A Most Dangerous Woman

It does not yet appear to be online, if it ever will be, but Mary Kenny's column in this week's Catholic Herald not only bemoans, in the light of present media coverage, the softening in practice of the Church initial - and, one should add, theologically unchanged and unchangeable - condemnation of Freudianism, but then goes on in the following terms:

I remember a point in the later 1970s when there was a pro-paedophile "liberation" lobby. It was called the Paedophile Information Exchange and it argued publicly for the lifting of the prohibitions (or "prejudices") against paedophiles. Mary Whitehouse, that doughty campaigner against pornography, took up the cudgels against the PIE - as is described in her autobiography, A Most Dangerous Woman - and was laughed at by liberals for her "reactionary" attitudes.

In 1978, I was living in Bloomsbury in central London when the PIE held a rally in one of the local meeting halls once so beloved of Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury Group. Members of the PIE had affiliated themselves to the National Council for Civil Liberties and some in the NCCL supported their cause. [Where are they now...?] To the surprise of many, however, this particular meeting was strormed by a group of working-class grannies who denounced the idea of paedophile relations as "wicked" and evil". There was a fierce hullabaloo, and the PIE withdrew.

Liberals were appalled at the fracas, but the battling grannies gradually gained public support. (And later, militant feminists began to support Mrs Whitehouse on both pornography and paedophilia.) Valerie Riches, founder of The Responsible Society, also campaigned against the PIE, and was one of the strongest voices against that particular "liberation" movement, which was within an ace of being accepted.