Oh, How Short Their Memories Are?

Perhaps over-charitably, Red Maria writes:

In February I blogged some quotations about paedophilia and asked my readers if they could guess their provenance.

Voltaire's Priest thought they came from some 70s or 80s campaign - he wasn't entirely far from the truth - whereas Mark from LibCom thought they hailed from the Sparts.

An anonymous commenter who again wasn't entirely off track said, "reads like an old PIE document (used to cover pages in Peace News and some early IMG leaflety think pamphlets in the mid to late '70s)," adding, "The question is, why?" [The IMG, let the reader understand, included Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth, and Tony Blair's Oxford mentor, Geoff Gallop.]

I'll come to why in a moment but first I'll tell you where they came from:

They didn't come from the Sparts although the Sparts have long held and shouted about their position that the age of consent laws should be abolished, something for which that group as well as the wider left have for long been slammed.

The documents, which were handed to me by an enterprising researcher a few years ago, in fact hailed from the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty.

A motion tabled at the NCCL AGM in either 1980 or 1982 (the script is unclear) read as follows:

Motion 31: This AGM notes with disapproval the continued harassment of the organisations Paedophiles Information Exchange and Paedophiles Action for Liberation, who are working for the rights of adults who are sexually interested in children. We affirm that the existance of these and any other lawful pressure groups should be threatened by neither press nor police.

Whether the motion was passed or not I don't know. I believe the NCCL's general secretary at the time was Patricia Hewitt and its legal officer one, Harriet Harman. Patrica Hewitt was one of the speakers at a meeting held in 1980 to discuss 'Child Abuse Registers, do they undermine the civil liberties of parents and their children?'

Why do I point this out? Not to smear organisations like Liberty or people like Patricia Hewitt but to demonstrate that very different ideas about paedophilia were current, indeed considered respectable in past decades. They were of their time and a lot of people subscribed to them. It puts the Church's actions in those years in some sort of historic context. Contrary to hysterical depictions of the Church as a mass-paedophile ring operating in a cynical and amoral vacuum, her response to clerical sex-abuse did then and does now mirror the attitudes and ideas of wider society.

These are the original quotations:

"we ... propose that the crime of incest [should] be abolished".

"... in cases of parent-child incest, undue pressure to consent could be placed on the child who is economically and emotionally dependent on the older party ... this is just the sort of situation where bringing in the law could do immense harm to the child, the father and the rest of the family."

"Where the child was a willing partner in the sexual activity, the strength of prejudice surrounding the case and the visible psychological effect on the defendent (who may have been a friend of the child) will be highly disturbing."

"In their report for the Institute of for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, Gibbens and Prince make the point that isolated events are unlikely to have any profound effect on a child who would probably soon forget about their experience if it were not for the significance given to it by parental concern and legal proceedings."

"Virkkunen (1975) studied a group of 64 peadeophiles and reported: 'Aggressive behaviour was not as a rule a characteristic of these offenders; on the other hand they seemed to be in a pronounced manner gentle, fond of children and benevolent.' "

"Parents, police and layers find it hard to believe that the child may actively seek the sexual relationship. Bender and Blau (1937) report: 'This study seems to indicate that these children undoubtedly do not deserve completely the cloak of innocence with which they have been endowed by moralists, social reformers and legislators ... frequently we considered the possibility that the child might have been the actual seducer, rather than the one innocently seduced.' Other researchers (Gibbens, Virkkunen) agree that the children often take the initiative; some of them have sexual experiences with several adults."

"There are many cases where the victim does no appear to suffer from any obvious psychological distrubance until after the case has come to court. It is often the publicicity in the local press and the reaction of neighbours that is most damaging to the whole family."

"Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage...A large number of people (one researcher estimated it to be about one third of all children) have one or more pre-pubertal sexual experiences with an adult. So at least some of the readers of this report should ask themselves whether their early sexual activities with an adult have resulted in any unfortunate after-effects."

"This suggested change in the law is merely a palliative. The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage. The present legal penalties are too high and reinforce the misinformation and prejudice. The duty of the court should be to inquire into the all the relevant circumstances with the intention, not of meting out severe punishment, but of determining the best solution in the interests of both child and paedophile."

"For any paedophile to defend himself it is necessary for him to disown his lover in court. Any hesitations in so doing are immediately seized upon by the prosecution. Any indication of support on the part of the defendent for children and for the validity of child/adult sexual relationships will immediately begin to add months, if not years to the prospective and rather inevitable sentence ..."

"The law's non-recognition of child sexuality is carried one step further in the police questioning of children. Quite apart form using sophisticated methods of terrorising children inside the nick and feeding them a series of lies (see Roger Moody's case), the police use a type of 'verbals' especially designed to confuse children as to their real meaning so as to get them to sign 'confessions'. This is done a) to obtain untrue statements b) to break down the resistance of children who do not want to betray their lovers or friends."

Red Maria further blogs today:

From Wikipedia:

"In 1977, a petition was addressed to the parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age-of-consent law and the decriminalization of all consented relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France).

The document was signed by the philosophers Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Glucksmann, by the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, the writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (elected in 2004 a member of the Académie Française), the writer Philippe Sollers, the pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and also by people belonging to a wide range of political positions."

As I recall, when some enterprising journalist brought this to the public's attention in the 1990s it caused a storm of outrage. Satre, the conscience of the nation, putting his name to such a thing! He must have been in the advanced stages of senility, people reasoned. Or maybe he didn't read the document.

Oh how short their memories are.

Well, as I said, perhaps over-charitable...