A rare escape, without bribery or bloodshed

In An Open Letter to the Labour Party recently, I revealed that the official reason given for my expulsion from the party with no possibility of defending myself was because the party had learned, apparently from a Daily Mail report last month, that I had been convicted in December of a “serious offence”.

My priority last time, as the “Open Letter” title suggests, was to focus on the Labour Party. I drew upon the thinking of radical leftists, from Friedrich Engels on the family to Roy Jenkins on the “permissive society”, to explain why I had become a member and why I thought the party should think again before repudiating the socially liberal strand within its own tradition. Fat chance of that, I fear, although I note that leader Jeremy Corbyn is now publicly saying prostitution should be legalised, thereby infuriating his own more censorious MPs. Well done Jez!

This focus of mine on politics meant I could only briefly touch upon the “serious offence” in question. It is now time to put the record straight. Heretics here know better than to take mainstream media monsterings of Kind people at face value, so thank you everyone for taking it all in your stride and waiting patiently for me to begin.

As I briefly indicated in the Open Letter blog, I was intimately involved with a 10-year-old boy in the 1970s. Recently, in December, his adult incarnation testified at a trial in Caernarfon, Wales. A Daily Mail report said I had “narrowly escaped jail” last year after “preying” on the boy and his 9-year-old brother.

The question that will leap to mind is how could I possibly have got off scot free, with no time whatever behind bars? In today’s savagely punitive climate, “predatory” offences against children are routinely attracting prison terms into double figures, including a whopping 35 years, no less, for the “ringleader” in the Rotherham “grooming” case last month.

So how did I “escape”? Did I bribe the judge? Did I whip out a smuggled gun, leaving a trail of bloodied corpses as I blasted a way clear of the courtroom?

There is another explanation, one the Daily Mail was understandably coy about because it failed to fit their preferred narrative. The real reason I left the court a free man is that neither the judge, nor the prosecution, nor crucially even the “victims” themselves, appeared to have seen me as callously “predatory”. Which might leave you wondering why this “historic abuse ” case came to court at all after nearly forty years.

All will be revealed.

First, we need to take ourselves back all those years, to 1977 and a very different social climate. As a young man then, I worked for a while as a group leader at an outdoor activities camp for kids, in Wales. One of the youngsters in my charge was a nine-year-old boy I will call Adam (other names will be changed too). Unlike some of the other kids, who were with their school mates or a sibling, Adam was on his own. He latched onto me, and during his week’s stay we became fond of each other. At the end of the week he gave me his address – I hadn’t asked for it – and he invited me to come and meet his family sometime.

A year later I did. It would have been about August when I met his parents at the family’s country home, and also his younger brother, Zac. By now Adam was 10 and Zac 9. These were by no means “vulnerable” children from a disadvantaged background. Quite the contrary. Their father, Sebastian, headed a significant organisation and was later knighted for his services. Their mother, Cassandra, was a highly cultured woman. The privately educated brothers now in their mid-forties, are doing well in their own careers, with families of their own ranging from young adult to early teens. They are in good shape, too: tall, slim, handsome. Adam’s relaxed warmth is still apparent. Zac has style, a touch of rock star glamour.

I felt I got on well with the whole family at that first meeting, an impression borne out by the fact that a couple of months later I was allowed to take Adam and Zac for a week’s hiking based at a holiday cottage in Snowdonia. We had a great time. Cassandra’s diary from all those years ago was an exhibit in the case. Her entry, when the boys arrived back home, records that they went straight off to some friends to tell them “what a fantastic holiday they had had.”

Adam, the only witness in the trial, had plenty of good things to say about me. I had seemed “a really nice guy” when we first met, an impression that did not change. He remembered the week at the cottage not just for the mountain walking, which he enjoyed, but also the fun. He liked my humour. There was plenty of joking and laughter. I was always “very respectful” towards him. He told the court I had been “very charming”.

He had not been sexually unwilling either. At age of seven or eight an older boy had introduced him to “wanking”, and he needed no further encouragement. When he did this quite openly at the cottage, naked and in full view of his brother and me, he had not objected when I became intimate with him. He didn’t feel pressured into anything. He did not feel he had been harmed in any way.

Asked in court if such activity might unconsciously affect a willing child participant, he agreed that it could: it might cause them to grow up with ultra-liberal sexual views without knowing why! This was as close as Adam came to saying why he eventually gave a statement to the police more than six months after Zac had done so. Zac, it is clear, was the prime mover in the case. He never claimed I touched him sexually, but on the basis that he saw me in a sexual situation I eventually admitted gross indecency towards him.

Zac, it has to be said, was always a very different character to Adam. Both were great kids. But, unlike Adam, Zac was just not physical. Whereas Adam loved to hold hands and snuggle close, Zac preferred to keep his distance. I thought I respected that. But not enough, apparently. He was the one who brought matters to the attention of the police. He claims to have suffered erectile dysfunction and marital problems as a result of his childhood encounter with my sexuality. I do not doubt his sincerity. I am sure he has suffered the issues he mentions but do not think they can reasonably be attributed to any aspect of his time with me.

The fact is that people with all sorts of problems, not just sexual ones but also drugs, gambling, business failure, you name it, are apt to look for a scapegoat. We all try to blame our woes on something beyond ourselves. In recent decades the scapegoat of choice has been childhood sexual abuse. Even people who were never “abused” will go to therapists, desperate to be told that they were, because that would “explain” everything.

Fortunately for me, Zac was not vindictive.  As part of his victim impact statement in court, he said he did not wish to see me punished. As for his testimony as a witness, that was not needed. Following Adam’s testimony, word reached me through my barrister that changing my initial Not Guilty pleas to Guilty (indecent assault against Adam and gross indecency towards Zac) would result in a suspended sentence, and I accepted that.

So, if Zac had not been out to punish me, what did he want? His written prosecution statement was very revealing. What prompted him to make his complaint against me was not just what happened on a very enjoyable holiday in 1978 but what was going on in the media in 2014 shortly before he went to the police. Specifically, he objected to what a TV news bulletin had reported me as saying about paedophilia at a time when PIE’s supposed political connections were under the media spotlight. He wrote:

“What concerns me is that paedophiles may have read his book or his online blogs and used that information to justify their own actions.”

In other words, he was bidding to use a criminal prosecution in order to shut me up. His ideological motivation is to be seen even more clearly in a remarkable admission: until several years after the holiday he “felt no resentment” towards me and “probably thought upon him as a nice guy”.

That changed only after I went to prison in 1981 for conspiracy to corrupt public morals. He knew about this because his mother told him. She had found out from the Guardian. Nothing surprising about that. What might astonish many now, though, is that Cassandra’s response was remarkably civilized: she wrote a very kind letter to me in prison and received me at the family home again when I came out in 1982. By this time she had even dipped into my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case. I had given her a copy before the public morals trial, in part at least because I felt she and her husband should learn about my philosophy through my own words rather than media distortions. She showed no sign of agreeing with my views but had the grace to say she thought my position was well argued.

Whereas Cassandra was calm and compassionate, resolutely refusing to be freaked out, her newly teenage son Zac started to take a much dimmer view in ’82 and has continued to do so. In his victim statement he said his object was to dissuade me from encouraging others to break the law. Regular readers of Heretic TOC will know that I absolutely do not do that and could be prosecuted if I did. But Zac appears to have been under a different impression.

The judge, in his sentencing remarks, quite properly emphasised that I was entitled to express my views. He seemed genuinely puzzled, though. He could see just from my bearing in the dock that I was deeply upset by the case. So he knew I was very much taking to heart everything that was said, including Zac’s own emotional statement as to the pain and distress I had caused to him and his family. What was going through the judge’s mind, plainly, was the paradox of my sincere response to Zac’s certainty that I caused harm, combined with the fact that I had given no indication that I intended to stop blogging, or otherwise speaking out publicly in ways that Zac feels are wrong and dangerous.

Through my barrister, I had said  that if I had known in 1978 what I know now, I would not have behaved as I did. It was an honest statement. When we defy the law we put children at grave risk of growing up feeling they must have been damaged – because our culture virulently insists it is so, on a daily basis – even when that is not how they felt at the time. Only in a culture which has changed so much that it is ready to accept more liberal laws will child-adult sexual relationships be ethically feasible. It is because I refuse to give up on that vision that I continue to write.

Zac said in his written statement that he wanted to “challenge” me. But he has made it impossible for me to answer his challenge. Part of the sentence was a court order preventing me from contacting him or Adam, so I find myself unable to pick up the gauntlet he threw down: I can neither explain myself to him, nor probe his thinking. I find this hugely frustrating. To coin a phrase, it is hard to find closure.

I wish him well, though. Adam too, and Cassandra and Sebastian. They are a remarkable family and I still have fond memories – shattered ones now, but still precious, like shards from a dropped Ming vase.

 

 

‘Paedophile’ soccer star did fuck all

Adam Johnson did fuck all. He didn’t fuck at all; nor did he have oral sex with an underaged girl as was alleged; and he certainly didn’t rape her. He merely sent flirtatious messages, which she welcomed, then kissed the very willing 15-year-old and copped a bit of a grope in her pants.

She was totally up for it, bursting to brag to her pals that she was scoring with a glamorous Premiership and England international footballer.

