Child Protection

This is a very bad government. But it has a few good points, and if it enacts the recommendations of the dear old Mothers’ Union, then it will certainly deserve an enormous amount of credit.

But what of Peter Tatchell, who would lower the age of consent of 14, and who wrote in The Guardian (26th June 1997) that: “The positive nature of some child-adult relations is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that no all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”? Last year, David Cameron offered Tatchell a peerage.

What of Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, who ran the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was passing resolutions in support of the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, and when it was publishing calls to legalise and destigmatise sex between adults and children? What of Stephen Fry, author of The Liar and The Hippopotamus, both of which glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church? What of successive Chairmen and Controllers of Channel Four, in its dramatic output a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts?

What of Germaine Greer, author of The Boy, a book-length celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male both by men and by women? What of Richard Dawkins, who in The God Delusion describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”? What of Philip Pullman, whose famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and who has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels? What of Geoffrey Robertson QC, who made his name defending the Schoolkids’ Edition of Oz and whose wife made hers writing explicit depictions of teenage sex?

What of everyone, or even anyone, who rushed to defend and to laud Roman Polanski? What of those in any way involved in Internet pornography, the principal, and highly commercial, sexual abuse of teenage boys in the world today? What of those who have taken us to war in Afghanistan, in 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?

What of 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? What of 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?

Among many, many, many others.

What’s that you say? They do not purport to be moral authorities? Really?