The ‘Voices’ begging to be heard? – The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on June 6, 2016

Chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Lowell Goddard, attends a rape and sexual abuse centre in Liverpool.

Oft’ times, when I am struggling to resolve opposing opinions, I will stare out the window and try to put myself in a similar position, using the nearest approximation I can find in my past life. Thus it was that I found myself trying to figure out what would have stopped me reporting abuse, had it occurred.

What if Ms Jones had sexually abused me at Duncroft (perish the thought!!!) – who would I have reported it to? She was, in effect, in loco parentis; who else would I have been in contact with in those blissful days before social workers were invented? I believe I had a ‘welfare officer’, but who she was or how to contact her, I’m not sure I ever knew. Hell, I didn’t even know how to find my own grandmother. So I can quite understand how it is that a young person would find it difficult to report someone who was so close to them, and had the power over them, of a parent.

What if it was a visitor to Duncroft? A famous pop star? Hmmn. Depends what the quid pro quo was of the abuse. If it was a stolen kiss in exchange for cigarettes, then I might well have chosen not to report it – the benefits to me outweighing so called ‘justice’. Had it been more serious than that – what would have been my fears at reporting it? Certainly not the ‘alleged power’ of such a pop star. Ms Jones was a far more powerful figure in my life. I might though, in later life have realised that it was abuse and spoken out.

What if it had been a famous politician? There was such a famous politician who visited Duncroft. Famous to other people that is. R.A.B. Butler. For at 15 I had no awareness of who or what Rab Butler was. Who, I hasten to add, no one, not even the loonies, has ever accused of any disreputable behaviour. I mention him only as part of my mental experiment to figure out whether I would have been frightened to have reported any ‘abuse’, had it occurred, at his hands.

The answer, has to be a categorical No! Simply because at 15, the ‘power’ that is allegedly wielded by ‘VIP politicians’ was unknown to me – and I would suggest, to any other 15 year old at the time. ‘Power’ was something possessed by those with the ability to give you a clip round the ear; to deny you dinner that night; to prevent you going out when you wanted to. The nebulous sort of power that the conspiriloons are fond of quoting – the freemason connections, the awards from church and political figures, the power to ruin police careers, weren’t common currency in the 60s and the 70s. So I am deeply suspicious of the volume of people who now claim that they were so well informed as 50s, 60s and 70s teenagers, that it was the unspoken ‘power’ of wealthy ‘VIPs’ that led them to stay silent until these ‘enlightened’ days of social media and safety in numbers.

Over the week-end, I was sent a copy of the document that has been supplied to the Goddard Inquiry regarding Greville Janner’s alleged ‘offences’ – supplied? Nay, demanded, by that Inquiry. It makes for shocking reading.

Greville Janner’s name came into the public domain regarding any suspicion of being an abuser in 1991. Up until the point at which Frank Beck shouted out his accusation in open court, every individual now involved in publicly reviling his memory, had been so well informed as to the potential power of politicians and their possible tentacles of influence, that not one of them had ever breathed his name to a single person in authority?

Now you might be tempted at this point to say – they were too frightened to go to the police, or social workers, or carers; ‘they had been silenced’.

That would be to overlook the fact that the police had already come to them, all 400 of them.

The Leicestershire Police had carried out extensive inquiries in the lead up to the Frank Beck trial, and had interviewed 400 people – children who had been in his care, social workers who had dealt with them, carers who had had daily contact with them. Whilst those who had been under his care as children were not too frightened to name Beck, the person with the most control over their lives, as an abuser; nor some others who worked with him, indeed, victims have seen convictions in respect of that abuse and received compensation – every last one of the 400 individuals was independently so fully conversant with current affairs and the possible powers of a politician that not one of them breathed his name? Not one? Even in passing?

Frank Beck shouting out Janner’s name in open court allowed the media to have a corker of a story. It resulted in the matter being raised in parliament. Which in turn fuelled the story further. These events coincided with the advent of social media.

Until social media, groups of people with similar interests were confined geographically. Whilst train spotters might have travelled round the country, and first world war historians arranged the occasional meet in northern France, then unless there was a geranium cuttings society in your neck of the woods you were pretty unlikely to acquire an obsessive interest in the ways and wherefores of pelargoniums. Social media didn’t just put people in contact with each other, like the invention of the telephone. It allowed you to easily seek out others on the basis of a shared subject matter.

Some of the people on social media were anti-semites, keen to make mischief against any prominent jewish name; some were anti-left wing politicians, keen to make mischief out of any prominent Labour name; some were anti-establishment, keen to make mischief against ‘VIP’ politicians of any hue; some were keen to enlarge the pool of those who were receiving compensation from various authorities in respect of abuse which they could now claim was corroborated by the sheer fact that there was ‘more than one’ of them.

It wasn’t the police that ‘missed an opportunity to prosecute Janner in 1991’ as so oft quoted – it was the alleged victims who missed their opportunity. Not one of the 400 took the opportunity to ‘have their voices heard’ that the internet now claims was denied them.

Some of those who have belatedly found their voice to complain of sexual abuse at Janner’s hands many very well be the same people who had already received compensation for the abuse carried out by others at Beck’s children’s homes. Nine of the complainants were resident in Beck’s homes. For a national figure as Lord Janner was, it it not curious that the only allegations to emerge originate from Leicester inhabitants? Do paedophile offenders with connections to national charities for youngsters operating nationwide only offend against the citizens of one town? How curious.

We will never know – for all are cloaked by anonymity. Thus protected from prurient gaze, they will be allowed to tell their tale at the Goddard Inquiry – unchecked by cross examination, unrestrained, anonymous and forensically unchallenged witnesses in the full glare of national publicity. I note with alarm, that based on this, that Ben Emmerson, QC, counsel to the inquiry, has said that ‘findings of fact‘ will be made in the case of individual complainants.

Waiting in the wings of this theatrical posthumous ‘finding of fact’ will be the six complainants who have already lodged their civil claims for compensation, thus pre-judging the only opportunity for the family of Lord Janner (who are not listed as core participants to the inquiry with the commensurate right to cross examine witnesses) that they would have had in the civil courts.

It will be a monstrous failure of justice, and a catastrophic pandering to the internet campaign to ‘claim a scalp’ if the Goddard Inquiry make a finding of fact ahead of the civil cases.

Justice cooked to a temperature demanded by the current hysteria is no justice at all. It is inedible.

{ 143 comments… read them below or add one }

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 2:38 pm

The bright sharp uber Racoon emerges from her week end in customary fighting form and unusually I disagree with what I identify as one of your central points. The point I understand you to be making is contained in the lines
The answer, has to be a categorical No! Simply because at 15, the ‘power’ that is allegedly wielded by ‘VIP politicians’ was unknown to me – and I would suggest, to any other 15 year old at the time.
I strongly disagree from my own recollection of my childhood …..deference was the order of the day back then ……and anyone with ‘power’ was deferred to not merely by children but by the adults who controlled them. It was a different construct in those days ….intensely repressive hypocritical hierarchical and controlling…and if one was astute one learnt to slip under the radar of those who wielded power.
I speculate Anna you were more fortunate than you might appreciate having Ms Jones in loco parentis……she strikes me as an outstanding individual …..and I think it may have coloured your view that many were as selfless and confident as she appears to have been (and I hope still is) . My experience was some were and some weren’t
But I take your general point about conclusions at to fact at this distance of time.

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 3:07 pm

As usual Steve, I have waffled and not managed to make my point!
I would have thought twice, thrice, about pointing the finger at someone with parental power over me,like Ms Jones – or substitute Frank Beck – but I wouldn’t have been aware of the potential pitfalls of pointing a finger at an MP. I am not saying that Ms Jones would necessarily have believed me had I accused, for instance Rab Butler – or substitute Greville Janner – but I wouldn’t have been ‘frightened’ to do so, nor would I have been aware of tales of freemasons, illuminati, or Papal connections. They would have gone over my head, and I seriously doubt that any teenager in those days would have been any different.
Given that these teenagers and various staff had no problem pointing the finger at Beck, I am incredulous that they would have felt unable to point the finger at Janner simply because he was an MP.

windsock June 6, 2016 at 3:16 pm

I think the point Fat Steve is making – and it occurred to me too – is that you or any child may not have had a problem reporting abuse by a “powerful” person to Beck/Ms Jones…. but that Beck/Ms Jones may have been all too aware of that person’s power and do anything to avoid provoking them, even is the price was a damaged child, because they have their own job/hide to protect. (And I know that from your description that Ms Jones would not have been intimidated by “power”… but others?)

And I think Beck was just shouting out in court to try to protect his own skin. Did it come up in his defence evidence?

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 3:23 pm

From Janner’s evidence to the Kirkwood inquiry.

It is correct that when Beck lost his job with the Social Services he wrote asking me for a reference. I declined to provide him with this as I did not even remember having met him. I later heard from [Claimant 1] who asked me to give character evidence for Beck at his trial. I declined for the same reason in my reply of 21st June 1990. I repeat that it is extremely relevant that the allegations against me by both [Claimant 1] and Beck appear first to have been made shortly after I refused to help Beck in his trial.
I do not know why both [Claimant 1] and Beck have chosen to make these false alle- gations against me. One possible explanation is however provided by a letter I re- ceived from a serving prisoner who had at times shared a cell with Beck and who is not known to me. He wrote unsolicited by me to tell me that Beck had admitted to him various of the sexual offences alleged against him. Beck had also told the prisoner that he had got one of his young victims to lie and tell Beck’s solicitor and the police that I had been sexually abusing him. Beck apparently told the prisoner that he was going to frame me and also that he intended to “fix police officers and top social services people.” The prisoner later telephoned me at the House of Commons from the prison office. He told me that he had made a statement to the above effect to the officers involved in the criminal case against Beck in which he had emphasised that Beck told him that the false allegations against me were designed to deflect attention from Beck to me.”
That prisoner was Newell and his statement to the police confirmed this was true.

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 3:24 pm

So all 400 interviewees were all too aware of that person’s power and do anything to avoid provoking them, even is the price was a damaged child, because they have their own job/hide to protect. Not one broke ranks?

windsock June 6, 2016 at 3:38 pm

I think we’re misunderstanding each other. Those 400 – were they “alleged” “victims”? Or people who would have had them in their care?

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 3:39 pm

A mixture. Big brave policemen. Experienced Carers. Professional social workers, and ex-kids in care.

windsock June 6, 2016 at 3:41 pm

Actually, have re-read your article and the answer is there. Yes, it would be surprising for adults who had been told of Janner’s name not to have mentioned it. But would the children necessarily have known it?

By the way – I am not asking this because I believe Janner was guilty – far from it. But I am looking at this from the point of view of all cases.

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 4:09 pm

I have no idea whether Janner was guilty or not, as I don’t have with Savile – but I am concerned that no matter what you are accused of, you deserve a full and fair trial. Not a media trashing when you are beyond defending yourself.

windsock June 6, 2016 at 5:02 pm: I agree.

Reply

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 4:55 pm

@Anna Raccoon Given that these teenagers and various staff had no problem pointing the finger at Beck, I am incredulous that they would have felt unable to point the finger at Janner simply because he was an MP.
That is a narrower point than the one I took and is valid ….I suppose its the floodgates argument ……but again I recollect everything being hushed up …..not I have to say that I have experience of sexual abuse to others (though in retrospect grooming) but actual physical brutality to young children including myself
The Raccoon waffle? Piffle !!!!!

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 5:21 pm

@Anna Raccoon
Not one broke ranks? SUCH a good question and yet history is littered with stories of powerful figures whose predilictions only came out after their death……go back to the Boothby/Kray/Driberg connection ….and it appears Janner was extremely well connected …..your narrow point has substance but I wonder …..not about Janner specifically but about that era …..The Headmaster of my Prep school was an exceptionally violent individual on a par with only a few criminals I have met…..many hundreds of boys from influential families passed through his school. Some of the nicest and most decent men I have ever met taught me there but only one Master I knew left in disgust after some years . So I think your narrow point is good but not conclusive.

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 5:37 pm

Not conclusive whatsoever – but sufficient for me to feel disquiet at the prospect of a public show trial with attendant publicity attempting to define ‘fact’ from one sided evidence and then used as a conclusive argument at a civil trial.

It truly makes me fear for the future of a legal system which is already under severe financial strain.

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 5:58 pm

@Anna Raccoon makes me fear for the future of a legal system
I have struggled to remain sceptical rather than cynical about most things in life but have failed miserably about our legal system. I believe its broken beyond repair ……some Bankers I know venture the same opinion about the financial system …….one should never underestimate the investment people have made in their careers and their need to protect that investment whatever the cost.
A measure of anarchy appears to me to offer the only hope

windsock June 6, 2016 at 6:16 pm

…the legal system, the financial system… and the education system and the welfare system and the health system and the energy system and the environmental system and the political system… What, actually, works well in this country?

Anna Raccoon June 6, 2016 at 6:19 pm

You have a depressing point there Windsock.

The Blocked Dwarf June 6, 2016 at 10:19 pm

What, actually, works well in this country?

Apparently Palliative Care here is world class, so the Landlady. Not quite sure what that says about the UK in general or the NHS in particular… maybe something along the lines of ‘if there is no chance to f*ck things up more than they are already then the UK leads the way’?

Don Cox June 7, 2016 at 2:26 pm

Things that work well:

Clean water comes out of the taps
Electricity and gas are reliably supplied — we don’t get constant blackouts from inadequate power supplies, only from extreme storms
Main drainage and sewage disposal works in urban areas
The street lights come on and go off at the right times
Radio and TV broadcasts work (you may not like the content, but it is always available)
The Internet works fairly well
The buses and trains run as scheduled
The supermarket shelves are well stocked
Cash circulates efficiently

Compare a true failing state such as Zimbabwe

windsock June 8, 2016 at 8:05 am: You are right. These are minor miracles we take for granted and are common all over Europe and North America, and in parts of Asia. South America, Africa and Australasia.

Given our confused approach to planning our infrastructure, however, I am not confident this will remain the case indefinitely. Many of the common goods you outline are already “up for grabs” (e.g. cash, trains running on time (ha1), the power grid and the internet).
Moor Larkin June 8, 2016 at 12:23 pm: it is because they are “up for grabs” that they work so well. When the Post Office was in charge of telephones for instance, there was a waiting list, just like if you ordered a Trabby in the DDR.
windsock June 8, 2016 at 12:41 pm: By “up for grabs”, I meant in danger of decline, – sorry, I probably misused the phrase.

As for phones – yes. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer.
Moor Larkin June 8, 2016 at 12:49 pm: but you know Spring has come when Cuckoos cuckoo…

Sean Coleman June 6, 2016 at 7:40 pm

I belong to the camp which assumes that every allegation made during a witch hunt is a lie (for whatever reason) unless proved otherwise. This stuff about powerful VIPs is just a cliché.

For what it’s worth (and I am a mere novice in the matter of Jimmy Savile, and savilization in general, although I have been acquainted with Richard Webster over the last few years) I think the disc jockey was innocent seeing as every allegation crumbles into dust as soon as you look at it and dig even a millimetre under the surface, as Anna and others here have repeatedly shown.

Going off on a side track, I just finished Bill Bryson’s short book about Shakespeare. His final chapter is about the persistence of conspiracy theories insisting that anyone bar the Bard himself must have written the plays.

Fat Steve

You say that ‘power’ was a “a different construct in those days… intensely repressive hypocritical hierarchical and controlling”.

I turn 58 tomorrow and that is not how I remember it. Rather in my youth there was a sense of firm but restrained discipline. There was little about it that was ‘controlling’ (surely life in every particular is more controlled nowadays) and I have never seen where the hypocrisy comes in. This is a universal cliché and I am not singling you out of course. It has simply been the done thing to talk of hypocrisy, ever since what is now known as pc first became took over (almost overnight, as I remember from my first year at grammar school where I came across the word ‘judgemental’, used of course in a very judgemental way). And there were hierarchies then, as there always had been, but that is how it should be. As for ‘power’ being ‘a construct’ which is ‘wielded’ by those who possess it (rather than burdened by its responsibility), I’ll just leave it there for now!

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 8:55 pm

@Sean Coleman
Our different opinions are marked by different experiences.
I am 5 years older than you and I think those 5 years are important covering the second half of the 1960s or early 70s
I went to Prep and Public School rather than a Grammar School. I cannot therefore speak for the State System but neither can you speak for the Public School System.
I am possibly fortunate in not having had to compete for a decent education and therefore feel neither beholden nor grateful save to those who showed me kindness and pointed me to broader vistas than the narrow Educational/Social norms of the day which frankly were stultifyingly dull and enforced with rigid control and ‘discipline’. Those who were different were few and far between but exceptional men in many ways and I would be doing them a disservice if I did not distinguish them from the self serving and self protective majority who invariably held senior positions in the schools I attended.
I am the antithesis of a politically correct individual though proud to call myself a(n) aspiring Traditionalist (within that Philosophical School of thought).Traditionalism is very different Authoritarian
I sense also we have different starting points in you speak seemingly admiringly of ‘there was a sense of firm but restrained discipline’ and.
‘And there were hierarchies then…..but that is how it should be’. I tend to disagree that the infliction of physical pain on a child is ‘firm but restrained discipline’ (what might be your definition unrestrained I wonder ?) and that hierarchies should hold too much power which inevitably become self perpetuating and self serving.Hierarchies are there to be challenged in whatever form they take and always held to account because without challenge they become corrupt ….hierarchies are there to serve not control.
I conclude by saying I sent both my children to Public School (though not boarding) and their experience was pretty much the opposite of mine hence why I think I am entitled to express the opinion I do whether cliched or not.