But that hasn’t stopped the zealots of victim feminism from cranking up their mendacious hate speech, deliberately obscuring the consensual nature of the activity under a blizzard of blather about “rape culture” – hate speech aided and abetted by incendiary media references to “paedophile” Johnson, as though the girl had been 15 months old rather than 15 years.

The madness of the reaction to Johnson’s “crimes” has been so extreme, so egregious, it takes a hard-boiled professional controversialist to do it justice. Take a bow, Katie Hopkins. Describing the Twitter mob’s version of lynch lunacy, she wrote in the Daily Mail, “Look around at these people. They are no different to the nutters of ISIS gathering to watch gay men thrown from buildings.”

As for the “victim”, kudos to Hopkins for daring to tell it like it was:

She looked way older than 15 and acted way older than 15, something “everyone told her” all the time.

But in Italy and Germany, where the age of consent is 14, they clearly define our young persons’ march into adulthood a lot more progressively then we do here in the UK.

She waited to meet him, willingly handed over her number, recorded their meetings to brag to mates, and was perfectly aware of what he wanted when she clambered into his car.

Not only that, but she was the one going back for more.

Funnily enough, daddy darling wasn’t bothered about his daughter’s “attacker” until she had let things get out of hand. She got drunk and gossiped to the wrong people. (Remind me of the legal drinking age again?) Adam stood her up, her name was dirt at school, and suddenly she needed an out.

From would-be WAG to slag, then suddenly she needed a more demure label: victim.

Those of us who take issue with WEIRD sexual values will reject the “slag” put-down. We don’t mind a girl who likes a frolic, or the excitement of having a famous boyfriend, or even bragging about it. And, yes, there should be every sympathy for youngsters panicking when they find they are out of their depth. By all means chuck them a life jacket, as parents find themselves doing wearyingly often when their kids get into all sorts of scrapes. Making mistakes and learning from them are a necessary part of growing up.

But the lifejacket marked “victim” serves only to strip young people – and adults too, increasingly – of all responsibility for their own actions. The age of criminal responsibility is 10 in England and 8 in Scotland. These ages may be on the low side but they suggest we definitely feel a 15-year-old should be accountable for their own behaviour.

So, what is particularly unedifying in this case is not that the girl is a “slag” but that she and those around her would seek to offload all the blame for what happened onto Johnson. Ideally there would be no criminal liability on either side because both were willing participants, but that is another issue. The point here is that by casting the teenager as the mere victim of an exploitative adult, a grave injustice has been done. Johnson’s fall has been vertiginously tragic, not only losing a glittering career and depriving his club and fans of a great talent, but he is also threatened with a long prison term for no more than what would usually be called “petting” or “foreplay”.

Another aspect of the case is worth noting too, namely what an article in The Independent called Johnson’s “worryingly feminist” defence. Siobhan Fenton wrote:

In many ways the story is a familiar tragedy of an older, powerful man abusing his position to seek sexual gratification from a vulnerable person. However, what is particularly striking is the extent to which Johnson has not only failed to deny these wider social issues surrounding abuse, but almost embraced them. Indeed, in a bid to deflect responsibility for the suffering he has caused, his defence in court represented an almost feminist logic…

Johnson, she said, claimed his early rise to fame and success as a gifted teenage footballer made him arrogant and retarded his development. His defence, as she put it, “echoes feminist arguments about rape culture whilst inverting them to scapegoat [sic; just means escape?] personal responsibility”. She thought that Johnson’s expensive barrister, Orlando Pownall QC, had deliberately drawn on the “feminist” perception that culture is all-important in forming our ideas of what is sexually acceptable and unacceptable, and that his client had unfortunately been brought up in a particularly Neanderthal atmosphere: that of professional football.

Note that expression, “rape culture”. Fenton uses it no fewer than six times in an article of not much more than 600 words! Johnson was acquitted of consensual but illegal oral sex. What we get from Fenton is rape, rape, rape, rammed down our throats in her own act of oral rape, on a totally spurious basis.

Johnson might have been expected to use the traditional mitigation that the complainant had been a willing participant, thereby “blaming the victim”. Of course, that would have outraged the anti-sexual zealots. Logically, then, the “feminist” defence he actually adopted should be seen by the victimhood promoters as a great improvement. After all, Johnson, was humbling himself, admitting he had done “wrong” and saying he was sorry.

But that just seems to have incensed the indignados even more! How dare he be humble! What right has he to be sorry!  As for seeking to understand where he had gone wrong, by trying to see his behaviour from a feminist point of view, there could be no more cynical and appalling crime! Doing that, after all, allowed him to argue for a punishment short of castration followed by execution! Why should he be permitted to do that? What right could any man possibly have to any so-called “defence” when accused by a woman? The arrogance of it! The chauvinistic sense of entitlement!

It is clear there can be no appeasing feminists of Fenton’s sort. They are unreasonable. They are implacable. They must be met not with grovelling submission but with contemptuous ridicule.

Easy for us to say, looking on. Not so easy when you are in a courtroom and desperate for any sort of get-out-of-jail card. Judge Jonathan Rose said the range under consideration was between four and 10 years. A prison sentence was “almost inevitable”, he said, telling Johnson he was being granted bail to “say goodbye to your daughter” before sentence is passed.

The CPS sentencing guidelines actually point to rather less draconian possibilities. The starting point for “grooming” (the flirtatious messages), where the child is over 13, is 18 months. For “sexual activity with a child” of this age (the groping) it is only 12 months, albeit that is for touching the child’s genitals without penetration. But this rises to four years if a finger finds its way into a vagina.

Sentencing is now expected to be next week. If it were up to Ms Fenton, one supposes the footballer’s one-year-old daughter would spend her entire childhood with no daddy in her life at all.

Mr Pownall’s defence strategy is aimed not at vicious viragos, though, but at the judge. It may yet work. His Honour has strongly flagged the likelihood of a long sentence but there is a faint ray of hope in his “almost inevitable”. He may yet relent and be merciful. But that would be a very brave course to take, putting his own head on the block, never mind Johnson’s. So, if you are inclined to bet on clemency make sure you get decent odds.

International Megan’s Law faces challenge

David Kennerly today updates the theme of his June 2014 guest blog Techno-tethering globalises oppression. The news is not good. International Megan’s Law, a nightmare piece of legislation, was signed last month by U.S. president Barack Obama. But, as David reports, a grassroots fightback is already  underway, and a legal challenge has been launched that could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

 

A battle is lost but resistance is mobilized

We lost the battle, brewing for some eight years in Congress, which will effectively stop those of us, U.S. “registered sex offenders”, from venturing outside our own countries. The enactment of International Megan’s Law is not the end of the war, however, as we are fighting back against this injustice in the courts and, to the extent that we wield any influence, in the media.

The bill was signed into law by President Obama February 8th of this year and will stoke the fire under the simmering cauldron which “child sex offenders” inhabit and further diminish our already depleted portfolio of rights.

To capsulize the highlights of the law (and which I see as the nadir of a once free society):

• It will criminalize the act of traveling outside the U.S. without prior notice and permission from the government. Ten year terms in federal prison await those of us who fail to do so.

• It will obligate the Department of Homeland Security to notify foreign governments of the anticipated travel of U.S. “child sex offenders” and encourage those governments to do what they will with that information, whether that be to slam the door in our faces or something even worse.

• It will obligate the Department of State to revoke the passports of U.S. “sex offenders” and require them to reapply for new ones with a designation affixed to each indicating that its bearer is a “sex offender”. [Note: this provision is not limited to “child sex offenders” but includes all “sex offenders”]

There are a number of other details, none of which ameliorate the law to our advantage, which provide a structure for carrying out this mission or which specify the information which the “sex offender” must provide before travel, such as detailed itineraries, purpose for travel, places one intends to stay, etc.

So much for spontaneity in travel! Of course, that assumes that there are countries which will let us in the door in the first place.

Here’s the funny thing: perhaps the most important aspect of this law, notification of foreign governments of the intended travel by U.S. “sex offenders”, has already been the practice of the U.S. Government for some three years. The U.S. has been issuing these foreign notifications, in the absence of any clear authority to do so, and Registrant travelers have already been turned away in droves by many countries, some of which have, coincidentally, explicitly (and very recently) announced laws forbidding “sex offenders” from entering their countries.

So, the peculiar thing about this new law is that we already have a very good sense of how it will play out and the results, so far, aren’t pretty, with many Registrants facing humiliating refusals at foreign ports of entry and being made to get on the first returning flights to the U.S.

Exceptions to those countries routinely turning away all Registrants, however, appear to be some Western European countries such as The Netherlands and France (but not the U.K., of course). Many other countries, particularly Asian and Latin American countries, as well as Russia, have joined with the U.K. in refusing entry to U.S. “sex offenders”.

The eerily-named governmental consortium called “The Five Eyes”, which consists of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, had already been turning away each others’ “sex offenders” for many years now, a fact which provides some strong clues as to the origin of this more recent global expansion of the policy of internal exile for “sex offenders”.

The critical component which is facilitating this world-wide travel ban is the international police agency, INTERPOL, which has openly lobbied for such bans. This is an agency which deserves far more scrutiny than it once did when it was mostly a sleepy backwater in danger of complete irrelevance. It has been completely made-over by the most powerful governments who comprise its membership and the new Interpol is very muscular and frightening, indeed. If ever there were an entity deserving of a full-on paranoid conspiracy theory, Interpol would be it.

