6 children, you are the person most likely to abuse them.
Right. My gaff, my rules. Doughnut, you’ll put that kind of crap away or I’ll start deleting. Yes, the statistics show that children are more likely to be abused by someone known to them but I’m not having that point used to insult other commenters. At least that’s how I construed it – maybe someone else can tell me if they agree. If that wasn’t what you meant then I think you could have phrased your point better.
Mike, I have to say that I’m sympathetic to your point and will try it on for size. Being a massive fan of Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ and currently rattling through Steven Poole’s Unspeak, I’m all for calling a spade a spade.
That said, as one of the commenters said on that CiF piece (I can’t claim the invite to read it BTW, that was from Redpesto), ‘paedophile’ is a word utterly devoid of any ‘positive connotation’ in this day and age. And I might be doing them a disservice but I doubt the majority of the British public are aware of the term’s history and etymology.
There is a spam blocking problem which has prevented my last comment showing up. But as I now see that all my comments have disappeared there doesn’t seem much point in reposting my last one
Mike, my Spam Karma filter’s gone a bit screwy. Try again if you like, hopefully it’s fixed.
Justin, a man could get paranoid…
OK, here goes. My final comment:
Doughnut, if your point had any relevance I’d respond to it. I will point out a matter of fact though. It’s true that a child is more likely to be abused by a relative (54% of the perpetrators are related to the victim, and 46% are unrelated to the victim) but that includes siblings, uncles,aunts, nephews, grandparents etc and of course, step-parents. So you’re not quite right about the risk to my children (quite apart from the fact that they are all now bigger than me).
Justin: You’re right that the word has no positive connotation etc etc. I just prefer not to use a word chosen by perpetrators themselves to put a positive spin on their activities. It’s also now used as a catch-all word to include the activities of men who rape 9 month old babies aa well as those who just like wanking to images of babies being raped. It’s a word which is also pretty meaningless when it comes to describing either behaviour.
Get out of the way spam blocker, I’m coming through. Do you hear me? I’m coming through.
Justin, I love it when you go all butch on me.
Mike Power: that you are the most likely person to abuse your children is exactly the point. This press mania over ‘paedophiles’ is a manufactured issue preying on people’s deep fears. The UK is the second safest country wrt child abductions in the world after Japan (which generally has a far lower crime rate). I think the yearly figure is 6 or 7 children per year in the UK. In a population of 60 million, that is an extremely low rate. Children are more likely to burn to death trapped in a car or building or get some hideous childhood illness like cancer or that condition where the skin falls off – those are the things people should be worrying about, not ‘paedophiles’. Yet people’s perception is the converse, and this is because their opinion has been formed by media bullshit. I often hear parents waffling on about child abuse and have to remind them that they are the people most likely to commit it.
Secondly, most cases of child sexual abuse are not committed by people suffering from paedophilia, they are committed by opportunists. In contrast to what the media might suggest, paedophilia is a psychiatric condition – a compulsive sexual attraction to children. Lots of people (such as Marc Dutroux) abuse children merely because they are there and vulnerable, without themselves suffering from paedophilia.
28 year minimum sentence for drunken homophobes who murder, but only 5 years minimum for random child rape.
I’m not questioning the sentences (as such) but the discrepancy between the two.
It seems to me that in both cases, these people have significantly overstepped the mark where they are significant dangers to the public. If prison is going to be used to protect the public then the difference between these sentences seems to make no sense.
Neil. Let me spell it out again. Craig Sweeney did not get “only 5 years minimum for random child rape”. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 18 years to serve (the New Labour arithmetic then kicks in).
After five years is when his sentence is reviewed not when he’s going to be released. Unless it can be shown that he is utterly reformed and no longer a danger to the public, it is highly unlikely that he will be released particularly after the hysteria the case has generated. There is a chance that he may never be released.
But these are not very convenient facts for a Home Secretary with an arse to cover, tabloid editors with shit to shovel, and a political party shit scared of being beaten and having no depth to which it won’t sink.