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 9:36 pm

Oh Sean Coleman just in case you think my opinion too cliched try this little extract about Chevenix Trench Head Master of Eton till 1970 …..firm and restrained discipline ….absent any hypocrisy of course because hierarchies aren’t hypocritical …..seemingly they can’t be because that is how things should be.
http://www.marcello-mega.co.uk/?p=48

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 9:58 pm: And if the reality of Chevenix Trench is not to your liking then have a look at the film If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If…. and Oh Lucky Man both excellent takes on the hypocrisy of the ‘Golden Age’ of discipline and hierarchy

Reply

Sean Coleman June 7, 2016 at 5:04 pm

Fat Steve

Of course I am not questioning your right to express an opinion. I am just disagreeing with it, in the same way as I have disagreed with the same opinion expressed by quite a few other people on weblogs.

I am pleased to learn you are five years older than me as I thought you might be younger (which is why I gave my age). In my first year at university I shared a room with another lad from South London, who happened to be four or five years older than me. He was studying psychology and had worked as a nurse with mentally subnormal patients. He was as easy-going as they come and very generous with his free time, driving a bus for disabled or disadvantaged children (I can’t remember which as I’m afraid I wasn’t very interested). (By the way, he also said that the patients could drive you into a rage on occasions. I was struck by this as I hadn’t yet gone into secondary school teaching (where the idea of discipline and hierarchy was a rapidly fading memory, at least in the state sector and from which I exited after a decent interval) but I recalled his words when outrage erupted over here, not that long ago, about the rough treatment of (some) mentally disabled people by (some of) their carers in the St Attracta’s home in the west of Ireland following secret filming by RTE’s Primtime Reports team (the same people responsible for the infamous Mission To Prey report). When I read the Minister for Justice’s reference to ‘pure evil’ I wondered what Richard Webster would have made of it; nobody else seemed to think his words were out of place.)

Anyway, he told me that he went to school (in or around Croydon) at the tail-end of the harsh regime which had endured until then and that you could be, and were, punished severely for minor offences, or nothing. We remained good friends and I saw no reason not to believe him.

My interest these days is in psychology, in particular in the extravert half of the population which I don’t belong to. I have noticed that the emotional heart of the new dispensation is in your age group and that of my friend, that of the people who are probably running Britain now and have an emotional stake in their grand social experiment. I said the word ’emotional’ twice because I am convinced that their commitment is driven by emotion. I think this is also apparent in your replies to me. I also believe that a person can have this emotional attachment to the new status quo while at the same believing he is a conservative or a traditionalist (which he genuinely might well be). Another thing I have noticed in my revived interest in the subject is the tendency to oversimplify these ‘ishyoos’. I call it ‘extravert cliche’. I think the film ‘If’ is full of clichés and I might even have left a disapproving comment under the full film on YouTube, where everyone says how wonderful it is. (If I haven’t then I must do so.) I mentioned Bryson’s book about Shakespeare in
my earlier post and I looked at a clip from Shakespeare In Love on YouTube last night, about someone (whom I recognized from the Fast Show) who had a stutter. ‘My favourite scene from any film’ wrote one. I hadn’t seen it, or indeed hardly any film since Mitt Liv Som Hund, and thought it, well, a cliché!

But I’ll go back to my old school to finish. For O-level History we had an Irish priest who had once, it was said, been the headmaster and a great man with the cane. At the start of the course, at the beginning of the fourth year, he gave us a choice between modern history and an earlier period, and we had a brief ‘debate’ whose outcome was decided before it began. The usual voices were heard and it was decided, almost unanimously, that we would do the modern period, from 1815 onwards. The usual clichés had been trotted out (if that’s not also a cliché) in support of it, by the boys at the top of the class *hierarchy* (a very strict one it was too) who hadn’t the least interest in the subject, of course. The one I remember was from one boy, comfortably placed and well-connected in the *hierarchy*, who opined that modern history was more ‘relevant’ because it was more recent, and that we could also discuss it with our grandparents. Let’s recap some of the terminology: relevant, judgemental, power constructs.

Sean Coleman June 7, 2016 at 5:10 pm

How could I leave hypocrisy off my list? Mary Kenny once remarked that this was the biggest, if not the only, sin of our times.

Fat Steve June 7, 2016 at 10:12 pm

I am not sure I follow your line of argument but I will take a few of the points you make.
I have noticed that the emotional heart of the new dispensation is in your age group and that of my friend, that of the people who are probably running Britain now and have an emotional stake in their grand social experiment.
I am not sure how qualified I am to speak on behalf of my generation . Those I know hold similar opinions of their schooling as myself. I confess we are all public school boys who boarded and although we went to different public schools the similarities are striking. As an aside here I was drawn to this blog because of Savile but was struck by the account that Anna gave of her life as a schoolchild which resonated with me deeply …..yes on an emotional level and you are quite right that I am emotional about childhoods being wasted and subsequent lives being blighted……but my emotional interest is narrow basically limited to ensuring my children got more out of their childhood than I did mine and protecting them ……actually offering them a different choice from the tepid well intentioned but in my opinion misguided prevailing politically correct clap trap pedalled on occasion by even the most expensive private schools or the few dinosaurs left over from the past. Actually as an observation they were usually Grammar School Boys who hadn’t quite been astute enough to appreciate the modern social realities of private education. I didn’t find it difficult and actually rather enjoyed confronting the odd ‘old school’ teacher of a certain sort or the modern liberal teacher who thought he might have a greater grasp of preparing my children for modern life and frankly they posed little challenge to myself who chose a rather more challenging career than teaching. Actually the ability to so do confidently was a direct result of my own experiences in childhood (one can read those teachers who aspire to hierarchy or just a quiet life and threatening them appropriately which amounted to little more than showing resolve was easy as well as being something of a joy) but also the deconstruction of the power construct to which I referred where in a manner of speaking …..at least in private education now…..he who pays the piper may not get the exact tune he wants the whole time but can ensure that the repertoire is, shall we say, carefully agreed upon. An example ? I didn’t want my children wasting their time on a rugby or lacrosse pitch or on school sports …..with gentle pursuasion they were released from that tedium and my daughter ice skated, rode her horse , fenced and skied …..and my son learned to arch,shoot and ski all of which are social rather than school team sports which were somehow thought essential to charachter building for EVERYONE (Rubbish of course it just means one teacher has to freeze his balls off on a winters afternoon looking after 30 children if they are playing rugby rather than doing something the child might like)
Actually if I would pick any generation who pedalled ‘the new dispensation’ to which you refer would say it was the one possibly 8/10 years older tham myself ….the soixante huitards ……and I wouldn’t place great store by their emotional commitment by them to very much other than justifying themselves.
But I will finish with an observation that you might want to consider and that is why the change in Society ? Ahhh you might reply because of those trendy lefties like Fat Steve and their misguided emotional attechment to liberalism . You would be wrong on a personal level but hey lets for the fun of it assume I was one of those muddle headed liberals who suceeded in destroying the fabric of society ……they preach clap trap as you would be the first to admit ……but it was only a truly rotten social order that could so easily be destroyed……pushed over without trouble…… by the clap trap they put forward as the viable alternative with which we now live . Both frankly are nonsense in my opinion and one doesn’t have to choose between the two…….though if pushed I would chosse the new rather than the old simply because it offers greater pluralism ……but I will stick with Traditionalism as a Philosophical starting point and modify it to seek the outcomes I think in the best interests of the long term happiness of those for whom i have responsibility.
It is perhaps surprising you feel competant to comment on the accuracy of the movie ‘IF’…..after all you don’t have the experience to judge its intellectual or artistic merit just as I don’t have experience or expertise to critique some things …..but don’t embarass yourself by repeating endlessly about it being a cliche as you appear to do on everything and everybody …..it is a pastiche of cliche because that was its point…….and its intellectual merit
Chevenix Trench is a cliche also for the emotionally stunted and sexually deviant Public School Head Master but labelling him a Cliche doesn’t make the reality any less true

Sean Coleman June 8, 2016 at 6:05 pm

My argument is fairly simple. If one accepts that humanity is divided into equal numbers of introverts and extraverts (see Dorothy Rowe) and you learn to identify the two distinct groups (easier said than done) then you can generalize from you observations. These include the extravert’s compulsion to police etiquette and mores (probably in that order) and to justify the status quo and received opinion (which is now political correctness) on the grounds that ‘everybody knows it is so’ and their propensity to be driven by emotion rather than reason, especially in (virtual) crowds (the response to the photograph of the drowned Kurdish boy last September is a good example). They also include a reliance on cliché (which I call ‘extravert cliché) which is closely wrapped up with rhetoric (‘extravert rhetoric’) whereby words become, as it were ‘reified’ – this means in practice that sophisticated arguments mask simple gut reactions on the most important points (cf the difference between Labour and Conservatives nowadays – with Dave ‘The Heir to Blair’ – where there is fierce argument about details but nobody disagrees on the underlying ‘Settlement’) and words (like ‘fascist’ – see Orwell’s famous essay. by the way) are treated as though they were tangible things rather than just mainly meaningless, well, words. That nobody else seems to have noticed this, in particular Rowe herself, I find astonishing. Please don’t think I’ve got it in for all you extraverts. I prefer you all on the whole.

Savilisation is perhaps the best arena for demonstrating the senselessness in modern thought because, as everyone knows here, the gap between reality and its description is at its starkest. How on earth can everyone believe that Jimmy Savile was the worst sex offender of all time? Or an Irish minister describe a handful of ill-trained, not very well paid and not very sympathetic care workers as ‘pure evil’ (without anyone even noticing the oddness of the description, let alone commenting on it)? How can 400 people possibly use the excuse that they were cowed by the ‘power’ of a VIP I’d never even heard of from speaking out? And, more interestingly, why do people like you feel compelled to argue that it is reasonable.

I won’t go into the details of your rambling post except to say that it is the 68-ers I have mainly in mind – when I was at university the students imitated them shamelessly; that to believe that the new order (Desmond Fennell describes it as a civilization in the making) is truly pluralist is silly; and, that while I thought If… was a good film when I was a teenager (like the rest of my friends) I now (whether I am ‘qualified’ or not to do so) think it is puerile rubbish.

By the way, I meant to ask you, is the (clichéd) scene where the sadistic prefect canes Our Young Hero meant to be realistic? Could prefects cane younger boys like that? I was a prefect (much against my wishes) and the most I could do was put someone on detention. I don’t mind if you don’t reply to the rest of my post, but I’d like to know this!

Sean Coleman June 8, 2016 at 6:10 pm

I forgot to add that I would not like to send a child of mine to a school where parents of other children can make their own interventions like you do. I’d also hate to have to work in one and put up with it. I’d argue that a well- run and ordered school wouldn’t stand for it. Call me old-fashioned.

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 6:33 pm

Ho! Ho Ho! Sean …..you really are every bit the Grammar School Boy …..The Schools to which I sent my children are amongst the most highly regarded in England and once I explained the added value I could bring to my children’s education in the main I had approval …better you stick with the past and your comfort zone…….somewhere where you will be valued …..although Political Philosophy is not my bag rather than being all dewy eyed about the past realise that the world has moved on and the rewards are there to be seized for those with guts imagination and brains. I am too old but my children are notIf you want to try make sense of things try Carl Poppers’s Plato and the Enemies of the Open Society and you might understand the direction Society has and is taking.

Sean Coleman June 8, 2016 at 10:32 pm: Fat Steve

“You are every bit the Grammar School Boy”

I’ll take that as a compliment. I attended a Catholic grammar school in South-East London which turned comprehensive the year after I left (combining with Kate Bush’s girls’ grammar). It was not uncommon for me to get half the prizes in a given year. In my fifth year I got the best marks in physics by an 11% margin and I didn’t even like it (a friend had got thrown out of his grammar school in Blackheath and gave me his traditional text book which was in a different class to the (let’s do some experiments and use our hands to make it interesting!) Nuffield rubbish we were given). Clearing out my attic years later I discovered to my amazement that I had also won in chemistry. I just don’t remember it. Just before I started I was told by my mother that I had been offered a place in the minor public school a short walk away (Mervyn Peake’s alma mater) but, while I was intrigued, I said I’d stick to the school I had already agreed to. I knew that at the public school I ‘d be mixing with children who wouldn’t be the brightest, only their parents could afford to pay for them. There was something fishy or unwholesome about the whole business in other words. I’ve never said or written this before in public, but my default position is to assume that other people are not as clever or as educated as I am and I do tend to look down on everyone else (although I hide it). See, you have dragged it out of me. Thanks!

‘Rewards to be seized with guts etc’

I just don’t see life like that. I always wanted an undemanding job that would leave me to my own devices as much as possible. I’m sure this is very common. I am sincerely grateful to the likes of yourself who actually go out and *do* things.

‘If you want to try to make sense of things…’

Thanks for your concern but I am doing all right by myself so far. My own explanation is one against millions, but it explains things better than the rest, although my son would say, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

Where do you get the impression I am dewy eyed about the past from? I am rather appalled by the stupidity *and lack of imagination* behind our cultural revolution. You are right in your earlier comment that it isn’t either the old civilization or the new, it’s just that the old was tried and tested.

“… try Carl Popper”

When I read any of the big names, try as I might I always find myself using a psychological prism. I might try Popper if I can get one of his books in one of a wide number of European languages: that way I can ensure I’ll learn something. Bryson’s Shakespeare book I read in Portuguese on holiday last week (where I also saw, in Faro, octopus on the menu as Major Bonkers wrote).

What I wrote above has gone right over your head hasn’t it? Story of my life. That doesn’t mean you aren’t clever (I am sure you are far cleverer than me in lots of ways, though that wouldn’t be hard) but that you are an extravert, like most bloggers. And intellectuals: take Orwell for example, or Einstein (mistakenly taken for an introvert, along with others like Gandhi, Bill Gates, TS Eliot and Al Gore, by Susan Cain in her recent best seller), Shakespeare (it seems) or even, most probably, Popper. And here is a strange thing: the most incisive and insightful critics of the new civilization-in-the-making are invariably extraverts.
Fat Steve June 9, 2016 at 1:28 pm: @Sean Coleman What I wrote above has gone right over your head hasn’t it?
You are just so so right Sean. I am stunned to silence by the depth of your intellect if not the breadth of experience . With wisdom and acchievements such as yours little wonder you opted for an easy life for all things having been revealed to you in winning all those prizes at secondary school what need of riches or indeed anything else.
Next time I am sipping a glass of Champagne overlooking what is a rather prettier part of England than sarf london where genius is born in the company of lesser mortals than yourself we shall contemplate the errors of our ways
Fat Steve June 9, 2016 at 1:51 pm: @Sean Coleman Like Colombo, I have just one final question.
Did you ever see (or more likely have reliable reports of) anything similar, or even remotely so, at your own boarding school?
Yes
And like Columbo and Yourself …..but with Columbo’s sense of humility rather than yours one question for you
How did a Grammar School Genius such as yourself fare in Tertiary Education and the broader world ? I expect something along the lines of a * First in Greats at Oxford , Fellowship of All Souls (I will excuse you if you tell me it was beneath you) ….a Doctorate no doubt Books published ? Public Lectures given ? I sense you were an academic in secondary school so no doubt head of an outstanding department and a clutch of standard text books to your name.
No I haven’t set the bar particularly high …..just (apart from the Fellowship of All Souls) pretty standard for the better academics at the Public School my Son attended but which appears from your comments to be beneath you to teach in
Fat Steve June 9, 2016 at 3:29 pm: @Sean Coleman
A psychological prism.
Yes you really might benefit from reading Popper i have decided particularly given your prism of choice.You would first need to acquaint yourself with Popper’s theory on falsifyability (actually not a bad approach to deconstructing the Savile Myth) and then you would understand that on a Popperian model, psychology resembles magical thinking: if an expected result does not manifest, explanations can be found which explain that failure away, and thus the core theory remains intact. This, Popper considered, is a weak point – the theory cannot be properly tested if it is inherently unfalsifiable.
Sean Coleman June 9, 2016 at 5:33 pm: Fat Steve

I see from this thread and others that ad hominem comes easily to you. I assume you learnt that at school. I told you about my academic success at school (including a prize for History at university if you are interested) in response to your boasts about the most highly regarded schools in England and because of your (perceived) attempt to patronize me. (Patronize: that’s another word from your lot’s vocabulary. I’ve never accused someone of patronizing me before. I hope I’m not turning into a liberal.) I haven’t ‘seized’ any of these dazzling heights you set so much store by because I never wanted anything to do with them. I probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway. As it happens, I was never over-confident. At the time I was surprised with my success but only looking back does it seem obvious – it certainly did not feel that way to me at the time. The same goes with the good looks, by the way. Anyhow, I am not intimidated by your assumed air of superiority but keep it up if you want so I can study your technique.

Oh, I see now what you were trying to say. You say I think I’m too bright to teach in one of these schools. Wrong, I was too useless as a teacher to teach anywhere.

I thought I made it clear in my original post that I wasn’t singling you out personally for criticism but rather your world view (which, despite your protestation, seems to be politically correct: the… three dots… kind of punctuation… fits the picture) but you nevertheless chose to take it personally. So you have a thin skin. Join the club.

Just a few points while I am here.

Bullying teachers to get the best for your own children. I suppose in my own ideal world such behaviour would not happen or be tolerated (but of course the world is more tolerant nowadays). I wouldn’t congratulate myself so much for that if I were you. Nor for crushing old-style teachers of certain kind (I think this is what you wrote). They used to do that with Catholic priests over here and still would, if they could find any: like the Colosseum there was always only going to be one outcome. I have a soft spot for teachers having gone through what they go through. Of course, as you say, teaching was beneath you because it was not challenging enough. Such humility! (Ping! That’s an example of hypocrisy, the greatest sin.)

‘If…’ You recommend that I watch the film and then complain that I am not qualified to have an opinion and how dare I, etc. What. Ever. How close was the ‘thrashing’ scene to what you experienced in real life? My guess is not very. Remember, it is a team of prefects, grimacing like Nazi war criminals, with the stroke of the cane coming after a run-up ending on a little hop. Did this happen in your school? We had the cane, but it was used rarely. Instead the slipper was usual.