The only way that we know anything about the fallout from our government’s extant policy of notifying foreign governments of U.S. Registrants’ travel (which predates the recent law, not yet in effect) is from the message boards at California RSOL where a number of us started discussing this looming issue some three or four years ago.

The only way we knew which countries were barring us was by simply attempting to travel to those countries and then reporting back to the CARSOL discussion forum. The U.S. government neither informed us ahead of time that it had begun notifying foreign governments of our “sex offender” status nor did it provide any reports of which countries had been refusing us entry.

We are preparing a country-by-country matrix based upon those attempted travel experiences which will be available shortly. Nevertheless, the information in that report will exist only because individual Registrants reported their experiences to the CARSOL message board and that information will almost certainly not be complete.

If this is sounding a bit like a grassroots effort to fight back against an ugly, unfolding (and uncommunicative) juggernaut aimed precisely at us, then you are right.

From what I can tell, our group, alone, has been gathering the appalling details of this secretive regimen and exposing it to the light of day although we now have the satisfaction in knowing that they are beginning to be known more widely, thanks to a handful of media reports.

I am encouraged by the individuals or publications which have begun to respond critically to IML such as Lenore Skenazy (Free Range Kids), David Post (of the Volokh Conspiracy, now part of the Washington Post), Reason, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Counterpunch, and the Washington Times. No, they’re not overwhelming in their number, but striking in their willingness to break both the complicitous silence and the flip-side hysteria which has gripped the press for so long when the subject is “sex offenders”.

This development, i.e. the enactment of International Megan’s Law, perhaps more than any previous outrage against Registrants, appears to have helped many to find their voices and to raise them in protest against the continued degradation of “sex offenders”, including those who are not themselves Registrants.

So, while IML has not quite merited a full “news cycle”, it has aroused something which I find intriguing, even promising: the emergence of individuals and groups willing to speak out against the shrieking unreason which has dominated the “sex offender” public discourse for decades.

We are not taking this terrible law laying down, either. We are challenging International Megan’s Law in the U.S. Federal District Court of San Francisco having fired our responding salvo immediately after the cowardly, former constitutional law scholar, President Obama, signed the bill into law early last month.

The California Reform of Sex Offender Laws and its Director, attorney Janice Bellucci, representing four unnamed plaintiffs, filed the civil rights lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of IML on a variety of grounds, including as an abridgment of First and Fifth Amendment rights and the clause against ex post facto laws. Those plaintiffs represent something of an overview of “sex offenders” whose circumstances raise different or distinct constitutional issues, such as the right to travel in employment or the right to live with or visit family members.

Since the appalling, and completely un-protested, Protect Act of 2003, which made it a U.S. crime for an American citizen to travel overseas and to have “illicit sex” with someone under the U.S. age-of-consent of eighteen and which also forbids Registrants from sponsoring foreign-born spouses for U.S. citizenship, there have been a number of American Registrants living overseas in their spouse’s country, their spouses having been kicked-out of America by that law.

Now, with IML, those Registrants find that they are being deported by their spouse’s country back to the U.S. and are prevented from living with, or even seeing, their own spouses and children, who cannot join him in the U.S. due to the Protect Act.

One of the plaintiffs in the challenge to IML is from that category of persons caught in the double-bind of two terrible laws. Another has lost his livelihood after being permanently barred from business travel.

A temporary injunction, barring the U.S. from further notification of foreign governments of the status of U.S. Registrants as well as halting the issuance of “sex offender” passports, has also been filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco but has not yet been granted.

We now await word from the court granting us that injunction and for our lawsuit challenging IML to wend its way through the courts, a journey which we suspect will take us to the U.S. Supreme Court.

An Open Letter to the Labour Party

Heretic TOC is today sending an Open Letter to Iain McNicol, General Secretary of the Labour Party. This follows the news, widely trumpeted in the British media last week, that your host here has been expelled from the Party. I was suspended on Tuesday, on the grounds that my conduct may have been “prejudicial” to the Party. Then, on Wednesday, I was expelled.

So, if I have understood the matter correctly, there will be no hearing at which I could mount a defence.

The first I heard of all this was through the media. Official confirmation reached me only somewhat later, on Friday, when I received two letters from the Party, dated the 16^th and 17^th and both postmarked the 17^th. The first letter did not specify any particular allegedly “prejudicial” conduct, but my activism in relation to paedophilia was obviously the issue, as was made abundantly clear in the widespread media coverage. The second letter, though, was much more specific. It stated:

“The Labour Party has learned that in December last you were convicted at Caernarfon Crown Court of sexual offences involving two children and given a two-year prison sentence suspended for two years…”

The letter went on to say that the Party’s National Executive Committee had decided to expel me immediately based on this being a serious criminal offence, as the NEC is empowered to do under section 2.1.4.D.3 of the Party’s rules.

It seems the Labour Party learned of the conviction from a Daily Mail report on Wednesday. I alluded to the case somewhat cryptically in Truth, reality and baby elephants at the end of last year. Now it is in the public domain and is being used as a handy stick to beat me with, I feel I should say something about the circumstances. But the story will take some telling, and I must put it on the back burner for today.

So, first things first. Heretic TOC is read globally, everywhere from Canada to Cambodia, and Austria to Australia, so I imagine many heretics beyond the purview of British party politics will be utterly perplexed and bemused at this point. All of you, and also UK-based readers who may have missed the news, are advised to read the links guide at the end, which will enable you to catch up fully if you wish.

Briefly, I joined the Labour Party last year, under my own name, under the £3 subscription scheme which enabled non-members of the Party to vote in the leadership election. I voted for Jeremy Corbyn. When he was elected leader, I joined the Party as a full member. I attended Party meetings, canvassed on doorsteps during a council by-election, and socialised with the local MP.

This was all abruptly ended soon after I made the mistake of telling the local police about my Labour Party membership and activities. This arose during one of their regular monitoring visits, conducted because I am on the Sex Offenders Register. They had been asking about whether I had taken up any positive activities that might be of benefit to the community. I thought my work for Labour could be put in that category. The police, however, homed in – as I should have realised they would – on the supposed danger to children involved in me doing door-to-door canvassing, because of the possibility that a child might open the door. Once they knew about this aspect, they decided they needed to notify the Labour Party about my background. This notification was supposed to be “confidential”, but was all over the media within days.

I hold out no hope of being readmitted to the Party but I nevertheless feel I should give them a piece of my mind over the decision to chuck me out. Accordingly, the following Open Letter is being sent to the General Secretary, with copies going to the Party leadership, my MP, some other leading members of the local Constituency Labour Party, and certain journalists.

Preamble almost over, the letter follows. You may feel it is too apologetic and that they are the ones who should be saying sorry, not me. There is a lot of truth in that, but bear with me. Anger has its place, but shouting at people is not the best way to get them listening. Anyway, here goes:

 

DEAR GENERAL SECRETARY…

I deeply regret that my membership of the Party has resulted in harmful publicity and I entirely accept the decision to expel me. Indeed, if anyone had thought to ask me, instead of blabbing instantly to the media, I would have been prepared to resign quietly.

This is because – although it might surprise you to hear it – I genuinely want the Party to win the next General Election. Note that when the story of my membership broke in The Times, my initial response was No Comment. I hope John Woodcock retains his seat in due course but I think he should take a leaf out of my book in knowing when to shut up, especially as regards his continuing and counterproductive sniping at Jeremy.

Disagree on Trident if you must, John; vote on Syria as your conscience dictates too. But get a grip on your gripes about the leader and take a tip from another unlikely advisor over your communication style: too many tweets make a twat, as “Call me Confucius” said.

John is a likeable young man and already a smart politician. When he grows up he might even move on from being a graduate of the febrile, rapid response, Thick Of It, school of political strategy, and develop a more mature style, less prone to knee-jerk sounding off.

Can’t blame him for his arrested development though. After all, he was groomed by the Labour Party right from when he was a kid in Sheffield. Once ensnared by the cult, he would have been easy game for brainwashing into thinking the Blair/Campbell political lifestyle is normal. Early abuse of this sort is inevitably traumatising and obviously what lies behind John’s problem with depression. He could sue for compo!

And before any professional offence-takers start screaming with outrage over mocking a man’s mental disorder (I’m not, actually), I would remind you that paedophilia is in the psychiatric textbooks as just that. More helpfully, it would be regarded as a sexual orientation parallel to hetero- and homosexuality, along with recognition of the right to be free from discrimination. Instead, paedophiles are routinely treated to hate-speech and face massive discrimination not just in political life but across the board, in housing, employment, you name it. Similar treatment for Jewish people, or gypsies, or Muslims or gays or blacks or women, would rightly be condemned as barbaric and worthy of the Nazis.

Yet even nice guy John Woodcock apparently feels it is acceptable to crank up fear and loathing where paedophilia is concerned.

Why? Because in this case I am a convicted paedophile? a criminal? I would remind you that is not so long ago that practising gays were also considered criminals. So, in his way, was Socrates. And Jesus. And countless ordinary people, too, have been condemned unjustly for their beliefs and even just for who they are. I hoped – still hope – that the Labour Party believes in free expression and even, on occasion, compassion for those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. I need only name the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and there is no shortage of other examples.

