One man's meat is another man's poison

Brian Rothery
Ireland

'What goes around comes around' and 'every cloud has a silver lining' are two more expressions that might describe the present state over here, and by 'here' I mean, after the US, the country with the greatest moral panic in the world about child protection - the United Kingdom.

So what is the silver lining behind the cloud of the latest peak in the panic? Let me describe the peak first, or, perhaps not knowing what the future holds, its latest new plateau. As the US hit a new plateau with its draconian residence restriction laws, that other 'bastion of liberty', the UK, has managed to potentially criminalize over 11 million of its 60 million citizens, from 16 years of age up, through a new knee-jerk reaction to the non-existent bogeyman of stranger-danger by introducing criminal record bureau vetting for all adults over 16 who may either work with, or on a regular basis help, children in a voluntary capacity. This includes simple tasks like sports coaching and driving kids to school or sports grounds.

One dramatic indication of the extent of the alarm caused by this new step is that some of the very child protectionist agencies that have been most shrill in their playing up of the need to protect kids from stranger-danger are now crying out "Too Far!" as they recognize that this step could come back to haunt them, a step incidentally carried out by the so-called 'New Labour' government as it introduces hundreds of new laws to protect the flock of sheep in its nanny state.

As for the silver lining - well, if I can humbly present my own situation. A few years ago, maybe three, I was being accused of being a scaremonger and a paedophile apologist for championing a new, and what I perceived to be a more enlightened, approach to what was seen to be child sex abuse and in particular child pornography. In the case of the latter I have for the past four years been the co-coordinator of a major British class action against the police and prosecution service for the damages caused to thousands by the deceit and corruption involved in Operation Ore, the main offspring of the notorious Texas Landslide travesty.

Whenever I had the misfortune to be the subject of a newspaper or broadcast interview, I faced the inevitable question, "But what is your position on child pornography or children being abused?" Each time my answer had to be: "My subject is police corruption, not child pornography or child sex abuse." The question, however, demonstrated the mindset of the interviewer, hell-bent on finding child sex abuse somewhere. One even said to me: "Men not guilty of child sex abuse is not news, but a child being abused is news." As the US author James Kincaid and others might put it, child sex abuse is an enthralling narrative for the general public.

The new silver lining, for me at least, or, more appropriately, my one man's meat, is that the draconian laws have over the past three years first moved to criminalize adult pornography involving violence, such as play BDSM and spanking, and now embrace the eleven million who might want to be, or continue to be, involved with young people. This new meat, which is that I and like-minded people are no longer pariahs, preaching an unwanted gospel, is now the poison that is choking millions. To say 'I told you so' would be unkind, but in a way a vindication of sorts, however dismal.

If the main perpetuators of the panic are alarmed, ordinary citizens are up in arms and close to open revolt. The blogs and the hundreds of comments on the online newspaper articles are clear almost to the point of being 100% in agreement. They are saying, "This has gone too far. Unless these laws are dropped we will not do any voluntary work or help any young person, and we cannot wait until the next election to throw this lot out."

Over much of the past thirty years or so we have seen new plateaus where at each we felt that a turning point may have been reached. We had the US-inspired day care centre scares, the satanic ritual abuse, the recovered memories, the child porn panic, which while still unabated has been turned into an entrapment industry by the FBI, and so on. It is interesting that on the general stage, in our new age of fear, we have also had the terrorist fears, the Y2 bug, SARS, bird flu, swine flu – all come and gone. 

What has been clear, however, is the general drift towards a supine, cowed population and an increase in police and prosecution powers, aided by a lazy, powerless and greedy legal industry that in the US at least appears to work for the courts and prosecution, which is increasingly the case in the UK where any questioning of the ruling ideology is concerned. 

One of the most interesting aspects of our Operation Ore class action which awaits permission to be heard in the High Court, is that it is an attempt to present new evidence which hitherto the police, the media and all politicians have refused to look at or even accept that it could exist. In other words, the judiciary is now our last hope for justice in the face of a powerful prevailing moral ideology. That ideology is that once accused, falsely or otherwise, of an inquisition's crimen exceptum, one is immediately guilty of being accused and becomes an accused individual for whom there is no defence.

What is almost incredible about this is that such a process has a long history going back clearly to the first inquisitions. This, however, is not something a police state wants its cowed citizens to be aware of.