Popper. Your description of his ‘model’ (love the jargon) is quite good (for you). I actually did a term of psychology when I left school, in UCL (ignoring, perhaps stupidly, my headmaster’s request to go to Oxford, because the course wasn’t offered there). We had a little ‘module’ I think they called it (you should use the word, it fits in with your vocabulary), on the philosophy of science. The first term (all I could take) focussed on Popper and his ‘Popperian’ (as you say) model and it was indeed about falsifiability. Most of the students were ecstatic by this which struck me as odd because I thought it dull. Now you may ask yourself why they were so excited. Need a clue? ‘If an expected result does not manifest [itself], explanations can be found which explain that failure away, and thus the core theory remains intact.’ That’s very good. Well done! (I say patronizingly). I don’t know about applying it to the Savile case (as in ‘I don’t know’ not ‘I don’t agree’) but it seems to fit the AGW mass delusion. Sheldrake’s Science Delusion covers a lot of this ground, for example the belief by scientists in the ‘hard’ sciences that they don’t need double-blind experiments because their own bias wouldn’t or couldn’t affect the outcome of experiments. ‘Psychology resembles magical thinking.’ Again, I don’t know (and again ditto above). But I think I know what you mean and I’d agree. My sense that this was the case is mainly why I gave it up. Psychologists are wedded to the materialist ‘model’ (I know, I’m just winding you up with the inverted commas) and we now have the doomed attempt to explain away behaviour, and above all consciousness, via neuroscience. All this and they don’t really ‘get’ introversion and extraversion. All right, they know in a way, in theory, and waffle about a ‘continnum’ (there isn’t one) but when you look hard at it you then ‘see’ what is involved and it is quite astonishing. Unlike all you extraverts, introverts don’t throw around adjectives like that willy nilly. It surely can’t be *that* hard for you to understand it.

Finally, my use of the word ‘cliche’. I am sorry if it stung you. It’s a word I have got used to using in connection with extraverts. I’m going to have to write that book whose lack you deride me for.

It’s up to you how you choose to reply, if at all. The present route is more time consuming but it you want to keep it up then I’ll have to too.
Fat Steve June 9, 2016 at 7:25 pm: Tut Tut Sean For someone so desperately well versed in Psychology (just the one degree ?) and critical of emotion investment your facade has cracked …..but don’t fret you have afforded me some good sport
The high point of your life appears to have been prizes won in the fifth form …..hey I never did so genuinely well done.
But a friendly word of advice if you use the words ‘but that is how it should be’.you set yourself up for a kicking …..why? because in my world that is how it should be
Sean Coleman June 9, 2016 at 8:37 pm: Fat Steve

Now what are you on about? Do you actually *read* what others write?

Where did I say I had a degree in psychology? I am saying that psychology as it is currently understood is useless and I could go some way towards explaining why.

Your posts are of some use for me in trying to get a look into the extravert’s mind, but not that much as I am past the stage of seeking feedback. I wonder again about how it is that many extraverts manage to combine their admittedly genuine ideals with self-interest. Your position on grammar schools, for example – I suppose you don’t approve but you didn’t say. If not, how does that square with the existing system of selection by house prices? YOu have probably heard the argument that they were abolished because middle class parents couldn’t bear the thought of their children going to secondary moderns while the lower orders got into the grammars. I also wonder (as usual in such exchanges) if you deliberately set out to be dishonest in your arguments. For example, you appear to sneer at the grammar school product and then when one explains that he is not in fact your assumed intellectual inferior you resort to the charge of pride. And then it is name-calling about ‘sarf London’ compared to your own des res. I hadn’t realized snobbery was still so thinly veiled. (My own highly des res in Killarney is located in what is colloquially known as Millionaire’s Row with views of the McGillicuddy Reeks at the bottom of the garden. I just got lucky and moved at the right time. I am sure you wish me well!) You rail against hierarchy, discipline and the old public schools but send your own children to them. It’s… all… kind of… stream of consciousness. Just say whatever comes into your head. (Now that *is* familiar.)

How about addressing any of my points? If there is anything you don’t understand just ask.

Your last line is good, though. Have you used it before? I too have enjoyed sharpening my wits against England’s Finest but I could have used the time more productively.

But please answer this one point. I suspect you are exaggerating in comparing your school, and public schools in general, with the nonsense in ‘If…’.

‘Popperian model’ indeed!

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 6:44 pm

Sean It not my job to educate you as to fact just google the regime of corporal punishment at Eton …..IF was an amalgam of themes from Public Schools ……it would appear the Prefect Scene was probably based on what was known as a POP tanning.
Gosh what a sheltered existence you Grammar School Boys had and yet you hold yourself out as authoritative on so much!!!

Sean Coleman June 8, 2016 at 10:42 pm

Thanks for the information. Just be careful of Wikipedia if that’s what you mean. It is useful, as Peter Hitchens, for finding out what conventional wisdom is on a given subject, or (as I say) if you want the weight of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in metric tonnes. The Wikipedes can’t bring themselves, for example, to admit that Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist (see his website on the extraordinary Guerrilla Sceptics who fight over the soul of his entry) and I’m sure people here have read Jimmy Savile’s entry, which tells us what John Lydon once said about him (yawn).

Sean Coleman June 9, 2016 at 11:43 am

Steve

Like Colombo, I have just one final question.

I looked up the POP tanning. There seem to be a few websites ‘out there’ about corporal punishment. Apparently this was last performed in 1963.

Did you ever see (or more likely have reliable reports of) anything similar, or even remotely so, at your own boarding school?

I am asking in the spirit of this weblog where people are always looking for reliable and credible evidence.

As a sceptic my guess is ‘no’ but I am willing to be corrected. I’m only saying that because I have heard stories about past pupils at Christian Brothers schools here in Ireland who never actually went to one. (I am not doubting you went to boarding school of course.) If we can throw a little light on the veracity of the scene in the film then it would at least be a start.

Tom O’Carroll June 9, 2016 at 12:25 pm: “Many of the punishments used in boarding schools do not differ from those in day schools: conduct marks, star systems, lines and detentions, caning. In public and similar schools, the senior boys can usually cane the serious offenders.”

— Royston Lambert, The Hothouse Society, 1968, pp.181-2

Lambert was a sociologist and later head of a progressive school with no corporal punishment.

His lengthy chapter “A place in the sun – power” copiously documents the immense power of the senior pupils in the traditional public schools.

See here for a terrifying taster of how that power was sometimes used:

http://www.authoritarianschooling.co.uk/index.php/learning-hatred
Fat Steve June 9, 2016 at 7:33 pm: Oh!!!and Sean All this and they don’t really ‘get’ introversion and extraversion.
Might just be because others have decided its not the Philosophers Stone you believe it to be
Sean Coleman June 9, 2016 at 8:59 pm: One last thing.

Here is a 1 minute video of Michael Gove and his reaction to the original Westminster veto of the govt’s bombing plans for Syria. This is what convinced me he was an extravert and so explained his views on grammar schools. See if you can work out how.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4n7AuwdWbA

I’m not making this up.

Sean Coleman June 9, 2016 at 8:51 pm

Fat Steve

I missed this last post of yours.

You are of course not the first to point out that it might not be the philosopher’s stone after all. Yes, that is quite possible, even probable, and philosopher’s stone is a nice term. I mean, it isn’t likely to end well, is it? Yet it does seem to explain so much. Rowe’s insights are stunning. I keep forgetting they aren’t mine, but I can at least push much of the blame onto her if I am mistaken. Jung’s Psychological Types (1921) is most insightful, as is to be expected. His description of the introverted thinking type is probably valid for all introverts, as is his extraverted feeling type for all extraverts (his translator’s spelling by the way). Most would be surprised to know that Jung was himself an extravert – this was clear from an interview he gave late in life, since removed from YouTube. Another question is where are the introverts in all this, why don’t we hear from them, what do they actually *do*? Well, the Dame is one of them and therefore hasn’t the excuse of dimished responsibility that your side have, which is one of the reasons I dislike her so much. But you don’t want to know about all that.

Fat Steve June 10, 2016 at 1:12 pm: Sean almost missed your post and would have done so but for tdf’s posts .
I am aware you might consider my views tainted but genuinely if you reckon your theory has value then you ought to publish it……the web offers such opportunity for a new era for pluralism …..I don’t dismiss your theory and I think that if you review our exchanges my attacks (I would dispute such personal remarks as I made were gratuitous ad hominem ) was perhaps directed to conclusion you reached as a matter of certainty rather than your theory.
I am an admirer of Jung (anyone who admits as much tends to be dismissed as a proto fascist) but my interest in him was sparked by his association with Herman Hesse (the antithesis of what is now termed a ‘fascist’) whose novels I admire greatly ……and there is a fine (and to me admirable) tradition now ‘discredited’ by ‘intellectuals’ (who classify everything in neo marxian materialist terms) about the importance (for want of a better word) man’s ‘Spirit’. Although a ‘dangerous individual’ (I adopt Hesse’s words who knew him) Evola takes notions of the human spirit to its limits and perhaps beyond . Evola is the one Philosopher genuinely feared by the ‘left’ and refered to as the ‘right’s Marcusa only cleverer (whether correct or not matters not because it is both witty and poses a genuine challenge to disprove).
I was being deliberately mischievious in selectively quoting Popper and actually expected you to take me apart for my selectivity …..though Popper has value to me because he justifies my own mind set of the lack of absolute certainties in this world……. The view that mortals constantly fall into the trap of certainty goes back (at least as the written record shows) to the Socratic dialogues of Plato ….again in making reference to Plato and the Enemy’ s of an Open Society I left myself open to attack by you which i tried to block by reference to Political Philosophy not being my ‘bag’ (its not and Plato’s Republic is my least favorite and in my opinion his most flawed work of Plato’s works) .
You have accused me of being rambling before now and perhaps I continue to ramble but if so it is on this occasion with less mischief and a genuine wish that if you think something important then publish and be damned .Anna is the best example I know though like much as Hesse considered Evola a dangerous individual I am sure some think that of Anna as dangerous….and just as i believe Evola takes issues of the human spirit to its limits and beyond i wonder a bit if Anna allowing Tom ‘O Carrol a platform here is not pushing things beyond a limit …..its her blog and everyone to posts here does so with her permission and subject to her rules (though I do enjoy testing them) …..actually like the short one from the flatlands I probably worry less about O Carrolls views (as ill concieved and personall repugnant as I find them) than I do that Anna’s intellectual tolerance might be misinterpreted for something other than it is .
But take a leaf from Anna’s book if you publish …..actually as I hope you will ……if the point is important to you argue it with care …..Anna has a lawyers training …..no lawyer starts with a conclusion…. they start with a submission and back it with evidence and argument and invite a conclusion ….take heart from what I opine ……our exchanges were between someone with genuinely held views whose values might well be important and an aspirant gadfly with some legal experience…..that I might be seen to have had some sucess in attacking your views owes more to tecnique than substance ….as a Psychologist I expected you to see that …..but I think you might be falling into the trap that Psychology is the discipline you should lead with in what I speculate may be your theory but hey never ever ever take Fat Steve’s views too seriously.
P.S. my puntuation with multiple dots is a quirk that tries to perform an appropriate function within the brevity of language on the web ….but ever self critical (well I try) I shall consider that it might betray some charachter trait
Fat Steve June 10, 2016 at 1:28 pm: PS Have a look at Aldous Huxley’s views on what constitutes a good essay if you do decide to publish ……and a little less reticence and more confidence about your personal experience which you minimise to an extent that is admirable but weakens your argument……R.S Thomas was i think someone you might classify as an intravert and his experience of life could not have been more narrow but it had great depth and as you know he narrowly missed being a Nobel Laureate …..Anna seems a natural at Huxley’s three poles approach ….retrochris who used to post here much the same.
Fat Steve June 10, 2016 at 1:45 pm: PPS I will be like really pissed of (with myself for my self inflicted public persona of being nothing more than a gadfly without conviction but oddles of ego) if you construe a word i have said as intended to patronising
Sean Coleman June 10, 2016 at 4:12 pm: Fat Steve

Many thanks for your generous reply which I was not at all surprised to receive.

I knew I was up against an experienced lawyer and was cursing my habit of opening my big mouth in the wrong places. Although I seldom do it, I am more used to jousting with the man in the street, or to be more exact, with manic depressives (on weblogs and YouTube) pretending to be somebody else. They are all learning experiences (this one more than usual) and usually entertaining in their own way. To get me to complain about being patronized was an achievement. I knew as I did it that I shouldn’t but I couldn’t find anything (not too far below the belt) to hand. Ditto the punctuation thing (actually something extraverts tend to like).

I hadn’t intended airing my Great Theory (work in progress) as I’d done it all before elsewhere and the only useful thing about it is the practice in trying to express the ideas. It first occurred to me after reading a regular poster on my old blog haunt, now haunted by an unfortunate troll. I try not to refer to it as a theory as it reminds me of John Cleese’s Ann Elk character (‘Well, Chris, this is my theory. And it’s mine!).

I didn’t realise you were being selective with Popper as it is a long time since I came across him, and then only briefly. About certainty, well that’s something I haven’t thought about, well not lately and in those terms. I can easily imagine myself arguing for and against it depending on the circumstance.

I will certainly look into those writers you referred to. One of the most exhilerating books I have read, Polanyi’s Great Transformation, was recommended by someone I didn’t know to somebody else I also didn’t know, on an Irish economics weblog.

Your comments about Anna, and those about and to Tom O’Carroll I fully endorse. I hadn’t meant to start posting here because it is, as you know, of a high quality and didn’t need any input from me. To think that when I first trawled the net looking for something – anything – that chimed with my own opinions on the Savile case I dismissed her (just on the name and without reading) as likely to be an oddball who supported Jimmy Savile just to be contrary.

I appreciate your advice on publication. I had half hoped you might suggest something. Up to now I have only met with incomprehension, not that I blame anyone. I am puzzled by your suggestion that I don’t lead with psychology. Also I’m not a psychologist – I had a brief encounter with the discpline and we didn’t get on. I am also puzzled by your suggestion that I be less reticent about personal experience. I have always thought I overdid it, although reading others do this can be most interesting.

It is something that just fell into my lap. I didn’t have to do anything. I used to borrow my mum’s library card and read Dunne’s Experiment With Time, studying Priestley’s Time and the Conways some months later at O level. There is a very odd thing about life, about coincidences real or imagined, which I have become more aware of again in recent years, and I notice Dunne features in Sheldrake’s book I mentioned earlier. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance idea offers an explanation, and I suspect it has a connection with the present plague of myopia (but that’s another story). I made notes but got derailed since February by the Savile case, which (as I said already) I had predicted on the strength of Richard Webster, but which is still so stunning that I had to find out about it. Jung talks about the introverted thinking type (all introverts as I see it) and contrasts him with the extravert, who having written his book carefully nurtures it every step of the way to ensure its success. The introvert, however, just dumps it before the public and is then offended when it doesn’t get the reception it deserves. How, I asked, does he *know* this?

Three things concern me. Should it be written at all? Will it make matters worse than they already are? Sceondly, since extraverts are responsible for most of the interesting things that are done in the world (Huxley seems to have been one too), introverts being a kind of elusive dark matter, how can I attribute these phenomena to their extraversion? This is the glaring weakness in the argument. Thirdly, how can I possibly make it readable and interesting without being libellous, or knowing what is libellous? I suppose the last one is always asked.

I don’t expect a reply to all this, of course. Just thinking out loud.
Sean Coleman June 10, 2016 at 4:24 pm: PS I thought at first it was yourself you were describing as the one with the genuine views and me as the gadfly. I had to read that line a few times. Only when I half-retired from teaching and entered the twilight world of the supply teacher did I discover, from hard necessity, an unsuspected ability to tell stories. Then, when I got used to blogging, I realized to my guilty pleasure that I had a gift for taking the piss. Now that pleasure has been denied.
Fat Steve June 10, 2016 at 10:22 pm: @Sean Coleman
I am glad I passed muster at the end and grateful you accepted my sincerity though always caution Fat Steve’s opinions
A couple of points
a)At times I flatter myself that i look at the world through the prism of Philosophy but more accurately it is through the prism of my family ….although having led an eventful life as a Solicitor I had the good fortune through odd circumstances to leave law aside and although I still have something of a rather too great an appetite for risk it comes a very poor second to ensuring my children get the oppertunity to live the life they want. Philosophy…..moral philosophy which is my real interest was/is no more than a useful tool to try to justify virtue to them in an unvirtuose world. I reacted strongly to your view of hierarchy for reasons I have already set out and as much as i have striven to give my children the tools to fit in to a world that was denied to me due in part to lack of forward thinking and but other things including personal failings also, I hope they are not corrupted should they achieve all I hope for them. you and Anna seem to have had good fortune with secondary school teachers I did not ….moral virtue which tradition holds as the key to happiness was not present in much of my education and my scepticism of school hierarchy is based on that. I am (and I hear you groan) one of life’s eternal fifth formers
b) my rather trenchant views on physical coercion of children (or for that matter coercion of any sort) is I am afraid a direct result of my own childhood experience ….no not quite as cinematically graphic as ‘IF’ but I didn’t go to Eton though a close chum did and was there before 1963 though we have never a POP tanning though i have little doubt of the veracity of reports on the web. Actually before Chevenix Trench (who was thought progressive !!!!) the birch was administered though not I understand by prefects. Your discription of the scene (Nazi thugs) shows sensitivity but rest assured the Prefects in my school wore fancy waistcoats proudly as a sign of been given authority and the Head boy was permitted to administer the cane (a privilage???) ….but mine was a far less prestigious public school than my brothers’ where yes senior prefects had the right to adminter the cane. The whole construct (sorry one of my go to words) was foul and designed to corrupt and in my experience invariably did. Through chance I bunked off from Public School at 16 pretty disgusted with the structure. But I have personal experience of boys being thrashed by a Master in Prep School as young as nine so hard that it drew blood and for nothing more serious than mild insolence
c)Like you ‘ I hadn’t meant to start posting here because’ ……in my case because frankly I didn’t think i would find a site or a blogger that warrented my interest or my support but Anna who I have never met and can judge only by her prose has so far as I am concerned (though whether she would thank me for the description is another matter) has a morality and a courage that I am somewhat in awe of. Trying to give support (I frequently question whether I do…. imagining myself most frequently a bar room bore) is the leasr she deserves though I can’t support her when she is unwell and believe she shouldn’t be distracted from what I believe are the really important things in life . But absent all that I have never read anyone (save perhaps the opening pages of Hesse’s novel Damian) that takes one back vividly (without sentimentality) to childhood in just a paragraph.
d) I am also puzzled by your suggestion that I be less reticent about personal experience. I have always thought I overdid it, although reading others do this can be most interesting.
All personal experience honestly recounted is in my experience interesting …..the key I have always thought is authenticity and a certain negation of ego….but a true negation not a supression …..forgive me but I think you think people value your exoteric academic achievements (thereby giving you a locus to be heard) rather less than they will value your esoteric reaction to the envionments in which you have lived which is an an important hook to get people’s interest and attention and respect
As to your questions
1. Should it be written at all? the answer is of course yes because I suspect you will regret it if you don’t have a go …..starting is all important and what you write will tell you whether you should persevere ……but don’t be a perfectionist …..I detected perfectionism in our exchanges which was one of my keys to strategy …..f**k it Van Gogh hardly sold a painting in his life but had much to offer. R.S Thomas wrote for himself and despised the world outside rural Wales (and was non too complimentary about his chosen environment) Sceondly, since extraverts are responsible for most of the interesting things that are done in the world ….balls …..the extraverts deal well with the exoteric intraverts with the more interesting esoteric
2. how can I attribute these phenomena to their extraversion? I don’t know the phenomena to which you refer ….but if i undertand your worry correctly some great truths are paradoxical or appear as such when first discovered ….my inability at Physics when young was based on such inability to understand phenomenal paradoxes (I am thinking wave theory which I only came to partially understand when trying to help my children)
3 Thirdly, how can I possibly make it readable and interesting without being libellous, or knowing what is libellous? Well that depends what you write and how you phrase it but that is waaaay down the line ….write first for yourself don’t look too far ahead (its that perfectionism rearing its ugly head again).
I am big on quotes …..the March of a Thousand miles starts with the first step
How not to do it is contained in the opening pages of one of Camus’s novels whose name escapes me (possiblt The Plague?) where a Doctor who wished to write the perfect novel, died and amongst his papers was an endlessly revised chapter of a novel he wished to write (essentially peerless classical descriptive prose but devoid of message)
Good Fortune Sean I mean it
Fat Steve June 10, 2016 at 10:39 pm: My recollection of the Camus novel was only partly correct ….it was the Plague but the charachter was
Joseph Grand: Joseph Grand is a fifty-year-old clerk for the city government. He is tall and thin. Poorly paid, he lives an austere life, but he is capable of deep affection. In his spare time, Grand polishes up his Latin, and he is also writing a book, but he is such a perfectionist that he continually rewrites the first sentence and can get no further. One of his problems in life is that he can rarely find the correct words to express what he means. Grand tells Rieux that he married while still in his teens, but overwork and poverty took their toll (Grand did not receive the career advancement that he had been promised), and his wife Jeanne left him. He tried but failed to write a letter to her, and he still grieves for his loss.
Sean Coleman June 11, 2016 at 12:27 am: Fat Steve

Thanks again for the comments.

Yes, I was fortunate with my teachers at both levels, and pretty good at university too. My advocacy of hierarchy is, like yours, partly from my own experience. If there is too much freedom you are at the mercy of the informal hierarchy of your classmates instead and then dull lessons are the least of your worries. My lot weren’t too bad, and provided plenty of laughs, but I can imagine what it would be like if you had a proper mafia.

I wouldn’t be in favour of thrashings, especially by prefects, and couldn’t imagine how that would be remotely feasible in the changed conditions of today. I would however oppose the abolition of corporal punishment as part of an intolerant pc ideology. I am reminded of a fairly recent radio programme by our state broadcaster, RTE, which I am a little surprised even got aired, let alone won an award. It was about Máire Bean Uí Chribín, a very traditionally-minded lady (an extravert I am pretty sure) who took a passionate interest in the education of inner city Dublin children and getting them to progress to much better things through that route. She was at the same time very Catholic and very religious, and to make matters worse for our pc commissars (there is far less opposition among the educated classes in Ireland than there is in England, where at least something still remains, for the time being, of civil and legal institutions to protect the individual and minority views, such as traditional Catholicism), to make matters worse she was also strong on the Irish language. She would be trotted out in later years from time to time onto talk shows during our own culture wars as an example of the awful barbarity the country had woken up and escaped from. What made me laugh, however, was her single-handed campaign against the campaign to ban corporal punishment, and in her copying of the revolutionaries’ tactics by turning up at her opponents’ (the abolitionists) meetings with some of her ‘girls’ and disrupting them, jumping up all over the place waving placards and yelling slogans. Well, I thought it was funny. Are we starting this all over again, by the way?

Here’s another view of schools and discipline, from a psychological types perspective (your turn to groan). Susan Cain in her book, Quiet, seems to be looking at this general area because she sees ‘quiet’ children (I think she is careful to avoid the workdintrovert as she recognizes it isn’t that easy to distinguish between them and extraverts – I am not sure as I read the French translation, hedging my bets) being at a disadvantage in American schools where extravert values such as group activities and self assertiveness are over-emphasized. I don’t think she gets the difference between the two groups (unlike Rowe) as shown by her examples, but that’s by the by. I suspect that school rules are so rigid in order to cope with extravert pupils who are always pushing boundaries. These are the same children who complain at the time, and even more later on in life, that school wasn’t for them, ‘but’ invariably ‘see, I made a success of my life in spite of them!’ A case could, perhaps, be made for the introverts who stick to the rules and get on with it, abiding by innumberable petty rules because some of their classmates would run riot without them. Then they leave, and the extraverts run off to innovate and ‘enterpreneurate’ using up all their pent-up energy while they are left standing looking after them and asking themselves: ‘So, wtf was all that about then?’ But there’s more. Some of their old classmates return as journalists, politicians and spokespersons, kicking up a fuss to change everything they believed in because that’s not what ‘everyone’ does anymore. Of course, it’s not that simple, but you might see my point.

I’m afraid you got it wrong about me thinking I am valued for my academic achievements at school. As a rule I don’t tell anyone and I don’t know anyone else who does either. I only told you in an attempt to shut you up (in the nicest possible way of course). Same about the perfectionism: I am the greatest sloven that ever walked the earth. Like all extraverts there is an organizing principle to everything I do, but I only ever see the wooden surface of my work desk when I clear it to move somewhere else. It is more I am uncertain where to pitch it. I am inclined to want to play it for laughs. It won’t be tightly argued as I can’t force much order on something so vast and so messy. Well, all right I could easily do a bit of that, but it would have to be more of a ‘hey, look what I found’ kind of approach. Perhaps I will just tell a story, like Max Bygraves. I have at least found a ‘voice’ from writing on weblogs, when I let myself go, but I don’t know if mockery will transfer easily to the bigger canvass.

My concern about writing it at all was of a Pandora’s Box variety. Well there is really know need to worry. Rowe has already opened it and nobody seems to have noticed, or have just forgotten, which is a little odd because it throws the intellectual furniture in the room over (or what little of it that remains standing after the revolutionaries and the varies elephants hanging about). There were a couple of nights where I had cold sweats, in a sort of enjoyable, nothing-too-threatening, self-indulgent kind of way but, when I do think about it (and I’m getting bored of it by now) it just makes me laugh because it is so absurd. And if I’m wrong and it is all a delusion (as must be the most likely outcome) well, that’s a cracker too. Those are the funniest of all. Like when a smiling service officer would enter the room with the post on a summer’s morning, early (as in the ballad), before anyone else had arrived, just myself pretending to read a very important document in a shaft of sunlight falling in gently from the window behind, and she would linger by the door for a full minute, studying intently the beauty of my face, not because (mind you) she fancied me or anything (she had never shown a flicker of interest before and was really quite impertinent considering her lowly station) but because she had heard reports from the girls upstairs and wanted to see for herself what they had claimed to have seen. And then I would imagine God talking to me. ‘Sean,’ he would say. ‘Sean, I admit I have had a few laughs at your expense over the years (in fact we all have) but now, just this once, I want you to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the universe.’ Then, one day, just as I was walking past the Odeon a haggard old beggarman approached me. Raising a hideous arm and with woeful countenance he began, thrice, in a voice clear and horrible to curse…

I could use that voice and tell them a story. What d’ya reckon?
Fat Steve June 11, 2016 at 10:21 am: Hey Sean Grear prose and you are starting to find your voice that I think people may be interested in listening to …..but for my taste perhaps a little too anxious for the reader to reach the same conclusions as yourself ……but f**k my opinion which is that of self appointed lit crit without training …… what matters is that you may have picked up on an idea that might serve you well and get you heard if that is what you ultimately come to want . As to your thesis its yours but as to what you write you almost say don’t bother with me …..cut to the chase and read Rowe (Rowe has already opened it) ….there is an adage ‘Good writers borrow Great Writers steal’ …..the theft is though invariably light fingered, performed with elegance and disguised because the thief makes greater use of the idea than the person who first thought of it.
I am afraid attitudes to corporal punishment is something of a touchstone to me as to whether I am likely to identify with an individual …..at the wire I believe the essence of somone’s spirit is the taboos they hold ….those dark thickets in a man’s mind that he identifies by that nebulous and perhaps irrational word ‘evil’ …..for me as you will have picked up from my comments to Odile the starting point of all things is ‘Primum Non Nocere’
I must draw our exchanges to a close …..I read and post here for as a break from a legal case that I have been working on in a non professional capacity for now some years…..a periodic break to some moral sanity during a ‘working’ day but a longer break beckons (absent of course the legal case flairing up as legal cases are prone to do at the most inopportune time) .
Sean Coleman June 11, 2016 at 5:06 pm: Fat Steve

Thanks for your comments. My final word also as this has already taken far more time than I had anticipated.

You have some useful points to make, some of which are wide of the mark (as I am sure many of mine are too). That sounds as if I am just being polite, but it isn’t. You do make some interesting points.

As you will have guessed, my final paragraph is the kind of ‘voice’ which can emerge if I just cut loose, and I imagine this is the case with most people. That was just nonsense, of course, but a few risks have to be taken to write anything interesting (extraverts don’t have a complete monopoly on risk taking). You are also right about Rowe: I don’t want to merely rehash what she has already said, rather I want to link extraversion with political correctness. ‘Great writers steal’ is true, of course. Perhaps you have read Alvarez’s The Writer’s Voice.

Just to make clear, I am not an advocate of corporal punishment, but rather I instinctively resist all changes which are foisted on us, even if many of them prove to be for the better. I can of course perfectly understand your aversion to it, and would not be pleased to see uniformed dwarves administering floggings in schools (or any similar nonsense).

We agree on far more than might be apparent from these exchanges, which is often the case. Good luck with the break.
Fat Steve June 12, 2016 at 12:56 pm: Sean by one of those odd happenstances not easily explained by chance someone with whom I am in correspondence happened to send me a quote by Jung …..actually within the context of investment strategy (rather than some metaphysical debate) but which was so on point with our discussions I just had to send it to you since as you say our views in the round may not be so different ….so here it is
Carl Jung opined that, “The wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”
Now have definately got to close
Sean Coleman June 12, 2016 at 9:17 pm: Well I wasn’t going to say this in case you thought I had a screw loose that a couple of days ago I found myself looking at my horoscope for the first time in 40 years (I don’t believe in it), purely by accident, and it helped influence me to change my tone. It went something like: As you know well a lot of things have been thrown at you of late but among them there is something of value: pick it up and examine it. I don’t know about that, but (as Jimmy Greaves used to say), ‘It’s a funny old world, Saint.’

Fat Steve June 6, 2016 at 2:57 pm

Anna
Just a couple of further points having read the Chairpersons opening statement
a) I find the use of the term ‘Truth Comission’ disturbing ….Can there ver be the WHOLE truth at this distance of time ….less than the WHOLE Truth is not the TRUTH.
b) and insurancecompanies (which are accused of obstructing admissions of liability in child abuse claims, and thereby defeating the right to truth for victims and survivors). A really important point that often distorts the law by reducing it to ££££

Eric June 8, 2016 at 11:54 am: Truth Commission : a worthy Stalinist statement.

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Moor Larkin June 6, 2016 at 3:44 pm

Think it’s important to distinguish between children, and 15 year-olds.

dearieme June 6, 2016 at 6:44 pm

The trouble is that Savile and Janner were such horrible creeps that the public will jump to the conclusion that they musta dunnit. Stands to reason, mite.

GG June 6, 2016 at 7:09 pm

Ok, I also don’t *know* whether Janner was guilty or not. But Henriques is pretty damning, if only in a circumstantial sort of way:-

https://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/reports/henriques_report_190116.pdf

Can’t speak for the rest of you but I don’t go trolling round children’s homes on a regular basis (as seems is undisputed about Janner) nor do I make a habit of booking myself into hotel rooms with underage boys or having them stay over at home when my wife goes on holiday (as also seems undisputed). Never mind send letters which Henriques QC reads as suggestive of sexual relations with children. Or have I misunderstood the report?

Moor Larkin June 6, 2016 at 8:29 pm

[semi] retired lawyers writing reports on behalf of other lawyers. The Levitt report that was written about Savile appears to me to have some very strange angles and even seems to present a false picture, although I’d have to bang on about it for a long time to make my point; it’s all about the subtlety of lawyer-speak. Can’t say as I’m interested enough to read the Henriques one but am as dubious about Henriques’ belief in a person being innocent until proved guilty as I am about Smith’s belief in the principle. https://twitter.com/moor_facts/status/689428296086335488

Eric June 8, 2016 at 11:52 am: We know Jimmy hung around hospitals- OK raised millions of quids for hospitals – so he could grope befuddled patients under the sheets while they were still under an anesthetic haze after their tonsils operation. I don’t understand though why he had to climb through ward windows to abuse, and then climb out again when he had his own keys to every ward in the country.

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Bandini June 6, 2016 at 9:53 pm

“The letters were written by Janner to Complainant 1 and confirmed that some form of relationship existed. They did not establish a sexual relationship but a number of letters were signed ‘love Greville’… …While the letters did not provide proof of a sexual relationship, they are, in my judgement, consistent with such a relationship.”

Janner comes across as being smitten and Complainant 1 was apparently not averse to seeing him (but Beck put an end to that):
“Some 14 years passed before Complainant 1 saw Janner again. They started writing to each other and Complainant 1 invited Janner to his wedding. Janner did not attend but sent a cheque for £50 and subsequently some money and clothes for the new baby.”

It’s such a mess this case that there’s little chance of ever seeing the truth emerge. I have my own ideas about what MAY have happened, but they certainly do not include Janner “raping and torturing” boys in the Houses of Parliament as that puffed-up sack of shit Simon Danczuk claimed (for a substantial tabloid payout).

On the topic of what can seem suspicious behaviour, I’m reminded of the death of Patrick Moore; the evil ‘truthseekers’ immediately pounced on his corpse – unmarried, a bit odd, obviously a ‘paedo’…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2249168/Revealed-Patrick-Moores-secret-sons-A-deeply-moving-interview-men-adopted-astronomer-losing-fathers.html

Moor Larkin June 6, 2016 at 11:24 pm

Bet that Doctor Barnardo just did all that building homes for lost boys mostly so he could get in their pants too.

Bandini June 6, 2016 at 11:32 pm: Careful, Moor, he’s only been dead for 111-years (a sixth of the number of the Beast)… you’ll give ’em ideas! Oh hang on, they’ve got there before you:

“At the time of the Whitechapel murders, due to the supposed medical expertise of the Ripper, various doctors in the area were suspected. Barnardo was named a possible suspect. Ripperologist [ho ho ho!] Gary Rowlands theorized that due to Barnardo’s lonely childhood he had anger which led him to murder prostitutes. However, there is no solid evidence he committed the murders…”

Sounds like a case for Tim ‘Tabloid’ Tate & Don ‘Liar’ Hale (and their shared buddy, the befuddled ex-copper).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_John_Barnardo

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Anon June 9, 2016 at 2:34 pm: Moor Larkin,

Re: “Bet that Doctor Barnardo just did all that building homes for lost boys mostly so he could get in their pants too”

Well what other motivation could their possibly have been? He had nothing (on the face of it) in common with them…. (sarcasm)

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Mariana June 7, 2016 at 11:56 am

Yes,but how do you sign off a letter to a teenager you’ve been treating as a surrogate son? ‘I remain your obedient servant’? As for inviting the boy round when his wife and daughter were on holiday, one son only decided to stay out overnight at the last minute and Henriques doesn’t say where the third child was. Janner put up with a lot from the boy but that is in keeping with his mission to save him. I’m reminded of the book written by the egregious Camila Batmanghelidjh before her downfall, where she lambasts a couple of foster parents for returning a child to care because he stole from them.
Actually, Batmanghelidjh is a good parallel. We now know about her extraordinary generosity to her favoutites: financing them through university, paying for a sex change, setting one up in a luxurious flat. I wonder how all this would have been interpreted if she was a man?

suffolkgirl June 7, 2016 at 12:23 am

I agree with Fat Steve that in the past, even in my slightly more recent experience, that many boys who had experience of grooming and sexual abuse by respected figures would rarely come forward of their own volition. The difference here,as Anna says, is that in this case there was an opportunity for either the boys or for staff to say what they knew in the context of a police investigation. It is hard to see why no one at all mentioned Janner then, until Beck’s statement, which was and is, again imho, dubious.

I read the Janner letter some time ago, and thought that it showed an emotional involvement which struck me as unusual, but the jury ought to still be out on that. The main worry for me is that there is no jury, just a truth commission, operating outside the norms of criminal justice. And of course always the money complicating the issues, and making me more cynical than I would otherwise be.
In other news I’ve just read on the Guardian website that the floodgates don’t seem to opening in Rotherham. Despite heavy involvement of police, charities, and, I’m sure, legal firms looking for clients, only a handful of complainants from the alleged 1400 victims have yet presented themselves. However, it’s early days, so I’m not reading too much into that,, as yet.

Moor Larkin June 7, 2016 at 8:10 am: “many boys who had experience of grooming and sexual abuse by respected figures would rarely come forward of their own volition”

Mainly because they didn’t want folk to think they were gay probably. If they’d been actually violently assaulted and beaten up, there would be no reason not to, because they could claim assault. This is exactly the same dynamic in the proliferation of female rape via grooming – which used to be called seduction.

The above all applies to knowing, sexually capable young people. The dynamics for pre-pubsecents would be entirely different.

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Alexander Baron June 7, 2016 at 2:25 am

The case against Janner is overwhelming. For ONE complainant. All the others are liars or head cases.

Moor Larkin June 7, 2016 at 8:11 am: Love-Crime?

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Eric June 8, 2016 at 11:44 am: Have finished reading a comprehensive overview of the Sandusky case in the USA and it really centered around one similar accusation from one complainant but then the flood gates were opened.
Each complainant received around $3M in compensation with a total cost to the university of around $200M which their insurers refused to cover due to many discrepancies in abuse accounts given, dates and so on. Few real checks of accounts were made and payouts flowed freely. One alleged victim’s account was almost refused when it was shown he was actually 17 not 15 as he claimed which meant he would have been legal aged. However he recalled that despite not complaining for 40 years he suddenly ‘remembered ‘ he had told the head coach at the time who despite actively disliking Sandusky who at the time was of no consequence, he did nothing and thus his fate was sealed as well.

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Jonathan King June 7, 2016 at 8:35 pm

Guess who was Master of Trinity College Cambridge when I was there, Anna. R A Butler. You would not believe the filthy things he did to me. Do you have Liz Dux’s number? As for Janner – like you I have no idea. Never met the man. But I suspect, like many, he was initially the victim of exaggeration rather than total fabrication, combined with invention when the compensation culture of the False Allegations Industry kicked in, thanks to the media.

Tom O’Carroll June 7, 2016 at 10:09 pm

>”Never met the man.”

I did. I interviewed him when I was a young journalist. Seemed a very nice guy.

Bandini June 7, 2016 at 10:27 pm

Well that’ll certainly help restore his posthumous reputation – an character reference from a bloke recently convicted of charges of “indecently assaulting one boy and one of gross indecency with the other”, the boys being 9 and 10 year old brothers. Aye, just what Janner’s family will have been hoping for!

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 10:31 am

@Bandini Aye, just what Janner’s family will have been hoping for!
Well done Bandini you just made me splutter my coffee all over my computer screen with a a fit of laughter

Bandini June 8, 2016 at 11:08 am

To be fair, Fat Steve, I posted the above before having seen Tom’s comment below (10:07pm) in which he raised the subject of his recent conviction, otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned it. (Surprised not to see more made of this by the ‘campaigners’, to be honest.)

I then replied to the 10:07 comment without first having read his own article which is linked to – it’s worth a read, and if the sentiment expressed is genuine might surprise some:
“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.”

I have to disagree with the claim that the younger of the two did not wish to see him ‘punished’ – not jailed, perhaps, but the punishment in this case IS the conviction.

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 11:21 am

@Bandini
As you will see below I did turn briefly to O’Carrols web site …..I regret (well perhaps not) having no patience to persevere with someone who is so subjective in his views ……and quite unable to see the objective issue let alone address it.

Tom O’Carroll June 8, 2016 at 12:15 pm

I have just seen your latest post, Bandini. Thanks for taking the trouble to read my blog. I drafted this a little earlier:

I don’t want to talk only to people who agree with me. However, this is not easy to avoid because those of us who take a positive view of consensual adult-child sexual relationships are seldom allowed even a word in edgeways. Even on an commendably pro-free speech forum such as this one, this topic tends to bring out the censorious impulse, even though it may be expressed in a courteous and friendly way (which I appreciate), as by The Blocked Dwarf.

As for your substantive point, it is important (I’ll answer it) but it is also a smokescreen, deflecting attention from the unanswered evidence about active, non-coerced, prepubescent sexuality, including sex with an adult, that I presented in response to Moor Larkin – evidence given under oath in court by an adult reporting on his own childhood experience. Are you saying this evidence is false or unimportant? If so, on what basis? How come we must always listen to the victim except when they say they do not feel they were victimised or harmed? Isn’t that a classic example of listening only to people who agree with you?

Now, those ten pints. The idea that masturbating a willing child, which is what I did, is inherently and obviously dangerous, like drunk driving, is pervasive in our society but it is simply false. It is a falsehood generated and reinforced through groupthink. Just like the grotesque calumnies to which certain public figures and entertainers have been subjected, it is a falsehood given immense, seemingly unstoppable energy in our society because it is in the interests of so many people –narcissistic attention seekers, compensation hunters, tabloid sensation mongers and populist politicians – to keep the story going, cranking it up to ever greater hysteria and disjunction from firm evidence.

The evidence I have presented was not just sworn court testimony, it was an uncontested account, accepted by everyone, even the police and the judge. Even the younger brother, at whose instigation the prosecution was brought, said in his written statement that he thought I was a nice guy at the time, and for several years afterwards this view did not change. What changed his view? Cultural influences of a kind we should all wish to see challenged because their basis is alarmingly irrational, based in dogma not fact, just like the dangerous trend for believing the “victim” irrespective of the evidence.

The evidence I have given is of course only a single personal case. But it is strong on a Black Swan basis [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory ]: it is enough to refute those who deny that prepubescent children are ever sexually active without adult encouragement or that they never give de facto consent.

So, having discovered that there is at least one Black Swan in the world, might further investigation in the right places find an abundance of them? Evidence from over half a century ago (the massive and highly authoritative Kinsey surveys) points strongly in this direction, as does a great deal of less formal evidence. But governments actively suppress research into child sexuality – for which I could give extensive evidence if anyone doubts the point. There is also the Rind et al. meta-analysis of 1998, very controversial at the time but since replicated and now accepted by leading academic psychologists, which found very little connection on average between childhood sexual contacts with adults and later trauma; and there is reason to believe the small connection discerned would have disappeared entirely if the survey had been limited to contacts in which the children were willing participants. I do not seek to justify coerced encounters, of course, which are frequently traumatic both immediately and in the longer term.

Moor Larkin June 8, 2016 at 1:01 pm

“Now, those ten pints.” …
That’s more like what we like to hear in this bar…

Not quite sure why I got an especial name-check, but if the landlady don’t mind, I think folk might clarify their thoughts by taking account of “The Trauma Myth” – http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/and-now-for-something-controversial_27.html

That is assuming anyone in Anglo-Saxonia ever wants to have a rational discussion about this taboo and all the legal evil that is flowing from the wilful turning away from that discussion.

Tom O’Carroll June 8, 2016 at 3:30 pm

Excellent blog, @Moor Larkin. Susan Clancy’s research findings are hugely important but she drew some very odd conclusions. You really nailed it in this paragraph, in my view:

“I am in no position to argue with her on a clinical basis but I was quite staggered to realise that at no point did she address the perfectly obvious reason why her patients might become traumatised many years later, as adults. Surely it would have most to do with the fact that their entire society was screaming at them that they had been involved in the foulest crime known to that society. How would such a person come to terms with the fact that they had been engaged in what all their peers deemed the most horrendous crime known to man – but they hadn’t minded at the time…? It’s enough to make the strongest-minded person develop a deep neurosis surely? Clancy just does not seem to see that angle, and so she recommends that the USA revises it’s legal processes.”

I also see that in your very next paragraph you address the question of why delayed trauma would be less likely in the case of adolescents than the “actual children” whose experience is reported by Clancy. I very much agree with what you say. My name check was in connection with your earlier reference, here, to the child/adolescent distinction. Now I understand the context in which you made it I don’t think I need to add anything.

A Potted Plant June 13, 2016 at 11:01 am

@Moor – I was exploited by pornographers, as a teen, along with my buddy (we were really boyfriends, but we couldn’t allow ourselves to acknowledge this at that point in our lives). I didn’t feel exploited by these men when it was happening, because I had no experience of, and very little understanding of, what the reality of adult sex lives and especially gay men’s sex lives really was. I literally didn’t know any better and for years after I just assumed what took place must have been “normal” for “in-the know” gay swingers.

While the group sex and the photo-taking was happening, I was feeling paralyzed. Not by fear – I was so stoned that I could only have muttered an amused “far-out, man!” if the ceiling had collapsed on us. I was paralyzed by being obsessively focused on falsely portraying myself to these men as VERY experienced, knowledgeable, and “cool with it all”, about gay adult sex parties. I couldn’t have voiced objections to anything that took place, for fear of revealing the truth about my (our) sex party newbie-ness. But there would never have been an opportunity to say no, or ask a question, or even “hey, hold on a minute!” – because these men were such practiced and professional exploiters of youths. Everything was tightly choreographed and controlled by them, and seemed to be happening so fast. They had total control over us, physically, but not in an abusive manner – they were not sadistic, just very firm and unyielding.
I didn’t possess an informed perspective, from which I could compare and contrast that experience, until about age 19 or 20. But once I did have such a perspective, I finally understood just how exploited we really had been. I could finally see that false front of pretended understanding in other youth, and how obviously “virginal” we must actually have appeared to these pornographers. I became very angry and resentful about the whole thing. But the worst of my new feelings was a haunting and depressing self-doubt. At the same time that I was finally developing full acceptance of my status as a gay man, I was simultaneously plagued by fears that I might be doomed to become just like those pornographers. They had claimed to be a gay couple, and I was a gay man, did that mean I would be a callous exploiter of youths? I nearly destroyed myself over these doubts and fears, but of course I eventually resolved them and carried on with my life.

I never felt “traumatized” by the actual sexual activity, though.

A Potted Plant June 13, 2016 at 1:21 pm: I should clarify, by saying that my buddy and I had not intended to become involved in sex with these men and certainly not to perform group sex on camera. We met them at a park and they invited us to smoke a joint with them at their nearby place. After the smoking, they offered to blow us and we agreed mostly to appear very mature and wordly (which we were not). The blowing very quickly turned into group sex, with no explicit consent from us, and then to a permanent pornographic record of our participation in that – again without our explicit consent. But for all I knew at the time, perhaps we would have expected the group sex and the photography if we really HAD been worldy-wise, perhaps all these things normally followed an offer to smoke pot with gay men, and we should have understood that (?).

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Tom O’Carroll June 14, 2016 at 6:08 pm: I was struck by this statement:

>I never felt “traumatized” by the actual sexual activity, though.

Quite.

You experienced emotional trauma from being exploited in a sexual situation but not from the sex per se.

Unfortunately, emotional trauma can arise in all sorts of bruising personal contexts, even when no one is at fault and there is no sex: think of all those painfully crushed “crushes” at school, and any amount of unrequited love later on. While it makes sense to avoid situations that are obviously going to end in tears, there are also dangers inherent in trying to cushion young people from every kind of new adventure and misadventure. It can all get a bit sterile and life-denying, keeping kids away from the experience they need in order to reach maturity.

Where specifically sexual experience is concerned, it seems to me our culture is in a bit of a bind. Personally, I think puberty is overrated as a great divide (adrenarche, at age 6-8, may be more important, both physiologically and psychologically), but those who set great store on puberty have to take account of the fact that the age of puberty is getting lower and lower, making it harder to hold back early sexual experience, which will not always be with the nicest people even when they are age mates.

At the same time, modern society is getting more and more complex so that a much longer preparation is needed to reach adulthood well qualified to earn a good independent income and generate the resources to start a home and family of one’s own.

So, how is this tension to be resolved? By the ever greater and longer-lasting policing of early experience, so that sex stays linked to full adulthood? (which it never used to be, BTW, except in terms of PIV intercourse for girls before marriage, for which age 12 and above was normative from Ancient Rome to mid-Victorian England). It is do-able, I suppose, but at the price of crazily neurotic sensitivity to physical proximity. For a good example see a story today about a mother’s concern over a swimming instructor:

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mom-pens-angry-letter-over-daughters-swimming-165323321.html

The mother clearly feels entitled to impose her view of what is “appropriate” no matter what the cost to anyone else – in this case, I would guess, the casual humiliation of the entirely blameless swimming instructor.

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Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 1:40 pm

@Tom O Carroll
As a starting point before looking for justification you might ponder by what right you arrogate the right to make value judgements as to the lives of others in particular children .
Your language is just so telling and would be an almost text book example of opinion that that elides immediately into justification rather a) establishes your locus b) addresses the central issue c) criticises and dismisses others in language that having failed to deal with a) and b) might be more applicable to yourself.
Whereas I think of Blocked Dwarf as the short one from with flatlands (with a measure of affection) I shall henceforth think of you as Black Swan …..Odile might be better …..or perhaps Von Rothbart ….absent of course as you will have guessed any affection

Tom O’Carroll June 8, 2016 at 2:35 pm

@ Fat Steve

“Odile, the Black Swan is the daughter of Von Rothbart, who is also an evil witch and who is willing to follow in her father’s footsteps.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Lake#Odile]

Is there a vacancy for Witch-Hunter General at the moment, FS? Looks like you might make a good candidate!

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 4:44 pm: Well done Odile ….not a difficult allusion though interesting you had to google it to get it
The terminology is Witch Finder General …..no not really my bag though I perform that function within the confines of my own little kingdom …..if you are in East Sussex though let me know in advance and I will have my Groundsman build a pyre.
Might I suggest that rather from starting from the premise of how much good you are doing you reflect on the adage ‘Primum Non Nocere’

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The Blocked Dwarf June 8, 2016 at 6:39 pm

Even on an commendably pro-free speech forum such as this one, this topic tends to bring out the censorious impulse, even though it may be expressed in a courteous and friendly way (which I appreciate), as by The Blocked Dwarf.

Then I expressed myself badly. There wasn’t so much censorious impulse as concern for this blog (gist to the mill of the anti-Raccoon crowd). I don’t wish you hadn’t written it but that I hadn’t read it – the disturbing mental images are my problem not yours…as Bandini’s obvious discomfort is his.

Moor Larkin June 8, 2016 at 12:31 pm

I recall the only voice raised in public defiance of the Jimmy Savile legends at one time, was the Yorkshire Ripper. Given his proximity to Broadmoor, it seemed odd that his account was not viewed as credible.

Tom O’Carroll June 7, 2016 at 10:07 pm

Great blog, great comments. I agree with Bandini that there is no evidence to support allegations of Greville Janner “raping and torturing” boys; but, having read the Henriques report, it seems highly probable to me that he was attracted to adolescent boys and had some sort of sexual relations with Complainant 1.

Not that Complainant 1 was complaining at the time or until long afterwards: in his late twenties he invited Janner to his wedding, which hardly seems the action of a deeply aggrieved man.

So if there was a relationship it appears to have been a consensual one in all but the legal sense – a crucially important point, I would say, but in a culture going ever more barking mad over child “protection” no one wants to know that.

Adolescents are developmentally beyond childhood as traditionally understood; and, as Moor Larkin has pointed out, “The dynamics for pre-pubescents would be entirely different.”

Even in this regard, though, I would make a plea for each case to be taken on its merits, and I am now in a position to cite my own. When I was convicted in December in an “historic” case from the 1970s, the middle-aged man who gave the only evidence in the case described his sexual experience with me when he was a nine- and ten-year-old boy all those years ago. He said I was always “very respectful” towards him.

He had not been sexually unwilling either. At the age of seven or eight, he told the court, an older boy had introduced him to “wanking”, and he needed no further encouragement. When he did this quite openly in full view of me and his younger brother, 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.

Unusual? Not his prepubescent sexuality, no. What is understandably rare in these difficult times, though, is such bravely honest testimony. It is a major part of what kept me out of prison, and I am profoundly grateful for it. I am not saying my behaviour was wise, by the way. As I told the judge, if I had known that one of the parties – the younger brother – would feel a lasting sense of grievance I would not have done what I did. I blogged about the case here:

https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/a-rare-escape-without-bribery-or-bloodshed/

I also blogged about Greville Janner:

https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/v-i-p-fiasco-you-heard-it-here-first/

Bandini June 7, 2016 at 10:51 pm

You didn’t know how the younger brother would feel many years later but if you HAD done you wouldn’t have done what you did!
Unless paedophiles are blessed with an ability to see into the future (which obviously wasn’t the case here) you’ve summed up pretty well why your argument (or advocacy) is wrong-headed:

‘I drank ten pints and drove a car into a pram and killed a baby but if I’d known that drinking ten pints before getting behind the wheel MIGHT have led to this I wouldn’t have done it! But how could I possibly have guessed where my innocuous actions might lead to?!?’

I suppose you could spend your time chatting to people who’ll tell you their tales of drinking ten pints and how THEY never killed anyone, and maybe convince yourself that it’s okay…

Moor Larkin June 8, 2016 at 12:08 pm

Was anyone in PIE actually interested in young girls? I’ve yet to find evidence that any of them were not gay in gender inclination.

Tom O’Carroll June 8, 2016 at 2:43 pm

Yes, most PIE members were BLs but with a smallish heterosexual minority of male GLs, including me (being paedo-bisexual).

In our magazine, Magpie, there was a rather patronisingly named section for the minority, called Hets’ Corner.

tdf June 8, 2016 at 11:33 pm

Tom, seeing as ‘Magpie’ has been mentioned, have you any comment on the claims by Don Hale that one issue included an advertisement advertising sailing trips with Ted Heath?

I am aware that some back issues of ‘Magpie’ were put up on the blog of Ian Pace, there was certainly no mention of any such advertisement in what Pace put up.

tdf June 9, 2016 at 12:02 am

To clarify, this article, among others, deals with claims about Heath that Hale made last year (the article doesn’t specifically refer to Magpie, but Hale claimed on Twitter that an advert in Magpie advertising sailing trips with Ted Heath was among the files that he’d seen in Barbara Castle’s records):

http://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2015/08/07/special-branch-threatened-me-over-ted-heath-dossier/

The posts from Ian Pace’s blog can be found here:

https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/pie-documentary-evidence-3-from-magpie-9-17-trigger-warning-contains-disturbing-material/

(If you don’t wish to answer the question, no worries. )

Tom O’Carroll June 9, 2016 at 11:53 am

I doubt whether Ian Pace and I would find each other good company over a few beers but he is clearly a painstaking researcher – an honest one, too, as far as I can tell, albeit so mired in his quest to sniff out skulduggery that he can never credit anything but the very darkest possible interpretation of all he sees. For this reason you may be sure, of course, that if he had seen material in Magpie along the lines suggested the implications would not have been lost on him: he would have put out the word and it would have been splashed on the front page of the nationals before you could say Morning Cloud.

Thanks for linking to the story in the Jersey Evening Post. I had no idea, I must admit, that Don Hale is an OBE with a remarkably distinguished record as an investigative journalist, as confirmed by his Wikipedia entry, which reports that he has been national journalist of the year several times –albeit I think at least one of the Exaro scoundrels has also been so honoured, so the glitter of this bauble is rather dubious.

I have no idea whether his connection with Barbara Castle was as close as he claims or whether she came up with any documentary evidence about Ted Heath. His claim is that she showed him “a cutting about an adventure trip for boys in Jersey. It was a quarter of a page, and I think it was in a Scouting magazine or a magazine aimed at boys.” The feature apparently said “Join Uncle Ted on a trip of a lifetime” or “something like” that.

For me, this is all hopelessly vague. He was a journalist. If he thought it suspicious, why didn’t he make a note of the exact wording, and details of the journal’s name and date? Better still, why didn’t ask if he could make a photocopy? Achieving journalist of the year status, it seems, means knowing when to STOP investigating. That point is reached, apparently, when facts threaten to get in the way of a good story.

Anyway, lest there be any doubt, I can tell you categorically that there was never any such article or advert in Magpie. Does it need pointing out that an ad or feature article of this sort in an openly pro-paedophilia journal linked directly to the name of a prime minister would have been absurdly reckless. The press even in those days would have been on it in a flash. He would have been politically ruined at best.

Hale also made another absurb claim, in the Sunday Mirror:

“Baroness Castle showed Heath was present at Westminster meetings with paedophile rights campaigners from the PIE group. Heath is said to have attended at least a quarter of the 30 or so monthly or bi-weekly meetings. His name is said to have appeared on minutes of the private gatherings, also apparently attended by other MPs, along with scoutmasters and headteachers. But the Castle files have been missing since the mid 1980s.”

PIE never met in Westminster. Our committee usually convened at a member’s flat in Clapham, later Hackney. Detailed minutes were indeed taken, but none will ever be found with his name among those listed in attendance. There were none. Again, think of the preposterous risk degree of risk to himself in allowing that to happen. The man might well have fancied boys but he was not an idiot.

Nor, sad to say, did he ever grace us with his presence on an unrecorded basis, or going by another name. I blogged about this:
[ https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/prime-minister-was-my-buddy-not/ ] Even as a socialist, I’d love it if I could brag that Ted Heath was once a buddy of mine; but, hey, it seems I don’t have to: I can leave it to Don Hale and all the other conspiracy-theory clowns!

Bandini June 9, 2016 at 12:22 pm

I don´t have time to reply to other comments at moment but couldn’t let slippery ol’ Hale go without a(nother) mention for Moor Larkin’s impressive work:
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/a-victim-law-ghost-writer.html

Hale’s Wikipedia entry is indeed impressive:
“He has also been national journalist of the year on three occasions… …[citation needed]”

His big claim to fame was involving himself in a successful campaign to overturn an unsafe (on a technicality) conviction; his spin-off book threw the mud at over twenty people (all completely innocent) who were at one point thinking of suing him. It’s a shame they didn’t go through with it as maybe the world would have been spared his bare-faced bullshitting that having a big award apparently allows one to get away with.

Re Barbara Castle: two writers of Castle biographies were contacted via Twitter (by the indefatigable @colinwforster) with such speed and ease that it momentarily made me consider signing-up myself. Anyway, no, they had no knowledge of the mythical ‘Castle Dossier’ nor of any particular interest on her part in the subject. I imagine she once mentioned that Heath was a bit odd & Hale overheard from afar as he was clearing the buffet-table at some event or other… and off he went!

He’s an absolute fraud. It’s no wonder people hold journalists in such low regard as they are never too keen on covering each others’ misdeeds.

tdf June 9, 2016 at 11:03 pm: Bandini,

Yes I do vaguely recall @colinwforster asking two writers of Castle biographies. I don’t know if the ‘Castle Dossier’ is entirely mythical – it’s possible that it exists (or existed) but that, much like with Geoff Dickens’ various ‘dossiers’ (largely a bunch of newspaper clippings, seemingly), there’s much less in it that some newspaper articles, Don Hale, etc, have suggested.

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tdf June 9, 2016 at 9:59 pm

Ok, thanks for response. It’s more or less as I expected to be honest.

By the way just to note in passing, I don’t think anyone at Exaro has an OBE or similar honour, possibly you are thinking of Graham Wilmer, who was on the original panel of the inquiry, before they changed the structure?

tdf June 9, 2016 at 10:10 pm

^ oops, actually on re-reading your post, you are probably referring to the National Journalist of the year title, not the OBE. it seems David Hencke won Political Journalist of the Year in 2012.

Tom O’Carroll June 9, 2016 at 11:20 pm: Yes, I wasn’t thinking of the OBE, and it was indeed probably Henke’s award I was vaguely remembering.
tdf June 10, 2016 at 12:28 am: Contemplating Exaro’s awards (apparently they have nominated themselves in some cases?) I am reminded of the Douglas Adams character who won the award for the Most Gratutious use of the Word ‘Fuck’ in a screenplay.

http://www.salon.com/2016/06/09/bernies_road_ahead_three_options_for_the_sunset_of_his_campaign/

The Blocked Dwarf June 7, 2016 at 11:14 pm

and I am now in a position to cite my own
I don’t speak for the Landlady, and this is only a suggestion from me meant in a really friendly way, but I do know she dislikes any comment that might give the blog a ‘paedo defender’ appearance. If you want to post such things in future (and I hope you do) you might want to run it by her first. Describing underage mutual masturbation etc could easily be seen in the wrong light.

The Blocked Dwarf June 7, 2016 at 11:27 pm

@ToC: PS it also conjures up mental images that I , and I suspect a great many of our fellows here, could quite happily live without. Not the graphicness of it (you were fairly tactful in your description) but in it’s honesty and passion. It’s late and I’m not expressing myself well so allow me to illustrate: When I write , say, ‘buggered his way through the mass ranks of Walton Boys Brigade’ then it is clearly not to be taken seriously, your account -however touching- was clearly meant with commendable honesty and openness.

Anna Raccoon June 8, 2016 at 1:52 pm

I understand your concern BD.

Tom is fully aware that I profoundly disagree with him on this issue, but I absolutely defend to the hilt his right to have and express an opinion that I don’t agree with.

My own view is that 16 was decided upon as the age of consent many years ago when puberty was generally much later than it is now, and pregnancy a near certainty after sex. Both factors have changed. Besides which, the powers that be could just as easily have settled on 14 at the time – or 18. Or even 20. They didn’t so I respect their decision.

I find it ridiculous that anyone should be pilloried (pace Barbara Hewson as well as Tom Carroll) for daring to raise the question as to whether that age should now be debated and possibly changed. We are quite happy to show evidence for and against the death penalty, for and against the European Union, for and against homosexuality – yet let anyone suggest that we even talk about changing the age of consent and there is utter hysteria and the person concerned should be hung drawn and quartered.

I uphold the law as it stands, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe we should debate it and alter it as new evidence comes to light.

Thank heavens people were eventually allowed to discuss whether the earth was flat or round….

Tom O’Carroll June 9, 2016 at 3:57 pm: This is perhaps a good point at which to express my appreciation not just of your stalwart commitment to free speech, Ms Raccoon, but of so much else besides. Only the fear of being boringly repetitious prevents me from dispatching missives of fulsome praise in response to nearly all of your blogs. Your writing is invariably witty and incisive, often on matters of great public importance, and colourfully interesting when it comes to the lighter side.

So, what’s not to like, except that your opinions do not always precisely coincide with my own? Yours, like everyone’s, have deep roots in your own experience from childhood onwards; they will not be shifted much by argument alone, no matter how sound in logic and well grounded in reliable evidence the case may be. This is perhaps no bad thing. Without some stability to our beliefs we would hardly know who we are or have any sense of direction. I find it frustrating though, as you may imagine, because I have only arguments and evidence to offer.

As for your personal strengths, I would of course single out your magnificent fortitude in the face of at times appalling adversity and the bold spirit (I am thinking of that dreadful sailing ship!) that makes you up for even the most daunting challenge.

Most of your readers, I suppose, myself included, find your work absolutely required reading in terms of the many important revelations you come up with, through digging deep into obscure committee reports, etc., so that we don’t have to – well, maybe we should but life is short.

So, Ms Raccoon, long may you and your writings prosper! I salute you!

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Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 10:36 am

@Tom O Carroll a consensual one in all but the legal sense
You just get it Tom old love …..you really just don’t get it

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 10:52 am

And Tom old Luv having flipped over to your blog I borrow your own words about others to describe your mindset
And what beliefs! What incredible credulity!

Fat Steve June 8, 2016 at 11:55 am

Duh !! My post above should read
@Tom O Carroll a consensual one in all but the legal sense
You just DONT get it Tom old Luv …..you really just don’t get it

Tom O’Carroll June 8, 2016 at 2:38 pm: >Duh !! My post above should read…

Don’t worry, @Fat Steve, I got it!

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A Potted Plant June 13, 2016 at 12:54 am

I concur – Complainant 1’s full statement is just remarkable and very damning for old Janner, so full of archetypal pederastic grooming offender behaviour patterns. The others seem frankly…not very impressive. Complainant 1 may not have been “complaining at the time”, but he was not the star-struck loverboy that Janner apparently perceived him to be, either. Statements that Complainant 1 made to some peers, during those times, reveal that he understood the relationship to be an essentially commercial one – with himself in the role of juvenile “escort” prostitute and Janner in the role of wealthy old client. Given the disparity in their life circumstances, the lure of all that Janner could offer him would have been as intoxicating as alcohol or drugs, so I would call the boy a coerced participant.

It is true that even pre-pubescent children sometimes experience specifically sexual “crushes”, the object of whom could be a peer or an older person. (This is not a universal experience, and some people who did not have that experience find the idea of specifically sexual childhood crushes inconceivable). I experienced sexual crushes for peers, myself, at a very young age but thankfully not for older persons.
I was once the object of a child’s sexual crush, as an adult, however. One of my college practicums involved participating in & evaluating an out-of-school care program for 6-12’s. There were two little 8 year old boys in the program who were “best-est buddies” – Mark and Bobby. Both cuter than a bug’s ear – out-going, athletic, smart, funny, mischievous, generous with their affection and totally endearing in their devotion to each other. Mark quickly took a shine to me and often recruited me as a participant in or observer of their games. By the end of the first month, Mark had taken to giving me a peck on the cheek goodbye as he left for home.
These boys sometimes enjoyed doing shockingly rude things in front of the adult enforcers of “good behaviour” in their lives, so I wasn’t surprised when they tested me one day with a tale of pulling their pants and underwear down in a park by their homes and chasing each other around in that state. “Some old people were watching us”, they informed me, and they thought that was hilariously funny. “That’s nice”, I deadpanned, not giving them any reaction. Another time, when I was helping Mark change into some athletic gear in the bathroom, he abruptly dropped his drawers and flashed me for a minute, then pulled them back up and laughed. I assumed this to be more “shocking the old people” mischief, and ignored it. At a later date, when the program went on an outing to a local swimming pool, Mark happened to be the only boy in attendance that day so we ended up alone in the change room together. Towelling off after our swim, Mark was openly staring at my body and suddenly bent over for a closer look (!), after which he repeatedly solicited me to do the same with him. Then, finally, “the light went on” in my clueless adult brain. I got it.
“Oh shit!” I said to myself, “this is not good”. When we were dressed, I sat down with him and told him that he must stop showing me his privates. If I was still a little boy I’d be happy to play naked games with you, I told him, but adults only play naked games with other adults and boys should only play naked games with other children. “You know there are bad men who make children get naked and then hurt them, don’t you?” I asked. “Yes”, he replied, “but I already know you’re not a bad man. You wouldn’t hurt me”.
At age 8, Mark could not conceive that a friend would ever betray his trust and hurt him – and that means he could only genuinely consent to sexual interaction with someone of equal naivety, regardless of how aggressively he might pursue such interaction with a more mature person.

Moor Larkin June 13, 2016 at 9:10 am

I’ve made no study of Janner but have the read Complainant 1 was 14 not 8, so I would refer the honourable gentleman to my earlier comment.
https://annaraccoon.com/2016/06/06/the-voices-begging-to-be-heard/comment-page-1/#comment-18205726434437864

A Potted Plant June 13, 2016 at 12:27 pm: @Moor – yes, and sorry I constructed that comment in a confusing manner. The story about childhood sexual crushes was in response to Tom’s court case related experience, not Janner’s complainant’s narrative.

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Tom O’Carroll June 14, 2016 at 6:15 pm

First of all, congratulations, APP, on your honest recognition that children can have sexual feelings and indeed passions. Your account of Mark’s determined bid for sexual intimacy with you at age 8 is an important testimony. But I wonder if you are drawing the right conclusions about it?

You wrote:

>At age 8, Mark could not conceive that a friend would ever betray his trust and hurt him – and that means he could only genuinely consent to sexual interaction with someone of equal naivety, regardless of how aggressively he might pursue such interaction with a more mature person.

This is an argument that could apply to non-sexual interactions as well. Like the two posts you made about being exploited as a teenager by adult pornographers, I would suggest it is over-cautious, and for similar reasons. See my separate response to that post.

Admittedly, that was about teenage experience, whereas an eight-year-old is far more likely to be naive, as you say.

But let’s take a non-sexual scenario and apply your logic to it. Let’s see where that takes us and whether you agree with my view. The three-paragraph passage below is from Chapter 9: “Power and Equality”, of my 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case:

It should also be realized that the danger of a child being emotionally bruised by a relationship with an adult is a possibility even if sex never enters into it. A friend of mine – we’ll call him Bill – went for a long holiday in Malta. Bill is a very likeable and perfectly ‘normal’ heterosexual, whose main passion in life is angling. In the first week of Bill’s stay on the island, a boy of nine or ten came to watch him fishing. Over the next six weeks or so the lad was his constant companion.

When the time came for Bill to return to England, the child wanted to go with him. When told this was impossible, he did everything in his power to persuade Bill to stay. There was a scene that was not merely tearful, but anguished – hysterical even – like those harrowing scenes we associate with a court that awards custody of a child to the ‘wrong’ parent.

Bill was astonished and appalled. He had no idea how much the boy had fallen for him. One does not know why he felt such a bond with Bill, or what deep need inside the boy Bill was at least partly fulfilling. What is clear is that the trauma of parting cannot be attributed to the effects of sexual seduction, or to any ‘manipulation’ by the adult. There had been none of either.

[ https://www.ipce.info/host/radicase/chap09.htm – free download of whole book available at this site.]

My question is, was the boy in this anecdote capable of giving his consent to spending time hanging out with Bill? If not, should it be illegal for an adult to associate with an unrelated child at all, even with parental permission? If that is what you believe, where do you think all this regulation would end? And if you think the story is irrelevant because there is no sex, why does sex make the crucial difference when what really hurts is often love, not sexual acts with willing participants?

Finally, let’s come back to what you said about Mark: “At age 8, Mark could not conceive that a friend would ever betray his trust and hurt him…”

Has it ever occurred you to that he might have experienced your rejection of him as hurtful, and perhaps even as a betrayal of the friendship he had found with you?

A Potted Plant June 20, 2016 at 1:25 am

@Tom – you asked: “Has it ever occurred you to that he might have experienced your rejection of him as hurtful…”
I was aware of the possibility, at the time. Read the account again closely, you’ll see that I was careful to discuss the situation with Mark in a manner that was accepting of him and of his interest in sexual exploration games with other people. I communicated an unequivical “no, not with me”, (but not in a condemnatory way), an explanation which delineated the socially acceptable boundaries for such activity – both for him as a child and for me as an adult – and a re-direction to the appropriate persons for him, i.e., his peers.

I have an educated understanding about the reality of childhood sexuality, Tom.
I don’t work with children, but I have studied child development through college (along with several other subjects of personal interest to me). My life-long quest, to fully understand the truth about pederasts and their relationship to/with the gay community over the last 200 years, has led me to research in many fields. I’ve studied the sexologists, all the way back to Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, Hirschfeld and Freud, and a lot of critical analysis of their works – both positive and negative analysis. I’ve read your book, by the way, and Breen’s book, and G. Parker Rossman’s book and a mountain of pro “boy-love” materials which were published or referenced in gay culture & community magazines and newsletters between 1976 and 1995 – some of which purported to be serious academic studies, but most of which was obviously biased “propaganda”. I’m familiar with the history of various pederastic organizations and “movements”, from the Victorian to the modern, including criminal conspiracies such as Better Life and Nambla, and the sex-crime convictions of many founders and organizers. I’ve studied the history of child protection laws, related organizations, campaigners and practitioners, as well as the history of child sexual abuse legislation, related organizations, campaigners and practitioners. And I have not neglected to listen to the voices & narratives of credible persons talking about the documented abuse they experienced as minors and their perspective on all these issues.

On balance I’ve retained a sex-positive attitude toward childhood and adolescent sexuality. The primal sex drive lurks in the subconscious of every healthy human person from the moment that conscious self-awareness is acheived, and will manifest in diverse ways throughout their development. This is reality. Most minors will explore and express their sexuality at some point prior to reaching legal status as adults, and they have a basic human right to do this, so long as they are not being sexually abused or sexually abusing others. Other than providing minors with information about human sexuality and sexual safety, and monitoring their relationships for evidence of exploitation, the adults in a minor’s life ought to STAY THE HELL OUT of their sex lives – neither attempting to repress nor to encourage their sexual expression.

It is because I have this perspective, Tom, that I bother with posting counter narratives to pro adult-child sexual interaction narratives that I encounter. (I mean, really, why bother with lengthy diatribes like this one?) I know that there are, and always will be, adult persons who are telling themselves that “it would be ok, morally if not legally”, for them to engage in sexual activity with a minor – IF the minor person “wants” the sexual interaction and especially if the minor person appears to be soliciting a sexual interaction. Brief, harsh, dismissive condemnations about “pedophiles”, “child molestors”, abductors, rapists or murderers, don’t seem to impact this type of self-deluded thinking, as far as I can tell – perhaps the persons thinking such thoughts feel themselves in agreement with generalized “anti-pedophile” sentiment and don’t feel such labels apply to them. Or perhaps they perceive these condemnations to be authored by under-educated knee-jerk ultra-conservatives who don’t really understand their own or anyone else’s sexuality anyway.

So I take the time to explain, in some detail, why IT IS NEVER OK for adults to engage in sexual activity with minors – not even when the adult can rationalize that they are “accepting an invitation” to sex, not even if they can “get away with it”, not even if the minor has previously been sexually exploited by adults.

Tom O’Carroll June 20, 2016 at 3:45 pm

Unfortunately, APP, you haven’t added anything substantial. All you have given us is:

(1) a repetition of your original account, as though we didn’t hear the first time, plus
(2) putting moralistic assertions IN CAPITAL LETTERS AS A WAY OF SHOUTING BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO NEW EVIDENCE OR ARGUMENTS and
(3) a lengthy ad hominem diatribe asserting your own authority by bigging yourself up and bad-mouthing your opponents.

The Blocked Dwarf June 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm

1-3– ToC

and here, Boys & Girls, ToC succinctly sums up the entire internet (although I miss “option number 4”- Cat videos on Youtube).

tdf June 20, 2016 at 4:26 pm

Tom,

I suggest to you that there were no ad hominems whatever in APP’s post.

I suggest that you are reacting like that because you don’t want to listen to research-based, evidentiary truths that don’t correspond with your own personal ‘truth’. From what I’ve read of your posts on this forum, and interviews you’ve done in the MSM, you present as polite, civil, engaging and intelligent. In some ways, it’s those qualities that make you, or at least, the views you represent, dangerous – which is why it’s important to challenge those views (and for the record, I do not condone and indeed condemn vigilanteism against paedophiles, be they of the ‘virtuous’ variety or otherwise).

The Blocked Dwarf June 20, 2016 at 5:00 pm

I suggest to you that there were no ad hominems whatever in APP’s post.-tdf

I too struggled to find any but assumed ToC was refering to a previous post.

I suggest that you are reacting like that because you don’t want to listen to research-based, evidentiary truths that don’t correspond with your own personal ‘truth-tdf

I would suggest that…actually I know- from past experience- that ToC tends to be a bit ‘touchy’ and to see attacks where none were meant. Not surprising considering what the man has been through and the ‘hate’ he attracts. I doubt I could be as brave or open as he.

tdf June 20, 2016 at 5:35 pm: @TBD

“I would suggest that…actually I know- from past experience- that ToC tends to be a bit ‘touchy’ and to see attacks where none were meant. Not surprising considering what the man has been through and the ‘hate’ he attracts. I doubt I could be as brave or open as he.”

A valid point.

Reply

Tom O’Carroll June 20, 2016 at 7:37 pm

Wow! I expected everyone to agree with me!

Seriously. But evidently I am as hopelessly deluded in my understanding of how I am coming across on non-sexual matters as on sexual ones. 

So, my bad.

Looks like we have a disagreement as to what ad hominem means for a start. Can we agree on the Wikipedia version:

>Ad hominem (Latin for “to the man” or “to the person”), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a logical fallacy in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

I was not thinking of any attack on myself personally, so I was not being oversensitive on that score. It didn’t even occur to me. What I had in mind was the “persons associated with the argument” in the above definition, in particular when APP said this: “including criminal conspiracies such as Better Life and Nambla, and the sex-crime convictions of many founders and organizers.” Come to think of it, that last bit could have been intended to include me, but that was not on my mind. I was thinking more in general terms that this is argument by character assassination.

Also, I would suggest arguments going “to the person” as the definition has it include not only denigrating other people’s credentials but also elevating your own – an exercise that took up quite a bit of what APP was saying.

Now to this, from tdf :

>I suggest that you are reacting like that because you don’t want to listen to research-based, evidentiary truths that don’t correspond with your own personal ‘truth’.

Well, as just explained, I was not “reacting like that” if by “like that” you mean with angry denial.

I was not angry. My message appears to have been too concise, thereby inviting misinterpretation as curt. It did not need to be lengthy, though, because, as I said, there was no substantial argument requiring a reply.

As for “research-based, evidentiary truths” I do not want to face, I would say, such as? Give specifics of the research and I will very happily respond. But not on an “everybody knows that” basis please, or “Are you blind? It’s all over the media every day.” That’s where the poorly grounded groupthink comes in. No, give me academic studies. APP should have no difficulties with this, if he is as well read as he claims – I do not doubt it, actually; I suspect it’s his use of the data I might wish to challenge.

It seems to me it is the research-based evidence I put forward that tends to be brushed aside, such as my reference here (8 June) to the Rind meta-analysis.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just about to settle down to England v Slovakia. Hope that’s normal enough for y’all. Back later, with luck, to respond to TBD and Bandini.

Bandini June 20, 2016 at 5:25 pm

Well, I’ve written & deleted several responses over the last few days but seeing as I’m at a loose end I’ll take you up on a couple of points, Tom. From your article:

“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.”

Yes, we most certainly do.

“So he [the judge] 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” but “[t]he idea that masturbating a willing child [Adam, in front of his younger brother Zac], which is what I did, is inherently and obviously dangerous, like drunk driving, is pervasive in our society but it is simply false. It is a falsehood generated and reinforced through groupthink.”

Blaming your woes on something other than yourself there, Tom?!? It turns out that your court case wasn’t your fault at all – it was ‘society’ at large (which I think must include myself!) and that blasted ‘groupthink’. Not only am I (presumably) responsible for messing with poor Zac’s head but I must also carry the can for putting you through the trauma of a judicial process!

[I also have to wonder what you mean by “willing child” as you state that “he had not objected when I became intimate with him” (when you joined in with his antics, uninvited I imagine); I wonder this as I have vivid memories of a child ‘not objecting’ as he was told to bite into a stale dog poo by older/tougher boys, an action carried out without objection. “But he WANTED to do it, honestly! He didn’t say ‘no’!”]

Back to the bottle, and those ten pints.
Although drunk driving may be “inherently and obviously dangerous” it does not always result in tragedy. The two main relationships in my life have been with girls whose fathers were alcoholics (I won’t stop to question what this may signify!) and both were regular drink-drivers. To the best of my knowledge neither was involved in a serious accident (although the first had his special ‘going out boozing car’ which showed all the scars & scrapes resulting from a session on the lash).

I suppose that if they HAD been prosecuted for taking a life (or ruining another) they could have blamed it on ‘society’ & the ridiculous groupthink notion that considering the potential well being of others should have any role to play in limiting what we get up to. Doubt they’d have had much luck though, as most people would recognise their recklessness with the lives of others… [coughs]

Let’s forget about sex for a minute. Having had a life-long obsession with children I’m sure your studies/observations of their behaviour must have revealed one important trait: their occasional cruelty & manipulative natures when it comes to others.
Did you ever consider how the relationship between the two brothers developed (or MAY have developed in a similar case) after the younger one got to witness you tugging his older brother off? Perhaps little Zac found himself with some almighty ammunition to use for blackmailing Adam for the next several years (“Give me your pocket-money or I’ll tell!”). Ah! That reminds me: please do tell us all your technique for ensuring that ‘not a word was spoken about the matter’. I mean, you MUST have ‘encouraged’ them that it wouldn’t really be a great idea to mention it to anyone else – thereby welcoming them into the world of lies & deceit. No fibs now!

Oh, I could bang on all day but what’s the point? I’ll finish by pointing out that despite your claimed concern for Zac’s welfare and distress (albeit with a wilful blindness when it comes to recognising who was solely responsible for causing it) this might look a little unconvincing when we consider that you originally pleaded ‘Not Guilty’, which I’m sure must have made its way to the ears of the man who had been carrying this ‘whatever it was’ around with him for decades, finally seeing fit to go to the police. That must have been hard for Zac – hearing that you were denying the charges – but never mind as you later changed your plea:

“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.”

Aye, it’s easy claiming to care about others once you’ve ensured your own hide is safe! This is the problem – you’re always the person in the ‘relationship’ whose feelings/interests/life take precedence over any one else’s.

P.S. I appreciated your posts, The Potted Plant.

tdf June 20, 2016 at 5:59 pm

@bandini Sounds like heavy s*** there you’ve had to deal with.

“their occasional cruelty & manipulative natures when it comes to others.”

If so, can Tom be entirely to blame for this?

Tom O’Carroll June 21, 2016 at 7:47 pm

I said I would reply to Bandini. I should have mentioned The Blocked Dwarf too.

>Blaming your woes on something other than yourself there, Tom?!?

Not woes, exactly, given that the article in question was an expression of relief over a lucky escape.

But, yes, essentially. Often we are wrong to blame others but it is not always unreasonable. Also, in the case of all sorts of accidents and disasters, judicial investigations find that more than one party is to blame. I have admitted my share of responsibility for my being on trial last year but this accounts for only a small part of the picture. I do not think I am to blame for victim status becoming so fashionable and sought after regardless of the facts – a fashion which played a decisive part in putting me in the dock, and which has been so ably and intensively critiqued by Ms Raccoon.

As for the degree of the older boy’s willingness, I suggest the focus of attention should be on his expressed views. It was he, not me, who said in court that he was already sexually active, that I treated him “with respect”, that he liked me, that he had a great holiday in my company, that he liked my sense of humour and found me “very charming”, that he was never coerced and did not feel he had been harmed.

How similar is that, really, to being bullied into eating dog shit, which is the comparison Bandini made?

>Back to the bottle, and those ten pints.

No thanks, I’m staying on the wagon. I stand by what I said.

>…please do tell us all your technique for ensuring that ‘not a word was spoken about the matter’. I mean, you MUST have ‘encouraged’ them that it wouldn’t really be a great idea to mention it to anyone else – thereby welcoming them into the world of lies & deceit. No fibs now!

No, Bandini, your baseless speculation is totally false. I did not tell either of the boys any such thing, nor did I imply it in any way. Their mother asked them about anything that might have happened on the holiday when she saw my name in the press in connection with PIE a year later, in 1979.
Interestingly, the older boy told her the truth but the younger one – the only one now claiming to be a victim – said nothing had happened. Their mother decided no action was necessary as BOTH boys said they had thoroughly enjoyed their holiday in my company and neither of them appeared to have been distressed or harmed in any way.

>That must have been hard for Zac – hearing that you were denying the charges

It is important to understand that I never accused either brother of lying, and they knew from a very early stage of the case, months before it came to court, that I had no intention of impugning their honesty in order to “save my own hide”, to use your expression.

Many of the allegations as presented in the brothers’ police statements were greatly at odds with my recollection of what had happened. The basis of my defence was that the passage of time appeared to have resulted in distortions and exaggerations of memory. I was vindicated in this defence to the extent that I was found not guilty of four out of the six charges.

Are you suggesting that I should have entered guilty pleas to offences I did not commit?

Now to TBD, who referred to his experience of me seeing attacks “where none were meant”. I think this is a reference to my defence here of Charles Napier. So I don’t think there are grounds for saying I am personally all that thin-skinned on my own account. If that were the case I would surely not have persisted so long with public debate. I do find wild accusations very offensive but I know I must either just suck it up (and respond calmly) or shut up.

Anyway, thank you TBD for the generous sentiments with which you concluded.

The Blocked Dwarf June 22, 2016 at 12:35 am: I think this is a reference to my defence here of Charles Napier.

Actually I had forgotten that the ‘incident’ was you defending someone else, I just recalled pointing out to you that the Landlady (I think…damn you Old Age!) hadn’t meant, whatever she had said,as you had taken it to mean and your reply had not been appropriate. Generous? Nope, either you are very brave or very foolhardy or possibly both-it’s a thin line. I’m guessing you also know you could have taken the easy option and not have decided to spend your life “charging that machine gun nest only armed with a potato peeler”.

Reply
Bandini June 27, 2016 at 5:04 pm: I’ve been a bit busy with life in general, so apologies for the late reply Tom. Here goes anyway…

I mentioned ‘biting into’, not ‘eating’; neither appeal, but there is a difference. Neither did I say the boy had been “bullied into” it – we’d have to debate the meanings of the word along with ‘coerced’, ‘persuaded’, ‘challenged’, and their occasional interchangability… was Charles Napier bullying when he told a boy “don’t be a baby”? (I’m glad you raised his name! I’ll return to him…)

Seeing that I offended your delicate sensibilities with the strong image I’ll change tack:

Many will recall that as children they did things that with the benefit of hindsight they NOW realise they really shouldn’t have done or didn’t even really want to do (although they may have enjoyed the thrill at the time). Imagine a non-violent gauntlet thrown down to an awkward child by a group of cool kids; he wants to fit in, be accepted. They ask him if he’s up for spraying some graffiti on a bridge crossing a motorway. He’d never thought of doing anything so cretinous in his life up until this moment but he’s going to prove to them that he’s not a wimp. He gets a buzz from the danger.

As he grows older he starts to look back on this event in a different light – “Christ, what was I thinking?!? I’d have died if I’d slipped and fell.” Still, though, he guards the memory with affection, as those ‘enticing’ him on were not much older than he was, they were all just kids after all…

Now let’s change that group of kids egging him on to a group of should-know-better adults. What would he likely think of THEM as he grew up & realised the risk he’d ran as he sought to be accepted, to fit in, to be cool? Adults who knew exactly what they were doing…

His memory would soon turn sour & he’d recall how he was exploited & manipulated into doing something he would never have freely chosen to do himself. It’s why we bear grudges against authority figures who over-stepped the mark but NOT against those of a similar age who may have actually hurt us far more. (I can’t work up too much anger when I recall getting a pasting at the hands of the school nutter – the anger fades with time – but could still happily crack a couple of teachers/police on the jaw for their cruelty and bare-faced lies. Solely because they were adults at the time.)

Gawd, I’m babbling on. Let’s zip through this. My ‘baseless speculation’ as you termed it surely paints you as the oddest of kiddie-fiddlers. I don’t think it is ‘groupthink’ to suggest that those involving children in sexual-activities are often quite keen for it to remain a secret!

“I have admitted my share of responsibility for my being on trial last year…” Oh dear. There really is no ‘share’ to be apportioned, Tom! The responsibility is one hundred percent yours.

Now, about that mysterious trial of yours!

“Are you suggesting that I should have entered guilty pleas to offences I did not commit?” Eh? What on earth led you to this misunderstanding? I’d never recommend that anyone ever admits to something they did not do. You’ve got me puzzled here, and doubly so as you were, of course, actually GUILTY of the charges which you originally denied. But first let’s have a bit of background to the trial:

With Britain in the grip of a Paedo Panic, the great King Paedo himself finds himself hauled before the courts. Oddly, the media ghouls who had drooled over the Australian ’60 Minutes’ load of old shite, revelled in ridiculous ‘Evil Paedo Wants Child Sex Robots To Be Built!’ stories and, finally, made much of the dull non-story ‘Bad Man Pays Subscribtion Fees And Joins Political Party!’ are absolutely nowhere to be found.

In fact, even while reporting the Labour Party ‘expulsion’/’resignation’ (both broadsheet & tabloid) they singularly failed to take note of your very recent downfall. They mentioned the previous convictions, of course, but not the far more recent and, most would say, far more serious case. Prior to this you had been able to maintain an intellectual air, debating free-speech & ‘ideas’ as you had never actually been convicted of ‘doing’ anything with a child. But here you were, knocked from your lofty perch, face down in the shredded newspaper and muck, fingers wrapped ’round the tiny tail of a primary school kid while his younger brother looked on… ouch!

So where were the press? It was a day or so into the ‘Paedo Joins Labour’ nonsense before the Daily Mail broke the news that mere months previously you had been convicted of, you know, ‘child abuse’. And this seems to have only come about because the police tipped-off Labour. Like I say, most odd.