Which brings me to the values – the Labour values – I hold dear and to why I joined the Labour Party.

I have been a Labour supporter since long before John Woodcock was born, converted at the age of 15 from my working class dad’s support for the Tories by a clever fellow pupil at my local comp who went on to study economics at the LSE. As a VIth former, I was already an activist, joining CND and taking part in one of the annual marches from Aldermaston to London to Ban the Bomb. When I went to Lancaster University in 1964 I was one of the founding members of the new university’s Labour Club. I canvassed for Stanley Henig at the 1966 general election, when he was returned as the MP for Lancaster. When I was a press officer for the Open University in the 1970s I canvassed for Labour there too, and later did the same in Yorkshire when I was a journalist with the Wakefield Express. I was on the million-strong London march in 2003 against Blair’s ill-fated decision to back the war in Iraq.

Not that I have ever been “hard left”. Absolutely in the mainstream Labour tradition, I have always supported democratic socialism, and I favoured Neil Kinnock over those to the left of him, including Tony Benn. Bearing in mind that there is said to be more of Methodism than Marx in the Labour tradition, I felt a great affinity for Benn’s Christian socialism, but always felt he flirted too much with undemocratic elements, not least in his sympathy for those who were seeking to unify Ireland through terrorism. Jeremy did likewise, but all is forgiven in view of the fact that peace in Ireland was eventually secured through negotiation. Credit to Tony as well over that, of course.

Why, then, it may be asked, did I never join the Party until 2015?

It is simply that I was never inspired to do so because the Wilson and Callaghan governments were a disappointment compared to the fantastic achievements of the Attlee years. As for the betrayal of democratic socialism under Blair, disappointment is too weak a word. The much brighter prospect of a Corbyn leadership was what finally persuaded me I really should join and get properly involved.

Right from the moment of joining, though, I always felt it would be only a matter of time before members would find out about my background and take exception to my presence. Then I would have to go. Until that time, I told myself, I would be content to help as best I could with such humble but vital tasks as stuffing envelopes and pushing leaflets through doors.

For me, it was all about the Party. Passionately as I believe in freedom of speech and radical thinking unimpeded by any perception of the “correct” line, I am not an indulgent individualist. I am a team player when allowed to be. I simply wanted to do my bit in a quiet and unassuming way.

Turning to my own “radical” thinking, I would note first that there was much hand-wringing last year over whether those joining the Party under the £3 scheme were true supporters of “Labour values”. That is not the easiest term to define. The Party’s website presently says the following, which is a bit motherhood and apple pie and open to wide interpretation:

…the values Labour stands for today are those which have guided it throughout its existence.

• social justice
• strong community and strong values
• reward for hard work
• decency
• rights matched by responsibilities

Some might feel my values fail on the “decency” score but I beg to differ based on Labour’s own history and traditions, and also on a broad view as to what the word means. I take it to be grounded in respect for others, rather than blind conformity to conventional mores. I might also mention that this official list of Labour values is too Blairite. It fails to spell out that “social justice” requires a more equable distribution of wealth. Also, does Labour not value liberty? Where is that word? Is freedom a value to be ceded to the right? Has Labour become just a party that hates pleasure, loves to restrict people’s lives, and seeks to ban things – including me?

I mentioned the importance of Methodism, or one might say non-conformist Christianity more generally, to the Labour tradition. But the non-conformity of Marxist studies on the family, and on the fundamental economic underpinnings of social and sexual life, have also contributed deeply to Labour thought. Engels’ book The Origins of the Family did not shy away from such big issues as the origins of the incest taboo, the rise of patriarchy, and the “bourgeois” family. Anthropology was in its infancy then: much theory was perched precariously on a sketchy foundation of traveller’s tales from far-flung outposts of empire; but a tradition of deep engagement with the origins of our social arrangements, and the ways in which they might be critiqued and developed for the better, has been an aspect of Labour intellectual life ever since the Party’s inception, if not always through the Party itself then through associated intellectual developments, notably the Fabian Society, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Left Book Club.

Early Fabians included the poet Edward Carpenter and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis. Carpenter was an early LGBT activist, whose socialist vision saw sexual freedom, including free reign for consensual sexual relations between man and boy, not as the abuse of a powerless young person by a powerful older one but quite the opposite. As he proclaimed in his book The Intermediate Sex,

“Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society.”

Havelock Ellis, likewise, an esteemed figure in his day, described the sexual relations of homosexual males, including men with boys. He wrote objectively, as a scientist, without characterising such relations in terms of disease, or damning them as immoral, or criminal. He discovered through his studies that same-sex love transcends age taboos as well as those of gender.

Fast forwarding to more recent times, my own early recollections are of a Labour Party in the 1960s and 70s that actually achieved far more than I gave it credit for at the time. Looking back, I note in particular the great social and educational reforms under the leadership of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, such as the abolishment of the death penalty and of theatre censorship, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality and the creation of the Open University.

Roy was derided by the right as a “champagne socialist”. It seems to me he simply wanted a rich, enjoyable life for the many, not the few. Unlike today’s dour breed of censorious, mind-shrinking, PC authoritarians on the left, he was the patron saint of permission. May we do it? Yes, we may! The permissive society, he boldly declared, is the civilized society. He is even said to have been impressed by the Paedophile Information Exchange’s Evidence to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee, which would effectively have led to an age of consent of 10 in most cases, plus a new system of civil law protection against relationships contrary to the best interests of the child. It may have been under PIE’s influence, indeed, that research was commissioned by the Home Office leading to an official report in which consenting underage children were described as “partners” rather than “victims” (Sexual Offenses, Consent and Sentencing, H.O. Research Study No. 54, 1979).

The big mistake of that era was not Labour’s “permissive” approach, which was always grounded in respect for others and for communal values. Nor was there anything wrong per se with the hippie mantra “make love not war”. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence from primate and human studies linking the encouragement of personal intimacy in infancy and childhood, including the unimpeded discovery of sexual expression, with peaceable, cooperative, pleasant attitudes in adult life: it’s the difference between the female-dominated bonobo world, where sex is permitted in all age and sex combinations and is actually used as a peace-making strategy, and the tough, kick-ass mentality we see exemplified in gun-loving America, where Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl, exposing a nipple, apparently counts as a bigger outrage than the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in which 20 children aged between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members, lost their lives to a crazy gunman.

What remains discredited from the days of Roy Jenkins, and rightly so, is selfish, individualistic, irresponsible hedonism – a philosophy that includes the relentless pursuit of personal greed and wealth accumulation, and which belongs to the right wing not the left.

I rest my case.

 

LINKS TO THE NEWS

Fury as paedophile campaigner is allowed to join Labour party

Subscription access only. This was the story that broke the news on Tues 16 February. No indication here as to how reporter Nigel Bunyan was first on the scene, for The Times. Story gives background re Harriet Harman; Hacked Off; Heretic TOC blog, with quote from About: : “I have been at odds with ‘the dominant narrative’ of sexual morality over the last several decades”.

Paedophile campaigner who joined Labour to back Jeremy Corbyn knocked doors in a by-election campaign

Very full account in Daily Mail on 17^th. Story mentions my trial in Wales last year for “abusing brothers aged nine and ten”. Says “Labour today said O’Carroll had been ‘auto excluded’ from the party following his suspension yesterday and would not have the opportunity to resign.” Quotes one of the brothers, who: “…feared he had infiltrated Labour in a bid to continue his campaign to justify paedophilia.” Briefly, I had some sexual engagement with a 10-year-old boy in the 1970s. He said in court that he had been a willing participant and I treated him “respectfully”. His younger brother, who had been present at the time, took a dim view. He is the one who initiated the case.

Notorious paedophile’s night in the pub with Barrow MP

Local paper in Barrow: Quote: “Looking back, the most disturbing thing about that meeting was how pleasant and articulate was the demeanour of this highly dangerous man – a million miles from the myth of the shifty paedophile who can be identified from his suspicious manner.” Also: “He also spent two hours debating Trident and Syria at a Christmas party at Cunningham’s, the former Furness Hotel, in Bath Street, Barrow.” Also: “The Barrow and Furness MP said: ‘The idea of him using Labour activities to get the opportunity to prey on children is sickening beyond words’.” Story says I will step down voluntarily as I do not wish to embarrass Corbyn.

Yet more paedophile questions for Labour

Daily Mail editorial: “…the suspicion is that his membership was only suspended yesterday because the Press had found out about it.” Also: “Hacked Off, of course, is backed by Max Mosley – who has never forgiven the News of the World for revealing his spanking sessions with prostitutes. Is it so surprising that O’Carroll beat a path to its door?”

Former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange has Labour Party membership suspended

Daily Telegraph. Nice quote from my blog site About: “My aim here is to present a discourse of resistance. That probably sounds grim, but humour and cheerfulness are my weapons of choice, along with reason and research.” Also a Profile box with details of two books: Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980); Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons (2010). Also some quotes from Radical Case.

Tom O’Carroll: Labour suspends convicted paedophile and pro-child sex campaigner who joined party

The Independent: Followed by some interesting comments, notably from Leonard Mann and Liberationista.

