Midwinter Maddie-ness.
Just a few short days ago, Madeleine McCann’s twin brother and sister celebrated their sixth birthday. They are probably reading by now, although not yet old enough to play ‘research the family history’ on Google – yet.
When they do, they will find that their missing older sister has possibly overtaken Princess Diana as the most talked about blonde on planet earth. Even when 25 year old Joanna Yeates was still officially missing, their big sister’s name was invoked in the media coverage; no missing person case is complete without the obligatory mention of Madeleine and photograph of those winsome eyes staring out at you.
It won’t make easy reading for them. Many entries on Google lead you to forums where those who enjoy such speculation are pleased to tease apart the finer details of the gruesome end they firmly, adamantly even, believe that she met. They are no better informed than those who speculate that she is alive and well and living as a fairy princess.
‘Our Maddie’ has become public property, the ultimate game of ‘McCluedo’, an inanimate object to be photo shopped, dissected, lied about, verbally abused, fantasised over, yeah, and even drooled over.
Overnight, another in the long line of personalities who claim to have ‘inside knowledge’ as to her fate has come forward. An exclusive in The Sun claims that Angolan born Marcelino Italiano is acquainted with a gang of Algarve-based Portuguese paedophiles that he is sure are responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance. The story will attract the familiar barrage of comments. You can only feel sympathy for the McCann twins when they are old enough to read and understand what is said about their family.
The Sun exclusive – not Marcelino – invoked the memory of the Casa Pia paedophile ring, and this in turn has set off a flurry of comment in the Portuguese based forums who have worked tirelessly to reassure their readers that whatever Madeleine’s fate, it had nothing to do with anyone Portuguese, and therefore the only remaining answer was that either her parents or their friends were responsible for her disappearance.
The Portuguese are sensitive, as surely the British would be, to any notion that there might be paedophiles in their midst, and publicly are quite convinced that if there are – they must be British imports. They pump out endless stories detailing the fact that the British asked that suspected British paedophiles who might have been present on the Algarve when she went missing weren’t to be named – and many on that list were not convicted, merely suspected – when the case files were published, but are strangely defensive when there is mention of the Portuguese citizens who were convicted in the Casa Pia tragedy – ‘they aren’t really guilty, they are appealing you know’…..
As it happens, yet another paedophile was finally apprehended – though for how long, we will see – in Australia yesterday. 73 British born Roderick Robinson was bailed to appear on child sex charges in Australia 10 years ago. He fled the country to New Zealand. There he was arrested for further offences – and bailed once more. He fled New Zealand for the Algarve on a false passport, and CEOPS and the UK border police, working in conjunction with the Portuguese police, traced him there and returned him to Australia. Once again he was given bail, this time he fled to Thailand. On Tuesday he was arrested in Thailand, and the Thai authorities are insisting that as a British citizen, he be returned to the UK. He will be met at Heathrow, put on the sex offenders list, and “As part of the notification requirements of this, he will be required to inform police of any travel plans”. One can only hope that he does dutifully inform the authorities if he is planning to flee once more and give them his forwarding address – but the signs don’t look too hopeful!
In Devon, police are investigating a paedophile ring involving some 20 children. A young man has been arrested.
No country is immune to this epidemic, but is it really an epidemic? Incest has always existed, the Bible felt it necessary to address the issue, but paedophilia is a lot more than incest, it is the ultimate ‘stranger-danger’. Is it more prevalent than it was 50 years ago, or have we become more sensitive to the issue, more ready to involve the authorities?
Another thought occurs to me, even more contentious. Could it be that in the past 30 years as women have become more strident, matured younger, felt more confident in their own sexual requirements, and at ever younger ages – that men who are less confident, sexually inadequate even, have been emboldened to look at children below the age of consent in their quest for an innocent female who will not mock their fumbling performance?
I am not in any way defending paedophilia, before any knees jerk in that direction, merely enquiring whether the rest of society has played any part in this apparent epidemic. I was in a children’s home 50 years ago – many of the girls there had been the victims of incest, but I cannot remember a single girl who it was alleged had been the victim of ‘stranger paedophilia’. Something has changed – any suggestions as to what?
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February 18, 2011 at 17:48 -
“……is it more prevalent than it was 50 years ago,…”
Probably not.
We simply now have TV & Internet to let us know it happens.
50 years ago, a lot of adults probably didn’t even know what paedophilia was.
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February 19, 2011 at 06:41 -
“Something has changed – any suggestions as to what?”
Joe nails it. 50 years ago, we had newspapers and radio, and a few slots on the TV for the most important news. Local news of this sort was confined to gossip, basically.
Now we have communication at the speed of light, and the game of Chinese Whispers is potentially a game the whole world can play…
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February 18, 2011 at 18:02 -
Well, it’s a narrative isn’t it? A discourse. Whatever.
We know the origins of the “paedo panic”. We know it began as the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic. We know it was pushed by a strange puritan coalition of extreme family values christians, and ultra-left lesbian feminists. We know that it was done for purely selfish, political reasons. When the Satanic angle flopped, the generic “paedophile” remained.
The term paedophile officially means a preference, or obsession, or fetish for pre-pubescent children. It has now been smeared out to mean, anyone who has sex with somebody under the legal age. That is a quite different thing. We the public are kept from making a persoanl assessment by making it illegal to even look at the evidence, but it seems likely that the majority of “paedophilia” is really about the underage, rather than the sexually immature.
The young people in the latest “ring” for instance are said to be aged 12 to 15. The one man arrested is 19. The vagueness of it implies that there is no organised “ring” or any such frightening conspiracy; rather that they have some cases of young teenagers havign sex with older teenagers or young men. But in a state of panic, that becomes a “ring” and what may be quite ordinary interactions become “grooming”. Because two things have been deliberately confused- a state of legal non-adulthood with a state of biological childhood.
There is, and always has been, some very small percentage of adults with sick desires towards children. Are there any more than there were 50 years ago? It’s impossible to know. There simply isn’t any good data. My parents warned me and my sister when out playing about “funny men” and “taking sweets from strangers”. Parents have I think always been aware. But there was no panic then, no well-organised politicised hysteria. The danger from strangers is probably no greater than it ever was. The perception of it, though, is quite different now to just a few decades ago.
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February 19, 2011 at 06:44 -
“Parents have I think always been aware. But there was no panic then, no well-organised politicised hysteria. “
More importantly, there was no money to be made out of it. The police and magistrates dealt with it, as a crime.
There was no need for child psychologists, council ‘child champions’, social workers, therapists, etc. There was, praise the lord, no opportunity for a parasite like Jim Gamble to grow fat on a diet of hysteria and panic and ruined lives.
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February 18, 2011 at 18:20 -
All part of the natural degeneration of things, maybe. Mixed in with the easy availability of all and every kind of twistedness online.
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February 18, 2011 at 18:41 -
‘You can only feel sympathy for the McCann twins when they are old enough to read and understand what is said about their family.’
…and when they ask ‘Mummy and Daddy, why did you leave us alone every night when you went out on the piss?’
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February 19, 2011 at 07:33 -
A very apt choice of name, ashtrayhead.
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February 18, 2011 at 23:05 -
The increase in numbers can only be due to our awareness, education and fear of what we know is actually happening. This is not an issue of perception. The involvement of the authorities more readily these days, in this type of case has been the education in awareness. 30/50 years ago, girls/boys who had been abused where told/taught not to talk about it because it was seen as something quite shameful towards them. But thankfully girls/boys/adults today are aware that abuse by adult men/women towards children are the fault of the adult.
Of course it is true that some opportunistic sexual predators have switched their attention to children because the new generation of young women make much tougher targets but surely this does not change the fact that most child victims of abuse are not targeted by these predators.
Most child victims of abuse are actually targeted by people who choose children as their victims. Most children who are abused by adults are abused by adults who want to abuse children. They are not selecting a victim because they are easy to target. Their whole gratification is based on easy victims. This is not a matter of circumstance; it is a matter of preference, as unpleasant as it is to us, a matter of selection.Thirty years ago they were targeting children because they chose to. Today they are doing the same. Just because some more deviants with a more opportunistic and less selective method are part of the problem does not change the fact that children are still most at risk from the same people they have always been at risk from.
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February 18, 2011 at 23:34 -
50 years ago people moved around a lot less. Communication was more difficult, many people not even having a home phone. Cars were less usual and were noticed. Many more people worked near their homes or in their communities, people knew their neighbours well and looked out for one another and their children, and almost all villages had a police house and resident policeman, who knew everyone. Anyone in the community who was in any way odd, handicapped or had criminal tendencies for any reason was well known, and watched or avoided or helped as appropriate. The opportunities simply did not exist as they do now.
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February 19, 2011 at 00:38 -
Ian B – well said. If you want to be really strict, then paedophilia is all about pre-pubescent boys. There ought to be another word for a desire for girls, but my Greek isn’t up to it (he’s a lazy sod).
Spreading the term ‘paedophilia’ to cover 15-year-olds is unhelpful to everyone (including victims of genuine paedophilia), but it is all of a piece with definitions of ‘alcoholism’ that include 1 in 15 adult men, or ‘abuse’ that includes ignoring someone. The range of normal behaviour is now perceived to be very narrow, and stuff that was quite acceptable 30 years ago is now a ‘problem’ or even a psychosis. We’ve medicalised or psychologised nearly everything.
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February 20, 2011 at 05:40 -
” We’ve medicalised or psychologised nearly everything.”
And the things we haven’t yet medicalised, we’re working on…
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February 19, 2011 at 03:26 -
I thought that those who lusted after the young got oganised in the past – the men becaome priests or teachers in boarding schools and such like.
And the ‘maiden aunts’ of WW2 became social workers and developed the ‘all men are evil’ politics.
. As democracy sits awkwardly with their needs and those of their comrades the current police state of England was evolved. -
February 19, 2011 at 07:39 -
This subject brought up an interesting question at work, while listening to the debate on the radio about the life term registering on the sex offenders register. If a seventeen year old boy has sex with his fifteen and a half year old girlfriend, is he a paedofile? Should he spend the rest of his life on the sex offenders register? Can of worms.
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February 19, 2011 at 09:29 -
Not really a can of worms. The answer to both questions is obviously “no”.
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February 19, 2011 at 20:44 -
There’s a complication, there. By UK law, even though children younger than 16 are not legally permitted to have sex, they are deemed capable of giving consent from the age of 13. Where this occurs, the offence is one of unlawful (consenting) sex, not rape.
Not all sex offenders go on to the register for life, and I wouldn’t think (though I don’t know) that where consent was given below the legal age of cosent, that, maybe, there would not be an entry on the register.
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February 19, 2011 at 09:13 -
I don´t know who is this anna raccoon, but, I´m asking this: don´t she has anything better to do, then spread her nasty poison?
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February 19, 2011 at 09:43 -
My sense of it is a number of things; more is known and talked about and more people (not just men) are desensitive – ised and taught that whatever you want is OK. So some fence sitting here
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February 19, 2011 at 10:03 -
PS pardon the terrible English
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February 19, 2011 at 12:12 -
In my experience, 50 years ago young girls were allowed outside to play, and taught how to deal with dirty old men. This included kicking them in the shins and screaming the place down. Not surprisingly, it worked.
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February 19, 2011 at 13:42 -
I suspect stranger danger is slightly greater now than once it was, but for a reason, itself, wholly good. I don’t think there are more sexually deviant people about now than there were, but I do think that, now it is (thank goodness) more difficult than it was for those with malevolent designs on children to secure positions of responsibility, such as within care homes, that give them access to children, there are possibly more of them on the look-out for opportunities to abuse strangers.
That notwithstanding, I still think, statistically, that children are more at risk from family or acquaintances than from strangers, and that the ‘stranger-danger’ risk remains vanishingly slight.
While I have no doubt that Madeleine and her family have all been victims of the ‘stranger danger’ peril, I still think the worst possible lesson others looking on could take from the — unquestionably horrendous — experience of the McCanns (including, and especially, Madeleine) is to be over-protective and restrictive of their children.
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