Anyway, so there you were, denying all the charges when, to quote you once more:

“As for his [Zac’s] 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 [on 2 of the 6 charges] (indecent assault against Adam and gross indecency towards Zac) would result in a suspended sentence, and I accepted that.”

Hmmm. You state here: “I was vindicated in this defence to the extent that I was found not guilty of four out of the six charges.”

Hang on there, Tom! Would you care to explain how you knew that you’d be getting a suspended sentence for admitting 2 of the 6 charges (halfway through a case) when surely the jury at that point hadn’t even started their deliberations over the other 4 (or at all)? By stating that you were ‘found not guilty’ of them I think it fair to assume you were implying that the jury had returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict; can you confirm that this is the case please?

You’ll have to forgive my suspicions, but as I said there is next to nowt in the press about your trial, and one only finds mention of your being “formally acquitted” of them. I’m wondering if a deal wasn’t reached whereby admitting those two charges would see the others ‘vanish’! And all the while the press looked the other way…

Right-o, enough of that. Time for Napier – or ‘Saint Charles’ as you seem to consider him! That there groupthink & ‘society’ bearing down on us all: does it explain one of Napier’s victims trying to take his own life at the age of 16? I mean, don’t they all need years in ‘therapy’ before they realise they have been damaged? Given that this event must necessarily have taken place a long, long time ago (the suicide attempt, that is) I’m at a loss as to how it can be blamed on the current vogue for retrospective navel gazing.

To be clear, I have ‘defended’ Napier and others when they have been accused of involvement in murderous rings and the like, simply because the evidence wasn’t there to support the mad claims. And I’ve just spent a few fruitless minutes trying to track down an article which came after his conviction – for the life of me I can’t locate it now though pretty sure it was from the BBC – but it included an interview with one of his victims who didn’t, in fact, consider himself to have BEEN a ‘victim’ at all! Why then was he joining in the prosecution? Because although he felt no damage had been done to him personally he knew that others had fared less well… and he had his own kids now. I have no problem accepting that an incident may not always have disasterous consequences, but you have a problem in accepting that it MAY.

Anyway, your defence of your pal didn’t stop his own team from stating that Napier “realises how appalling his actions were”. But just in case I’ve got it all wrong, and poor old Charlie is a wronged man, can I suggest you try & rouse some interest amongst those academics whose studies occasionally interest you so greatly?

For after all here we had the most incredible statistical blip (and if it were not a blip it would back up your bizarre notions) as within a tiny geographical area dozens upon dozens – nay, hundreds! – of young lads found themselves irresistably attracted to the poor fellow. Driven wild by his cruel thin lips & leery gaze, they were…

God, how they all lined up, one after another, banging on his bedroom door, begging to be let in. “Sir! Plllllease! You’re driving me wild!”, they moaned. The little minxes would parade before him wearing seductive short trousers, desperately trying to corrupt our hero.

At his tether’s end, Charles tried to fight them off by plying them with booze & bribing them with sweeties and ciggies, hoping that they’d forget their pre-pubescent man-crush as they nodded off, intoxicated. To no avail! Still they came, finally forcing him to flee the country, their tiny fingers pawing at his safari jacket as they begged him to debag them.

Poor Charles! Who’d have thunk it, but yet another statistical blip was to await him on foreign shores! And every where he ever went!

Fingers out, Tom. Get those academics involved: statisticians, mathematicians, paedatricians… gotta be a prof at a former poly who could make sense of the madness, eh?

Reply

A Potted Plant June 21, 2016 at 2:13 am

@Tom – despite the, much appreciated, supportive comments from others…I PLEAD GUILTY – ON ALL COUNTS, YOUR HONOR!
My use of capitalization for emphasis, as well as excessive and often inappropriate use of hyphenation and quotation marks, are all habitual but deliberate elements of my internet ranting style. I hear my own voice, in my head, as I type – as though in live conversation – and I devised this “style” in 1995 as an approximation of how I actually speak. My voice does go up somewhat when i employ dramatic emphasis in conversation, but I don’t shout. My very subjective internal perceptions, and irrelevant. To you it is shouting and I apologize if you were offended.

You are correct. I don’t generally engage in “fair & honest debate” on the subject of adult-child sexual interaction, with people who express a “pro point of view”. For me, actually debating them would imply that there could be something valid about a ‘pro’ argument which makes it worthy of debate! I don’t believe that, and I don’t encourage others to believe it by publicly debating “opponents”.

Instead, I typically present counter narratives that illustrate responsible thinking and behaviour, (some people don’t have a concrete conception of what responsible thinking and behaviour, in respect to adult-child intimacy, would look like in real life circumstances, if their life experiences never gave them cause to contemplate the subject) , or that illustrate potential consequences of mistaken thinking and irresponsible behaviour, which “opponents” perhaps “forgot” to mention. From these narratives I draw explanations of the, (frequently quite natural and not consciously dishonest), self-serving rationalizations through which adults justify to themselves or to others, that which cannot be justified – the necessarily selfish exploitation of persons with developmentally “impaired” powers of foresight, for their own gratification.

For example – a person might rationalize adult-child sexual intimacy by observing that young children can’t really give informed consent to the non-sexual relationships and interactions they have with adults, and their consent frequently isn’t even solicited, but concern that such circumstances might be exploitative and somehow harmful to the child is rarely voiced. Perhaps that means the contrasting extreme level of concern focused, and embodied in law, on children’s inability to give informed consent to sexual relationships with adults is actually an arbitrary expression of emotional hysterics?

This type of rationalization ignores an essential reality. Children cannot develop without social interaction and the relationships that facilitate social interaction. Literally, various brain functions do not develop without the stimulation of social interaction. Relationships with siblings and peers can be stimulating, but frequent interaction with some adult is necessary for optimal physical, emotional, social and intellectual develolpment. Non-sexual social relationship with adults is not “optional”. Various relationships with adults are also a legal requirement in our society. Children must be schooled and socialized, that’s the law, and they must have adult guardians legally responsible for at least minimal supervision and health/safety maintenance. These non-sexual relationships are not optional. Even if these interactions with adults are imposed on a child without their consent and against their wishes, and even though they inherently entail some risk of unforseen harms befalling the child, some non-sexual relationships with adults are a necessity – not a choice. On the other hand, sexual interactions between adults and minors are never a required relationship. They are always and only “optional”, chosen interactions for the adult, and never a necessity for the minor’s wellbeing. There is no legitimate parallel with regard to consent, between non-sexual relationships with adults and sexual relationships with adults.

I’m happy to explain the self-serving false logic of such rationalizations, but I won’t debate them as though they were valid arguments.

It was not my intention to “assert my own authority” by “bigging myself up” – but I accept that could be a fair interpretation and take responsibility for your perception of that. I don’t consider myself an authority on anything, I just wanted to demonstrate to you that my perspective isn’t an uninformed one. My understanding of some issues would be quite heretical to some anti-pedophile zealots.
You were discussing Susan Clancy’s “The Trauma Myth”, with Bandini, and Clancy’s observation that many of the adult-child sexual interaction “victims” she interviewed when they were adults, described to her that they experienced such sexual interactions more as strange and confusing than as traumatizing, at the time they were occuring. You probably know that she was relentlessly stalked, harrassed and threatened by self-professed child victim advocates, following publication of that book. She felt forced to leave the country for awhile even. These zealots just could not accept that what her interviewees told her, was what they told her, and allow those persons ownership of their own experience and the right to tell their own story – totally contradicting their decades long advocacy campaign insisting that academic analysis of CSA victim’s narratives usurped the victim’s ownership over their experience, and that their experience was whatever their narrative said it was. Apparently they only meant that to apply to persons whose experience was one of being immediately and severely traumatized by the sexual acts themselves. They were outraged that anyone would publish a study in which some interviewees claimed not to have been traumatized by the acts themselves and accused her of being a secret propagandist for some organized pedophile-criminal lobby, which was not true of course.

I’m sure you remember the controversy over publication of the study: “A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples”, by Rind et al, which suggested that for many men, “the harm caused by child sexual abuse was not necessarily intense or pervasive”, but “that even though CSA may not result in lifelong, significant harm to all victims, this does not mean it is not morally wrong and indicated that their findings did not imply current moral and legal prohibitions against CSA should be changed”. You may recall the hysterical and paranoid response to this study by certain organizations and lobbies in the US, eventually resulting in an Act of Congress being passed by the US House of Representatives, which declared that “sexual relations between children and adults are abusive and harmful” – by which they meant “inherently and necessarily abusive and harmful”. It is “law” in the US, that “sexual relations between children and adults are abusive and harmful”, and no statute which implied or inferred that this might not be the case can ever become law in that nation without first rescinding this resolution.

There are some ideas about adult-child sexual interaction that many people just don’t want to hear, or to be publicly discussed. They are afraid, of course. PIE, NAMBLA etc are still lurking under their beds and haunting their nightmares. They fear that any discussion about CSA by academics or professionals, lawyers or politicians, which doesn’t vehemently and unequivically state that adult-child sex is inherently and necessarily harmful to the child could be propaganda from people who secretly desire to sexually abuse children, and will be exploited by pedophiles as justification for their criminal behaviour. And their fears are not unjustified, because these things really have been true in some cases, in the past. But that doesn’t mean irrational hysteria will go unchallenged.

Eric June 8, 2016 at 11:10 am

It’s now around 35 years since my nephew was accused of sexual assault by a scruffy youth. The West End police station the youth reported this alleged rape to took it very seriously, arriving at my nephew’s flat with 1 detective and 3 uniform coppers. He was in the cells for around 5 hours before he was released.
The fact my nephew lived in a flat owned by a prominent QC was even more exciting for the coppers, But there was a big difference : the police actually took a stance of fully questioning the accuser and seeking out exact details. They also called a doctor for a physical examination. When the doctor said the youth could not have been raped his story began to fall apart. Eventually he admitted it was all false and that as my nephew had initially claimed, the accuser had demanded money. The police wanted my nephew to agree to give evidence that it was a blackmail plot but when he refused, they fully understood.

The often rolled out claim that the police never took ‘victim’s” claims seriously is utter bullshit.

Anon June 8, 2016 at 11:33 pm

Another Jimmy Savile. I wonder how many more will get this treatment before more people start getting suspicious? :/

Alexander Baron June 9, 2016 at 2:28 am

Did anyone notice that 101 year old man appearing in court on indecent assault charges? And there was me thinking this was June not April 1.

Alexander Baron June 15, 2016 at 12:37 am

Arrest that man!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3641755/Clement-Freud-child-abuser-Former-Liberal-MP-molested-girls-young-10-TV-documentary-reveals-two-victims-tell-pain.html

Who next, Harold Wilson?

A Potted Plant June 21, 2016 at 10:02 am

Here’s a heretical idea which is nevertheless a fact.
Can a minor who is being sexually exploited by adults also be exploiting those adults in a consciously predatory way? For some people this scenario is just inconceivable, and any adult who makes such allegations against a minor that they are charged with abusing will surely be accused of self-protective fantasies and blaming the victim. In most cases, that will probably be the real truth of the matter. But let me tell you about Darcy…

Darcy was a truly beautiful little androgyne living in my community, who was a legendary and infamous figure among the gay community when I was a young man. He was also a heroin and Ts&Rs addict and a prostitute from the age of 12.
Darcy’s mother and step-father took in foster children, of the harder to place teenaged variety. The step-father was a workaholic with little involvement in the children’s lives, but most of the household income came from payments the mother received for the care of these foster children. Being her natural child, Darcy wasn’t a source of such income and apparently of little interest or concern to Mom as a result. Darcy was primarily cared for and “raised” by older foster siblings.
A foster brother introduced Darcy to all the standard homosexual acts when the brother was 14 and Darcy was 9, and this relationship carried on with varying frequency over the next 7 years. Darcy claimed that he was in love with this brother and was himself the aggressor, demanding to be taught to perform these acts with him, which seems improbable He also claimed to have sexually seduced many of his brother’s more attractive friends throughout this period, though its hard not to suspect that the brother might have been advertising his “queer little brother’s” sexual services to some friends and receiving some kind of payment for services rendered. Whatever the truth might be, having no experience of unconditional love and affection, Darcy seemed to learn from these experiences that affection was bought and paid for with sex acts. And not only affection, most of his material desires could be fulfilled through manipulation of older person’s sexual interest in him.

When Darcy was 12, an older foster sister shot him up with heroin for the first time. She facilitated his almost spontaneous addiction for awhile, but when her supply ran out she suggested to him that she knew some men who would pay her to have sex with him – and then they could afford to keep the trip going. And so it went, but Darcy only put up with his sister’s pimping for about a year before he “went independent” on the prostitute strolls. Darcy was totally convincing in drag, and sometimes worked the female strolls where he could make twice as much for the same acts, tying his member back to hide the only trace of his true gender.

From the age of 13, Darcy’s “hobby” became seducing attractive heterosexual young men. His motto was: “there is no such thing as a straight guy – there are only guys who haven’t met me yet”. Does he sound like a “boy-lover’s” dream? In reality, he was a worst nightmare for some local pederasts. One of Darcy’s regular Johns, I’ll call him sucker-boy, was foolish enough to profess that he “loved” Darcy and would be his life-partner if Darcy would quit hooking. But Darcy was not interested in being anyone’s partner. However, when Darcy was 15 Sucker-boy received a compensation payout of almost $100,000. When he told Darcy the good news, Darcy moved in with him and declared them to be a couple, (but he didn’t stop having sex with other men). They ran through the money in about 6 months. There was a sports car that Darcy wasn’t old enough to drive, but his name was on the pink-slip. There were full-length fur coats for Darcy and all manner of frivolous material goodies. But when the money started running out, Darcy became much less discreet about his “extra-marital” affairs. Sucker-boy would come home and find Darcy engaged in sex with an older teen boy on their living room couch, for example. Eventually Sucker-boy made a serious suicide bid with an overdose of smack. He survived, but Darcy was disgusted. He got some friends to help him pack up the things Suckerboy had bought him, and moved out. And never spoke to the man again.

Darcy’s success rate, seducing young heterosexuals, was astonishing and legendary. Some friends of mine saw him at the roller-rink one Friday night, when he was probably 14. He told them that the 18-20 year old working the booth thought he was a girl, and that he had a date with him for Saturday night. My friends expressed concern, this this very athletic young man might inflict bodily harm on him, if he discovered in the middle of sex that Darcy was really a boy. Darcy went off and talked with the booth worker. When they saw him again later, he said: “well, he knows I’m a guy now…and we still have a date for Saturday…” But there were other occaisions when Darcy didn’t reveal his true gender to the young man he was seducing, relying on the old tie-back trick and a dark room to keep the deception his secret. Until he ran into the young man again, in the company of a female friend, at which point he would confront the guy: “remember when you f***** a girl named Suzette? that was me, and I’m really a guy”.

There was no question that Darcy was victimized by many older males, from a young age, but there was also no doubt that he was also a shrewd and calculating victimizer of older males. Nevertheless, they all knew he was underaged and once they crossed that line and engaged in illicit sex with him, all the responsibility for whatever resulted from the relationship has to fall on the adults. “But he was a street-wise prostitute” – and so? “But he was a liar and a con-artist. He tricked me, I didn’t even know he was a boy” – well, suck it up buddy! The harmful consequences of illicit sex don’t only flow in one direction.

Having been an intraveous drug user and a prostitute with hundreds of unprotected sex partners, in North America in the mid to late 1980’s, Darcy didn’t survive his lifestyle for very long. I think he may have made it to 20.

Anna Raccoon June 10, 2016 at 4:32 pm

I dismissed her (just on the name and without reading)

Why, when I saw your name, I nearly dismissed you.
‘Sean Coleman’ – who one earth goes around calling themselves Sean Coleman?

Regards, Ms Raccoon. Anna Raccoon. The name’s Raccoon. Oddball Raccoon.

Nurse Mildred June 10, 2016 at 4:36 pm

Own up! Who woke her up? I’d just put her down for her afternoon nap!

Sean Coleman June 11, 2016 at 12:42 am

Sorry Anna. I saw you, Moor and Rabbitaway and sighed, ‘These will be the internet cranks so – from one set of loonies to another.’ And then I returned and began to read. (I’m still going through the back issues. It can get very complicated and then the comments complicate it further.)

Anna Raccoon June 11, 2016 at 7:58 am

You are lucky that I managed to lose some 3000 posts from the site when I tried to take it offline and succeeded in deleting it all instead! You only have around 1,600 to go through now! I think I have now found copies of all the posts that pertain to the current moral panic but you will note that some are marked ‘imported’ and carry no comments, that is because of the format in which they were retrieved.
If you are doing serious research, then you will find that Edinburgh University maintain a database of all posts and comments which is searchable.
Moor Larkin is a meticulous researcher that I have great respect for, he has turned up some stunning revelations that are easy to overlook with his current format – I have pleaded with him in vain to catalogue his work in a searchable fashion – it really should be a book!

Anna Raccoon June 11, 2016 at 8:01 am

Oh, and do hurry up! The site hosting is paid up until the 17th July – I am waiting until I get my next scan results on the 8th July before making a decision as to whether to renew it or not – I don’t want to leave my husband with the responsibility of a ‘live’ site to worry about.
You have been warned.

Moor Larkin June 12, 2016 at 9:59 am

I though the University folk who got £50k to enable their meticulous research would have got their finger out by now. I guess all will be revealed around the same time the Albany Trust Files are opened, and we’re all happily dead.

Sean Coleman June 11, 2016 at 5:17 pm

I was wondering why there weren’t any comments on some of them. Agree about Moor Larkin’s book: it would be top of my to-get list. Thanks so much for the site, Anna, and I hope and pray it continues for many years to come.

Anna Raccoon June 12, 2016 at 10:05 am

I think Chilcott is next in the queue!