Labour Suspends Pie/Hacked Off campaigner

Guido Fawkes, 16 Feb 2016: “Guido was in the room but failed to spot him among the crowd of weirdy-beardy grey-haired wrong ’uns with shared interests in shutting up the press.”

Paedo Tom O’Carroll’s plan to emulate Corbyn

Guido Fawkes, 17 Feb 2016: “O’Carroll wrote a disturbing post praising Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, implying he wanted the paedophile movement to take inspiration from how a man with controversial views had won “respect” after decades of sticking to his principles.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V.I.P. fiasco: you heard it here first

So, the sensational allegations of brutal, even murderous “V.I.P. paedophilia” that were hailed as   “credible and true” by a top cop in Operation Midland, which was set up to investigate them, have now tacitly been admitted as the ravings of a fantasist by the toppest cop of the lot, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, head of the London Metropolitan Police, writing in the Guardian.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hogan-Howe admitted that officers had been “carried away” by the prevailing dogma that complainants (or “victims” as they are so often prematurely called) must be believed. Investigating a crime properly required officers to “keep an open mind”, he said. As Luke Gittos, Law Editor of Spiked, puts it in an article that explores the wider institutional ramifications, “The announcement that the police will actually start investigating crimes, rather than just believing in them, reveals the sorry state of policing around allegations of sexual abuse.”

And what beliefs! What incredible credulity! The madness of Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald’s assertion in December 2014 that wild, bizarre allegations by a certain “Nick” were “credible and true” would have been obvious from the start to anyone less in thrall to the febrile witch-hunting spirit of our times.

This is not hindsight on my part. Just a few weeks later, in January 2015, Heretic TOC began to call the craziness for what it was, in the first of several articles based on what I just happened to know personally about the allegations. So, remember, you heard it here first! In The pencil is mightier than the sword, and then Exposé outfit murders its own credibility a couple of months later, this blog focused on allegations made by “Darren”, whose yarns, in common with “Nick’s”, were being promoted by sensationalist news agency Exaro News. So hand-in-glove was this relationship that Exaro is said to have been present when these allegators gave their police interviews.

“Darren’s” attack was on the late Peter Righton, who had served with me as a  committee member in the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Peter had been a senior social worker and I knew him as a very decent, kind and gentle soul. In “Darren’s” preposterous version, though, he had been a ruthless killer who had torn a man’s body apart by tying him between two vehicles which were then slowly reversed away from each other. He had even forced the victim to dig his own grave beforehand! Needless to say, this wild yarn has not been substantiated.

Scotland Yard launched Operation Midland in November 2014 after hearing claims made by “Darren’s” stablemate “Nick”, an alleged victim of child abuse. I use both names but the lurid, depraved brutality depicted is so similar in the telling they could easily have been just one person. “Nick” claimed three boys were murdered by paedophiles, including senior politicians, in Westminster in the 1970s and 1980s. Detectives, according to the Daily Mail recently, now regard him as a “Walter Mitty” fantasist.

They were not saying that last summer, when the furthest, wildest reaches of “Nick’s” fertile imagination were being fed to the slavering media. Now sexual abuse allegations were being made about the long dead Sir Edward Heath, Tory British prime minister from 1970 to 1974. Following this, the Sunday Mirror ran a story reporting on another missing dossier on V.I.P. “child sex abuse” to compete with the already fabled one supposedly compiled by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP. Attributed to Barbara Castle, a leading Labour cabinet minister in the 1970s, this new treasure trove of dirty deeds dug out of the dusty archives included the following gem. Reporter Don Hale wrote:

“We can…reveal that Heath, under investigation by seven police forces over child abuse claims, was present at more than half a dozen Westminster meetings of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.”

The absurdity of this claim was the subject of my blog Prime Minister was my buddy – NOT! in September. The whole ridiculous edifice began to unravel soon after this, not least when it was exposed that Tom Watson, the Labour MP who had been the prime myth peddler behind the whole theme of a Westminster V.I.P. paedophile ring cover-up – a conspiracy theory conveniently targeting the rival Conservative Party – had used the fact, as the Daily Mail put it, “that an innocent Tory MP had a paedophile relative to bolster his claims”. The Tory MP was John Whittingdale, now a leading government figure as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport; his relative was Charles Napier, another former PIE committee member and friend of mine, currently in prison for what I believe to be an unjustly lengthy 13-year sentence, as I explained in Hi, this is Charles. I’ve been a naughty boy…

It has been estimated that the ill-fated Operation Midland has cost £1.8 million and taken up in excess of 80,000 hours of police time, but no charges have been brought as a result and there is speculation that the investigation will be formally wound up later this month. Worst of all, during this time the reputations of those baselessly accused, notably former MP Harvey Proctor, Field Marshall Lord Bramall – an elderly war hero and former Chief of the Defence Staff – and the recently deceased former Home Secretary Lord Brittan, were needlessly and devastatingly trashed in public. Hogan-Howe has announced that there will be an independent investigation to look into ways in which the police could have handled things better.

Blogger Anna Raccoon, known offline as retired lawyer Susanne Cameron-Blackie, sees an ulterior motive in setting up this new inquiry, as it follows hard on the heels of a report covering similar ground last year by Dame Elish Angiolini. Ms Raccoon says the real reason Hogan-Howe may want a further inquiry is perhaps that “he would really rather you didn’t read this recent and comprehensive review of Metropolitan Police Policy and behaviour towards sexual offending – a review which reveals more than it conceals for once.” Ms Raccoon is absolutely right that the 141-page Angiolini report is of great importance, as will be clear to anyone reading her blog The Presumption of Innocence yesterday, which I highly recommend, not least because it explores the origins of the police “always believe the victims” policy. There is also a lot of interesting material on the competing statistics of false allegations. She presents estimates for false allegations of rape ranging from 2% to 30%, showing why there is a basis for such wide variation, depending on who is doing the counting and what is counted. Fascinating, and very revealing.

However, the Angiolini report was not comprehensive: it focused on rape reporting and could not possibly have had anything definitive to say about Operation Midland, which was still in its early months when Dame Elish’s report appeared last April.

I was struck by the name of the man Hogan-Howe appointed to undertake this additional task:  Sir Richard Henriques, a senior lawyer. It rang a bell and then I remembered why: I had appeared before him when he was on the bench in an appeal hearing of mine before the Royal Courts of Justice in 2003. He had also been in charge of the independent inquiry relating to the late Lord Janner, producing a report that came out just last month. He ruled that the former Labour MP should have been prosecuted as long ago as 1991. Instead, he was charged much more recently, by which time he had Alzheimer’s and was deemed not fit to stand trial. He died in December, aged 87.

As it happens, Lord Janner had crossed my path too, although conspiracy theorists should not get too excited over what was a very fleeting connection. He had been plain Greville Janner then, back in the early 1970s, when he was the MP for Leicester West and I was a very inexperienced and somewhat anxious young reporter with the Leicester Mercury. He was a lively and popular MP in those days, with a reputation for being a tireless constituency worker. That was the image at least: his name seemed to be constantly in our paper for some worthy activity or another.

And it was in just such a context that I interviewed him once, on an immense stretch of derelict urban wasteland, strewn with discarded old bike frames and the like. I remember having to all but trot after him as he strode quickly over this “blasted heath”, regaling me at great speed and with infectious enthusiasm with his vision for how the land should be developed for the public good. Keen to make an accurate record, I found myself scribbling into my note book as fast as I could, but soon fell alarmingly short of being able to keep up. He never complained about my eventual report, though, so either I got it roughly right or he was just happy to get yet more good publicity.

He would definitely not have found the publicity Henriques gave him so congenial. Sir Richard was properly objective in tone, referring to “complainants” against Janner rather than “victims”, and his 46-page report is thorough, carefully detailing the nature of the complaints and what was done about them – or rather not done – by the authorities. For those very reasons, the apparent thoroughness and objectivity, the picture painted is damning.

It also surprised me, when I read it. I had somewhat assumed Janner’s name had been blackened baselessly, as with the ridiculous tall stories from “Darren” and “Nick”. But not so. The allegations against Janner were not necessarily true but those by one complainant, at least, were definitely substantial. To my mind they show that Janner was quite obviously a boy lover. Whether he actually did anything is another matter but the circumstantial evidence suggests he probably did.

Suspicion first fell on Janner in 1990, when it emerged ahead of the trial of Leicester children’s homes manager Frank Beck the following year on child sexual abuse charges, that Janner knew Beck and had a friendly relationship with a boy at one of the homes in question, starting when the boy was 13. Affectionate letters from Janner to the boy were found; there was evidence he had given the youngster expensive gifts and stayed with him on many occasions in hotel rooms around the country.

There was nothing, though, to suggest that any sex was non-consensual. There was an active relationship for a couple of years and long after that the boy, now a man in his late twenties, invited Janner to his wedding. Janner appears to have been a nice enough guy, who was just unfortunate in finding himself tangled up with Beck, who was possibly – though he too may have had a bad press – a rather nastier piece of work.

As for Sir Richard Henriques, he had risen to prominence as the lead prosecutor against the two boys who murdered the toddler James Bulger, and then later made the case against serial killer doctor Harold Shipman. Heavy stuff.

