Child-abuse hysteria’s latest victim: football

Dec 3, 2016 by

by Tim Black, Spiked:

This is football’s Jimmy Savile moment. That’s what some are blithely calling the exposure of the already exposed and convicted paedophile Barry Bennell, a football scout and coach who, from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, used his role in youth development at several football clubs to sexually abuse the boys in his care.

And in a sense it is football’s Jimmy Savile moment. It’s the moment at which an institution — in Savile’s case the BBC, in Bennell’s case football — ceases to trust itself; the moment at which an institution starts to see moral corruption everywhere within; the moment at which an institution institutionalises suspicion and distrust. So the Football Association has already announced the obligatory internal review/investigation, led by a QC, and the police are busily trawling for allegations.

[…]  This goes beyond the reporting of crimes; this is a search for crime, indeed a search for the evil in our midst. This is why we have seen a minister urging people to report allegations — ