Clambering over every sector of society, driving its tendrils into the judiciary, weakening the mortar of reason that kept us from collapsing into anarchy. The pungent scent is positively evil.

Paedophilia, at least the practice of it, the act of sexual behaviour towards a pre-pubescent child is abhorrent; I don’t think anyone – even the only paedophile I have ever knowingly met, a very unhappy young man in north wales who was, at the time, appealing for funds for treatment to rid himself of his illegal urges – would disagree with that.

However, the current hysteria regarding the media depiction of paedophilia, whilst mildly amusing when it manages to encompass remorseful middle aged matrons claiming compensation for a pat on the backside from minor rock royalty ‘three days before their 16th birthday’ that they were once proud of, is having a disastrous effect on society’s sanity and leading us down a totalitarian path.

This morning I was sent a link to a respectable legal web site: Legal Cheek – the link concerned a case before the Court of Appeal this week of a young law student who had ‘slapped a sleeping woman round the face with his penis’. Careful, you may end up, as I did, guilty of ‘thought crime’ within the meaning of section 63 if your mind wants to work things out to their logical conclusion as mine does – Mr G is a 1,000 miles away in England, that’s my excuse.

‘How the heck did he manage that’?, demanded my ever inquisitive mind. Slapped, not touched. He maintained (and there was photographic evidence) that the act was not sexual, since his penis was flaccid. My right hand moved from right to left in a slapping motion – well, in order to slap, he, er, must have a penis considerably longer than the width of my hand, considerably longer. You need a certain amount of excess in order to achieve a ‘slap’.

He may not have a future as a lawyer, and quite right too, the last thing we need is yet another impecunious criminal lawyer who doesn’t know when an act is against the law – but he certainly has a star-studded future as a porn star. Was I guilty of a ‘thought crime’ – was the act of imagining this sexual offence the first step to a future as a sexual offender?

You might think so this week from the outcome of another court case in Middlesborough. There, Robul Hoque was found guilty (for the second time) of ‘thought crime’. He had turned his sexual fantasising into computer generated cartoons which depicted ‘incest and child abuse’ – with great difficulty I would imagine.

I mean how precisely – and the law must be precise – do you prove that two computer cartoons are related to each other; are we talking lineal consanguinity here, or collateral? Do you measure the hexadecimal notation of the skin tone, or is a shared Cthulhun appearance sufficient? What about defining age? Does the gestation period from first ‘twinkle in your eye’ count, or is a cartoon only born when you lift your pen from your bamboo tablet for the last time? If that provably turned out to be 18 years ago, is that cartoon now legal?

The justification for outlawing porn depicting children was that in order to exist a child had been abused, and that even copying – or ‘making’ as the law terms downloading – was wrong because it encouraged the industry that abused children. Fair enough.

But a cartoon, of a fantasy? What is the matter with us? Every night we sit in front of a television satiated with images of murders; is that encouraging us to commit murder (some might argue yes!)? Are the makers of TV documentaries about the Great Train Robbers encouraging us all to go out and find a handy mail train? There was no perpetrator in this offence, and no victim.

At least where Andrew Holland was concerned there was a faint whiff of a victim, very faint mind you. He was charged with being in possession of extreme porn, to whit, a video sent to him as a joke by a friend which the CPS felt came within the remit of ‘bestiality’. A woman who apparently had a tiger in her tank.

Nothing about this case was as disturbing as the fact that the CPS, who you might have thought would be fairly inured to such matters, had declined to actually view the video, just waved the smelling salts under their noses and instructed counsel to prosecute.

The Judge at Mold Crown Court was a more curious fellow and demanded to see the video, complete with sound track, and was somewhat perplexed when said tiger turned to the lady at the end of his exertions and said ‘That was Grrrreat’, as any gentleman should. Gentleman? A talking tiger? There is something sadly amiss with this supposed example of Zoophilia? It was, as we now know, a man in a tiger outfit…

18 months later, the DPP accepted that there was no case to answer, and Mr Holland was dismissed, an innocent man – but not before his reputation had been throughly trashed across the front pages of the national papers. His lawyers are now demanding that the DPP review section 63 of The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 before anyone else undergoes such an unpleasant experience. There is an excellent resume of the history of this case HERE.

Does any of this matter, beyond being the subject of outRAAAAGE on Twitter? Yes, it does. Such is the rampant hysteria, and so entrenched has become the gender based ideology that men are a danger, and all men are but one fortuitous step away from being sex offenders, that it is having a deleterious effect on family law.

Section 11 of the Children and Families Act 2014 is intended to amend, enlarge, whatever you want to call it, Section 1 of the Children Act 1989 to define what could be termed the ‘presumption of parental involvement’ following a family breakdown. Since the majority of children, for a variety of perfectly sound reasons, will live their future life with a single parent – their Mother – we are talking in general terms about the amount of contact, if any, they will have with their Father. A member of that deadly dangerous clan – Men.

It is worth reading exInjuria‘s superb and detailed post on the passage of that ‘presumption of parental involvement’ as it battled its way across the ideological landscape of consultations, parliamentary debate, and media speculation to emerge wounded and weakened as ‘involvement of some kind, either direct or indirect, but not any particular division of a child’s time’.

A parent was redefined as someone who could be involved in his child’s life only if it did not put the child at risk of suffering harm. Not direct harm, mind you, but the harm that could be suffered as a result of conflict between the parents…

I don’t presume to paraphrase any more of exInjuria‘s post beyond noting that any Father who can manage to get divorced without incurring conflict with the ‘other parent’ is a genius.

Should he manage to prove to a court’s satisfaction that he has done so, in these days of cuts to legal aid, he will have battled the malign ideologically opposed forces of child counsellors, psychologists, CAFCASS officials, and the police – all of whom have been conditioned to #Ibelieveher when she says he is a danger to my child.

He will have done so, not with the aid of an experienced family law practitioner – but that of a ‘widget’ embedded on the websites of a number of charitable support organisations offering links to helpful information – and the dubious assistance of a£2m network comprised of CAFCASS – and some pro-bono law students.

The sort of people who go round slapping sleeping women with their penis and not realising that this might be an offence injurious to their future career – in the law, at least.

Sheesh!