Britain needs to grow up
about child sex crimes
Question. You receive in your morning mail a misdirected packet. An address you can’t recognise or decipher. It was probably intended for someone in your town but the chances of tracking them down are not particularly good.
You’re curious so you slice it open to see what’s inside. To your total disgust you find a collection of graphic images of child pornography.
What do you do?
Obviously you put them back in the envelope and take them to the police right? They may be able to track down where it came from or for whom it was intended. They could perhaps identify the victims or the perpetrators. There could be fingerprints or other physical evidence they could get.
Right?
Not me mate
Okay, first of all this is a highly contrived example. I can’t imagine anyone getting their extreme-porn fix via any means other than the Internet these days. That said, whilst this is probably an unfair and biased opinion, I tend to view child sex offenders as the lowest rung of society in every respect and therefore not necessarily computer literate. Perhaps they would want stuff like that sent to them through the mail, and surely they would try to disguise their address a little to cover their ass.
Would I report it to the police? Sorry. Not me. Not in this Britain. I’d completely destroy it and get on with my life.
This is a wrong and troubling answer. All crimes create innocent victims and child sex offences are the purest distillation of this – when it comes to sex children are the purest example of innocence and a sex offence is the purest example of a crime motivated by nothing other than gratification for the offender. However small one’s social conscience may be, surely this should firmly tug at it.
But not mine. And I suspect I’m not the only person who would say the same in knee-jerk, media-frenzied modern Britain where child-sex allegations carry a huge payload of guilt by association.
Self-preservation trumps social conscience.
Guilty until proven innocent
Few people who’ve been anywhere near Britain in recent weeks could be unaware of the Jimmy Savile Child Sex brouhaha which is still occupying a prominent place in most days’ news. The allegations that this well-known and exceptionally eccentric DJ and TV personality was, at the height of his career in the 70s, having sex with hundreds of under-age teenage girls are still unproven. Some may wonder how they could ever be fairly tried since the alleged “victims” conveniently waited decades until he was dead in order to air their grievances. Yet within days of the allegations hitting the news and before the sheer volume of them was apparent, the late Mr Savile’s Highland Cottage had already been vandalised, and has been repeatedly since.
This story quickly developed into allegations of a “paedophile ring” at the BBC. This is a stunning example of how offensive sensationalism and spin can be. Since the alleged victims were sexually aware and maturing teenage girls am I the only person who finds this label outrageously insulting to anyone scarred by paedophilia when they were actually children? The media piranha pack where on a mission to be the first to break the names of the other personalities involved and a victim alleging one of his abusers to be a prominent politician of the time had the BBC naming the apparently totally blameless Lord MacAlpine as the perp. Though they have already admitted their error and agreed compensation I suspect it will be some time before the mud completely washes away.
Media sensationalism of child sex crimes is nothing new and seems to be aggravated by some rather sloppy police practices. I remember about a decade ago Matthew Kelly being accused of child sex offences for which he was totally cleared. Unfortunately he wasn’t cleared before his name had been splashed all over the media and, if I recall correctly, details of the investigation leaked, such as (non-child) porn being found on his computer. Details that are no-ones business for a man supposedly innocent until proven guilty.
We’re all victims
Over a decade ago an anti-paedophile campaign by the now defunct News of the World involved printing the photos, names and addresses of convicted sex offenders. Their stated aim was supposedly to ensure people knew who the sex offenders on their housing estates were, and so where able to protect their children from them.
This always struck me as a particularly sick example of self-serving sensationalism. I fortunately cannot put myself into the mindset of a sex offender but like most people I have my vices and I know I am far more likely to indulge them in the bad times than in the good ones. This seemed to me a campaign which, by publicly demonising and harassing the dangerously weak-willed, was far more likely to increase the number of victims of abuse than reduce them.
Once upon a time wanting to spend time with local children was seen as a selfless and worthy thing. Coaching a football team or even just taking a couple of local kids on a fishing trip was giving something back to your community. Now you can’t even conduct a church choir without a background-check and at least a few people eyeing you with suspicion. Today an ever-increasing number of adults wouldn’t even think of doing it. Charities and community groups find themselves fishing in a much smaller pool of volunteers, stripped of the fearful innocent but surely still well stocked with the guilty.
Living in Should Land
Child sex offences are an extreme example of human depravity, human weakness and human failing and it entirely makes sense that we not only want to distance ourselves and protect ourselves from them, but that we want to be seen to be distancing ourselves and protecting ourselves from them.
But the fall-out from the furore affects all of us negatively and seems to directly hamper capturing the genuine offenders. In some cases, at least to my mind, it makes them more likely to offend too.
Britain should be more mature about child sex offences. But that’s a Should Land answer and it is hard to see the track our society is on carrying us there.