Breaking The Silence

So much for public schools as centres of traditional moral values. They are just about the most anti-family institutions imaginable, founded on the premise that children should be brought up with as little parental contact as possible except when it comes to paying the bills, and organised towards the acting out of adolescence in single-sex residential environments.

No wonder that their products, stalwart defenders, and users as parents, gave us Thatcher's Children Act. No wonder that they cheered on as the economic basis of paternal authority was destroyed - initially in working-class families and communities, but then very rapidly throughout society as a whole - by their heroine, who had left her own small children to hired help while she pursued first her legal and then her political ambitions.

Now, when are we going to have a high-profile television documentary on the numerous Social Services Departments that ran homes in which sex between men and teenage boys was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged? Or on the Police, who long ago stopped enforcing the age of consent from 13 upwards; as with their non-enforcement of the drugs laws, one really does have to ask for whose benefit that is?

Or on the war in Afghanistan, our military defence of the endemic abuse of such boys, an abuse to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they were very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we have installed in their place actively colludes in it as surely as in the heroin trade?

Among many, many, many others.