I had no idea of this weighty background when I encountered him in his role as an appeal court judge. On that occasion he was sitting with Lord Justice Scott Baker, presiding, and His Honour Judge Crowther QC, who delivered the judgment. I don’t recall Sir Richard saying a single word during the entire hearing. The judgement went against me, but in the absence of knowing what Henriques may have said to his fellow judges in their discussion of the case, I can have no complaint against him personally. I do have a story to tell about that hearing, though, but it looks as though it must wait until another time.

 

ONE SWALLOW DOESN’T MAKE A SUMMER

The good news that the Met chief has seen sense and retreated under pressure from the “believe the victims” creed does not mean anti-paedo hysteria has peaked out in Britain, sadly. The ink was barely dry on his Guardian article before other leading figures in the abuse industry were piling in to disown Hogan-Howe’s reassertion of a more traditional approach to the assessment of allegations.

One swallow, clearly, does not a summer make. Luke Gittos, in the article linked from my main blog above, explores this theme with reference to other institutions beyond the police wherein justice is being undermined by dogma. Tim Black, in another Spiked article attempts to identify the underlying force giving the hysteria its continuing energy.

Meanwhile, the hydra-headed moral panic monster sprouts another gargoyle: Paedophiles use secret Facebook groups to swap images. Enjoy!

 

PEER-TO-PEER CONNECTION

Two of my featured characters today, Lord Bramall and Lord Janner, once had an unusual peer-to-peer connection: Bramall “connected” with his fellow peer of the realm Janner by hitting him, in a room just off the House of Lords chamber! No, the pair were not love rivals for a boy, or at least that is not the official reason for the violent incident, which is said to have arisen during a heated quarrel about the Middle East. Bramall was in his early eighties at the time, Janner in his late seventies. The younger man later accepted an apology from the old (but not entirely retired!) warrior.

Standing up for justice and diversity

Galen Baughman is a star, a master of stand-up. Not stand-up comedy, although he is surely smart enough for that, but stand-up persuasion. Telling a personal story with modest, dignified eloquence, this presentable 32-year-old weaves a narrative that artfully compels the sympathies of a mainstream audience who might be expected to loathe him, for he is speaking as a so-called “sex offender”.

He stands, alone in the spotlight, for a TEDx talk delivered late last year to college students in New York about his nine-year imprisonment for sex with a willing 14-year-old boy, and his close brush with indefinite incarceration under civil confinement as a “sexually violent predator”. His presentation was released on YouTube on 26 January.

I was alerted to this by “Salem21” in a comment here on Heretic TOC last time, and emailed my enthusiastic congratulations to Galen after seeing the video. He replied saying “…we’re hoping that this breaks 100k views in the first thirty days and really raises some eyebrows”.

It should, so you might want to click over to YouTube yourself for a bit of that action.

Galen was still a teenager himself,  a 19-year-old college student, when he fell into the clutches of the law. He had been at the University of Indiana, studying at the university’s prestigious Jacobs School of Music to become an opera singer. He was sentenced in a Virginia court in 2004 to 30 years in prison for sex with a minor after having been charged initially with soliciting sex over the internet. The younger teen was a “sexually mature” adolescent, willingly involved. The boy did not want to prosecute, but his parents did.

A Guardian report significantly describes Galen as “gay”, which these days is a liberal media signifier of good-guy status. It is possible to tell a story of state injustice against a gay person but would the same sympathy have been extended to anyone perceived as “paedophile”, as could easily have happened in this case? No way! Not in the present climate, for sure. It is to Galen’s great credit that he has managed to present himself through TEDx and elsewhere as a likeable, regular guy – gay being the new normal – without putting anyone else down. Yes, he notes the “maturity” of his erstwhile boy partner, but the title of his talk, “Are we all sex offenders?”, hints at a bigger message, a message that is truly big on inclusivity and diversity.

The state, he says – and as all of us here know only too well – has gone crazily punitive, especially in the sex-law field, with more and more people, including children, being labelled as sex offenders for offences that give no offence, and for crimes that are not criminal. Instead of being reserved for a relatively small number of cases in which real harm is caused to real victims, the state lashes out indiscriminately with draconian measures. Anyone could be a sex offender, so the term becomes meaningless.

Because the laws have become so overly broad, he says, and because so few people commit a new crime after release, a child is “more likely to be labelled a sex offender, than to be abused by a sex offender” – and if that isn’t a killer observation I don’t know what could be.

Part of Galen’s long sentence had originally been suspended by the judge, meaning that after six and a half years he was due to be released. But the authorities told him they thought he might be too dangerous to let go. In 2007 he was informed he might qualify for civil commitment. A psychologist eventually arrived at the prison to conduct an assessment interview, to decide whether he was a “sexually violent predator”. He refused to answer questions unless he had a lawyer present. Instead of allowing the state to stitch him up with a biased official report, Galen hoped to introduce testimony from his own expert witness, a leading doctor who would have said he was not suffering from any condition making him likely to engage in sexually violent acts.

Galen took his case to a jury trial in a Virginia court. Even though the judge refused to allow evidence from Galen’s own medical expert, a jury of six women and one man decided he was not likely to be a “sexually violent predator”, thereby removing the rationale for holding him indefinitely in civil commitment.

He was the first person in Virginia ever to win such a civil commitment jury trial, and one of only a few nationally. He was released on probation, and subject to a state policy based on a “containment model” involving polygraphs and therapy sessions with a great deal of intrusive non-confidential questioning (anything said to a therapist could end up on a prosecutor’s desk) about sexual behaviour, including masturbation.

He wanted to resume his studies at the Jacobs School of Music but being on probation meant he needed permission from the governors of both states, Virginia and Indiana, to move from one state to  the other. He managed to overcome the Virginia block, but didn’t have enough political clout in Indiana to secure their cooperation. It would have needed plenty: after all, what state governor would want to be seen letting in a sex offender?

He does not drive a car because he fears any cop who runs his plate will notice he is on the sex offender registry and look for a reason to pull him over, if only to harass him. He still had six years on probation ahead of him at the time of the Guardian’s story in September 2013.

But all is not gloom. For Galen, unlike many whose lives are so routinely trashed by an uncaring system, there would appear to be a future in advocacy.

Following his release in 2012, Galen Baughman spent two years as the Director of Communications at International CURE, a grassroots advocacy organization, where he focused on policy analysis, direct advocacy, messaging strategies and grassroots organizing.

More recently, he resigned from CURE when he was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship. That’s Soros as in George Soros, the fabled progressive-liberal business magnate and philanthropist behind Open Society Foundations (OSF) an international grant-making network. The fellowship sees him at the Human Rights Defense Center, embedded in DC with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs. He is working to end the practice of civilly committing youth as sexually violent predators. He is a campaign strategist on issues related to sex offender policy and trains advocates around the country to build movements against mass incarceration.

He is a JustLeadershipUSA 2015 Leading with Conviction cohort member, and also serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Sexual Justice.

Not bad, eh, for a guy who lost almost the whole decade of his twenties behind bars?

You might also like to read his article “Questionable Commitments”, published by the Cato Institute, which looks at the history and development of civil commitment.

 

ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

If word reaches you that the first half of a two-hour movie is set almost entirely in a single small room and has garnered four Oscar nominations, your curiosity might be piqued. Mine was when I heard BBC film critic Mark Kermode raving about Room, an abduction drama that he rightly insisted, repeatedly, “is not what you think”.

What Kermode thinks we will think is that it’s all about “Old Nick” (Sean Bridgers), the evil abductor of a young woman who is kept locked in a windowless garden shed (there is just a skylight) and routinely raped for years on end while her toddler son is kept out of the way in a cupboard. Plus an escape drama in which the plucky kidnap victim triumphs against the odds.

Room has these elements but they are not the point. This is not a simple goodies and baddies story. The first half focuses not on the kidnapper or his dastardly deeds but on the small room where the victims are held captive, hence the title, and how mother and child make a life for themselves there – a surprisingly bearable one for the child as an infant because this is his whole world and he knows no other, except through the screen of a small TV. Indeed, the illusion that no other world exists is one the mother strives to maintain for the child as long as it is viable, much like the fiction of Santa Claus. In the second half, once the obvious baddy has been vanquished, subtler issues present themselves.

To say much more risks a spoiler so let’s switch focus to an Oscar nomination Room deserved but did not get: Best Actor in a Leading Role, for Jacob Tremblay, who is now nine, was seven as shooting started and plays the little boy, Jack, as a five-year-old. He is on screen for almost the entire movie and carries it off with apparently effortless perfection: not a single syllable or gesture is strained or unconvincing. In truth this probably owes a lot to director Lenny Abrahamson, up for Best Director, who allowed Tremblay to ad lib: an imaginative child will say interesting things that a kid would say and do things a kid would do better than any adult could script it – although another of the nominations is for Best Adapted Screenplay, by Emma Donoghue, from her own best-selling novel of the same title. Another is for Brie Larson, as Jack’s mother, “Ma”, who is nominated for Best Actress.

The film is also up for Best Picture, for Irish producer Ed Guiney, and I would put in a special word for Joan Allen as Grandma, and Tom McCamus, in a small but significant role as Grandma’s wise and sympathetic boyfriend. He is kind, and could easily be Kind.

Ultimately, though, it may be thought that no movie, even a beautifully crafted “arthouse” offering such as Room, would win plaudits in Hollywood without conforming rather tightly to mainstream mores. A film can ask some big questions, as this one does, about what it means to be a good parent and a good person, but it cannot afford to hint at the “wrong” answers. It cannot be subversive. That may be so, but this is a film worth seeing for all that.

 

ETHICAL  CARTOGRAPHY

Like Galen Baughman’s work, Cart O’Graph’s new channel on YouTube is far better than Hollywood for delivering usefully subversive content. Our host makes use of his moral compass to guide us over the ethical territory he has mapped out in over half a dozen videos so far. He writes:

“On this channel, I provide information and make rational arguments on the topic of Minor Attraction and Child Sexuality. I also speak with people who are Kind, to show that we are human beings. If possible, I will also engage non MAPs in discussions or debates. This is an informative channel, but I do hope to entertain as well.”

I checked out “Is Minor Attraction Wrong?”, a 12-minute talk piece, illustrated with well chosen stills, including wittily amusing ones. Cart, if I may be so familiar as to use his first name (!), modestly disclaims much knowledge of philosophy, but argues reasonably and presents some useful information. He cites James Prescott’s work, familiar to many of us here, on the link between a sexually repressive upbringing and the genesis of harsh, aggressive, violent attitudes and behaviours as kids grow up, and into adulthood.

He also mentions an “Express newspapers” report comparing the benign upbringing of French children, who typically get a lot of parental and other adult affection, including kissing, with that of their less fortunate American counterparts. Good information, but I found myself wanting to know the research source it was based on, or an exact reference for the press report at the very least.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down and dirty in the VP basement

A confession: distaste for Virtuous Pedophiles (VP) has hitherto deterred me from undertaking a thorough scrutiny of their website. I thought I knew quite enough about them, thank you very much, from their media coverage, plus exchanges with co-founders Nick Devin and Ethan Edwards on Sexnet and here on Heretic TOC.

Their input of comments to last week’s blog, Humble or haughty, nasty is naughty, however, meant I would finally have to get down and dirty, scouring their lair from attic to basement in order to make a properly informed response. That is why I have taken a bit of time over the job and is also one reason why, having made that effort, I feel it is worth featuring this undertaking as a follow-up blog. Another is the growing salience of VP in public discourse. I believe this means there will be sufficient general interest to justify showcasing the result.

Having said that, I had better issue a trigger warning. Please understand that what follows will be longer and less humorous than usual, without any particular structure leading you through from one paragraph to the next. I will simply be responding, first to Nick’s points then to Ethan’s. As such, the text itself, as opposed to inherent interest in VP, is so dull it may send you into a coma. There is more than you might expect, at the start, on research by Dr James Cantor. You have been warned!

RESPONSE TO NICK 

Nick wrote:

“Dr. Cantor’s scientific findings…appear to be generally accepted by other scientists, including Mike Bailey who we both trust. His work has also been confirmed by other researchers. Check out the resource section of our web site for some recent studies.”

What Mike Bailey and I both accept, along with others who have been taking an interest, is that James Cantor is a scientist of some repute and that his findings are interesting.

It is not true, though, that all of these findings are generally accepted. Cantor, for instance, has concluded from his own research and that of others, that paedophilia is a sexual orientation. I think he is right, and increasingly this seems to be the consensus, but the position is nevertheless contested. In one of the sources (“Are paedophiles’ brains wired differently?”) listed on your website resource section, he is quoted thus:

“Paedophilia is something that we are essentially born with, does not appear to change over time and it’s as core to our being as any other sexual orientation is.”

But Dr Paul Fedoroff is quoted in the same article as an expert with a very different view who thinks paedophiles can be “cured”. As you know, he and his colleagues (lead author Müller K.) published a claim to this effect in a peer-reviewed journal. His paper is listed on your website. Mike Bailey rebutted it, and Fedoroff et al. rebutted the rebuttal.

How are non-scientists like you or I supposed to know whom to believe? As responsible people, I don’t think it makes sense just to latch onto the first scientist who comes along who seems to know his stuff. We need to think about the evidence for ourselves, just as a lay jury must think about the evidence-based claims made in court by an expert witness (or possibly by competing experts on opposite sides).

Having said that, I have never personally disputed any of Cantor’s findings or claimed to have grounds upon which to do so. That may surprise you. It may even surprise Cantor, because his own reaction to my sceptical questions has always been one on knee-jerk hostility towards anybody coming from an “advocacy” position. He simply has no interest in patiently addressing such questions when it is easier just to hurl abuse.

Please understand that what I have disputed (but only through questions, not assertions) has never been Cantor’s findings but rather his interpretation of those findings. For instance, he wrote a paper about the “deficiency” in paedophiles’ brains of white matter.

There is a huge presumption in that word deficiency. It suggests that something is wrong. But it ain’t necessarily so. A post mortem examination of Einstein’s brain showed (or so it was reported in Neuroscience Letters in 1996) he had a smaller brain than average for an adult male: 1.2kg as opposed to average 1.4kg.  Does that mean he had a “deficiency” of brain power? Clearly not. Even when brain size is different on average between two entire classes of person (men’s brains are on average larger than women’s), it is unwise to leap to conclusions about superior functionality based on size alone.

Indeed, even where brain differences have been associated with a dysfunction, such as lack of social skills of people with Asperger’s, that brain style may also go along with exceptionally high cognitive functioning: there are plenty of geeks around with Asperger’s, and they make a huge contribution to the advancement of science, engineering, etc.

Cantor is well aware of the dangers of assuming inferiority based just on evidence of difference. He must be. He is gay. He knows there are research findings showing that gay men have subtly different physical development at the foetus stage, which is associated with disproportionately high left-handedness (as with paedophiles!), a different ratio between the length of one finger to another, etc. But he does not leap to the conclusion that gay people are inferior; nor should he.

That is exactly what he does with paedophiles though. He uses the word “deficiency” in relation to paedophiles’ brains and then, talking about brain development of the foetus, he speculates:

“A possible cause may be maternal stress or malnourishment.”

He continues:

“The more we can zero in on exactly what’s going on and when it’s happening, the greater chance of being able to prevent it from developing in the first place.”

Who could argue against such sympathetic common sense? Who would not wish to eliminate maternal stress or malnourishment?

Well fine, let’s do research on that.

But note the unexamined assumption that paedophilia is caused by an undesirable condition, and the scientist’s job is to find a way to eliminate it.

If Cantor is really being objectively sympathetic and humane, why doesn’t he apply the same logic to the gay population, given that they too are the product of in utero developmental anomalies? If he is really clever, he might be able to stop people being “born gay”, including any future Cantor clones! I doubt he will be applying for research grants along those lines though.

And here is another dodgy assumption, in the very same short passage from your own cited  resources. He claims it is as though paedophiles have cross-wiring in the brain. And, on this basis:

“It’s as if, in these people, when they perceive a child, it’s triggering the sexual instincts instead of triggering the nurturing instincts.”

The assumption here is that when the sexual instinct is turned on, the nurturing side is switched off. What Cantor does not seem to have considered, or does not wish to examine, in the possibility that for paedophiles (or for those of us who love kids as opposed to raping them) erotic and nurturing feelings towards children are not in opposition to each other. As with many mothers, they go together. In male paedophiles such feelings could well arise from a slight feminisation of the brain in utero.

As for what I think of Cantor’s findings, as opposed to his interpretations of them, I have often entertained sceptical thoughts but I have never had strong enough evidence to contest them, or not until recently.

For instance, Cantor reported that paedophiles tend to have a significantly lower IQ than average, based on forensic sampling. It would have been easy to rubbish such work on the basis that most paedophiles in the community are likely to be more intelligent than those who get caught committing offences. In fact, though, Cantor’s research is quite sophisticated and takes this possibility into account. Rather than making a weak criticism of his IQ claim on Sexnet or elsewhere, I have held my tongue.

Recently, though, I see there is a new forensic study which comes up with completely different findings, showing paedophiles’ IQ is normal:

Azizian, A. et al., 2015. A summary at the Paraphilia Research website begins “This new study joins previous research in finding that pedophiles have normal IQ.” A separate link to the previous research in question is extensively referenced. I have yet to read and assess all this, but we are talking about peer-reviewed studies.

One further point about research, before I move on. You proudly point to your resources section, which includes academic papers. I would point out, though, that it is a rather loaded selection, notably excluding work showing lack of harm associated with adult-child sexual contacts (notably the Rind et al. 1998 meta-analysis) or with positive outcomes.

Moving on from Cantor, and from research, you write:

>You are wrong when you say that I don’t criticize sex offender treatment programs.

I did not quite say that, but I accept that I inadvertently implied it. My apologies for that.

Also:

>Mike Bailey knows why I posted the link to the article [i.e. the Vice News piece discussed last time] because he, Ethan and I had private correspondence about it before I posted it. I was intrigued by the quote that was attributed to you because it sounded like you regretted not taking the path that VP has taken. Given your hostility toward us, that surprised me.

I do not doubt any of this. What I find harder to accept is that you had no further motivation, of a less charitable kind. You use the media, at every opportunity, to badmouth “pro-contacters”. Why would your approach be any different when trying to influence people on Sexnet?

>It never occurred to me that you would be so offended by the fact that someone from our group said mean things about you in the article. Like Ethan, I would have thought that you would be accustomed to this, and that you would not be so thin skinned.

That’s a bit like punching a woman in the face when you see her, then excusing yourself by saying,  “I know your husband often beats you up, so I guess you are used to it and won’t mind me hitting you as well.”

It also ignores what I said in this latest blog:

“I have no trouble living with Brett’s disapproval but being branded “pro-contact” is another matter entirely because it slyly misrepresents those of us who would like to see cultural changes and legal reforms leading to the possibility of sexual self-determination for all.”

Let me emphasise those first words: “I have no trouble living with Brett’s disapproval”. You are right to say one becomes inured to “mean things” that are said. If I were to lose sleep over insults on Twitter, or get desperately upset over routine tabloid vilification, I wouldn’t last long as a heretic.

The general rule, I think, is that bad-mouthing from those who are either ignorant, or just hired guns, is pretty much like water off a duck’s back in terms of personal impact. It can be much more wounding to hear unwelcome “home truths” from a close friend, or anybody one respects.

Or, indeed, from anyone whose views are likely to be respected by others because they appear to have some special knowledge. That would include scientists such as Cantor, and also you and Ethan (and Todd and Brett) because you are insiders to the experience of being MAPs. When you are nakedly hostile it is thus likely to influence a lot of people; also, your lack of solidarity with your fellow MAPs feels deeply treacherous.

I am sure you are aware of this. So the fact that you twist the knife at every opportunity does you no credit. It merely confirms you as vicious rather than virtuous.

I have no power in this matter though. Neither do any of us here so far as I can tell. All I can do is implore you not to abuse your own influence in the world. You can make your case on behalf of the non-offending paedophile quite effectively without resorting to incredibly offensive (especially to anyone less inured than me, and that will include most of the Kind community) anti “pro-contacter” propaganda.

You can simply choose to speak for yourselves and for other non-offenders, a category which I would think includes many of us heretics here, especially these days. Oh, and by the way, as long as you, Ethan and others go under pseudonyms we only have your word for it that you are non-offenders. Not that I am saying you ought to give your real names, nor am I accusing you. Just saying. As for your forum members, there will surely be former offenders among them who are now sincerely trying to stay “virtuous”, but not all will necessarily succeed.

While I am at it on the matter of pseudonyms, I would add another matter that should give the media some grounds for wondering just how kosher you are: VP has no constitution. You and Ethan are answerable to no one in the way you run it. You say you have “members” but there appears to be no democratic structure. You cannot be voted off the executive. This is perhaps not a great problem at the moment, especially as you do not seem to be asking anyone for money. Of course, a similar criticism could be made of Heretic TOC. However, like other personal blogs, this one is openly focused on my personal views and those of others I choose to host – usually fellow heretics but sometimes not, as in the present case. An organisation such as VP, by contrast, which aims to help distressed paedophiles (though curiously this is not listed in your official aims, which are very restricted and tucked away as FAQ Q5) arguably should be more accountable.

If VP continues as at present, successfully attracting publicity and further “members”, it will become increasingly difficult to monitor and moderate interactions on the forum on a purely volunteer basis, which will in any case have its downside in terms of quality control – as we have seen when Brett has been let loose.

If you feel the need to present a distinctive VP brand, I don’t think we heretics could have any objection to your doing so in a slightly different way. If you are going to set yourself apart, let it be from those who abduct, rape and murder kids, or who trick and exploit them: people who do real harm.

Nor would I object to you saying you do not think kids can consent, and that present laws should remain. That is certainly an arguable case and I have no quarrel at all with you saying you subscribe to it. Where I think most of us here would part company with you is when you collude with the tabloids and others in vilifying those of us who take a different position. That is just plain wrong, as wrong as the KKK used to be in attacking “dirty n……s” who “lust after our womenfolk” and seek “miscegenation”.

So please, I politely implore you, just stop it now!

RESPONSE TO ETHAN

Attempting to justify use of the term “pro-contact”, Ethan wrote:

>As you note, I see the possible confusion with using “pro-contact”, but I don’t see any strong evidence that Brett or Todd or the public at large are interpreting this as being in favor of adult sexual contact with kids today.

As Dissident wrote earlier today, it is a safe assumption that many will take it that way.

>”They are sufficiently repelled by pedophiles who confidently conclude that it’s only societal attitudes and laws that keep adult-child sex from being OK — even if they do obey the laws.”

But don’t expect Kind folk here to be happy with your efforts to reinforce how “repellent” we are. As Stephen6000 implied with his short sceptical question, you are going out of your way to reinforce prejudice based on whipped up emotions, not facts.

>“we have irreconcilable purists on our own side”

There are people whose views I respect who perhaps take an even dimmer view than I do of dealings with mainstream media such as Vice News, and who likewise might see no point in any sort of negotiation with VP over language such as “pro-contact” versus “pro-choice”, or whatever. Is that being a “purist”? Perhaps “realist” might be an expression more favoured by some.

>Todd and Brett rightly point out that even a few loud voices can stain those of us with moderate views.

Neither Todd nor Brett sound moderate to me, I have to say. Their denunciation of “pro-contacters” is rabid in its ferocity, and the VP website is likewise fiercely partisan.

Yes, I’ve taken a potshot or two myself against you guys, notably in my last blog, but only because there are limits to turning the other cheek. None of this antagonism would have started without VP setting out deliberately, right from the outset, to aim at making yourselves look good at Kind expense. It’s all there, quite clearly on your website, in your public pronouncements and even in your name: you are “virtuous” and lose no opportunity to define yourself against the “selfishness”, “self-serving rationalisations”, etc of the despised Other i.e. anyone with a different view to you, no matter how principled and indeed moderate it may be.

While our views are indeed a long way from the mainstream I don’t think we can be accused of extremism in our methods, which have always been peaceful, democratic and inclusive, which is why you are allowed to participate on this forum. We are reasonable, and as Mike Bailey says, principled. There is nothing immoderate about that.

We give no cause for you to talk in public about us in the extraordinarily hateful way you do, making us out to be all but sub-human, just as the worst of the tabloid media do. And then you, and more especially Nick, have the gall to claim we are being hateful. The hypocrisy is so naked and extreme it beggars belief that you can expect to be taken seriously.

>But the trends seem to be against you. “Holding your ground” seems like very much of a rearguard action.

Yes, it is. As you rightly point out, we have been losing ground for decades, since long before VP came along: victim feminism and “respectable” gay politics have steadily gained ground at our expense in mass culture. This does not, however, mean we are wrong or should give up. The early Christians had to fight for centuries before the tide turned in their favour.

Where I think we are holding our own and have some prospect of doing better in the near future is in the extent to which we MAPs begin to see ourselves as Kind rather than Virtuous. Bear in mind, it is not just Heretic TOC versus VP: other websites, such as those listed in the Blogroll here, offer good information and thoughtful analysis, with Consenting Humans as a recent very impressive addition. Dissident has given other examples earlier today.

There are also organisations which do not support the “heretical” perspective seen here but which are truly moderate where VP is not: notably B4U-ACT in the US, which I see has its annual workshop coming up in April, and FUMA, its fledgling UK equivalent, as mentioned in Heretic TOC last time.

>Meanwhile, 1,300 people have been inspired to sign up with Virtuous Pedophiles in the last 2.5 years. I don’t think there is any group where pro-legalization opinions are welcome (see how precise I’m being?) that has attracted members in anything like those numbers.

As we have seen from Samuel, there are grounds for scepticism over the meaning of these numbers. Also, it is not comparing like with like because Heretic TOC has not offered membership. This site scores hundreds of hits every day (over 500 yesterday). If we were to go down the membership route it is entirely possible we would get as many sign-ups as VP,  and with much less chance of people leaving through disillusion over the fact that you offer help (well, you offer your forum) that may not be experienced as all that helpful.

About your forum, you say:

“A forum provides a community to reduce isolation and desperation. The Virtuous Pedophiles forum provides a place where pedophiles can discuss living with their attraction, but with the shared understanding that sexual activity with children is wrong and that we are not trying to make it more acceptable.”

I find myself wondering exactly what this discussion amounts to, and whether many or most forum participants end up feeling they have been helped. Nick referred on Sexnet to data  I have supposedly ignored. Trawling the VP website in response to this accusation, though, I do not see anything that fits the bill, except perhaps for the “First Words” section of “Who We Are”. This showcases “…the initial messages we have received…. Reading them will give a flavor of our diversity, the themes that come up over and over again…”

These messages are interesting, and worthy of study, but they are indeed first words, which tell us why the writers came to VP in the first place. But they tell us nothing of how these people feel about VP after they have been around for a while, or why they leave if they do – perhaps because Brett has trashed their posts or they have not found the sense of community they had hoped for, or any real sense of how they can live with their paedophilia.

I may be wrong about this. Perhaps there is a lot of satisfaction. If so, VP would do well to ask members for their thoughts after they have spent some time on the forum, and when they leave, or go silent. Is there, indeed, any formal procedure for leaving? People register, but do they de-register? If not, then as time goes by your “membership” is going to be increasingly inflated by lost souls looking for a way out, a bit like the Hotel California:

“Relax,” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!”

Much better than just VP’s own survey, though, would be to encourage formal independent research for a peer-reviewed journal article. My call for this on Sexnet has so far gone without a positive response.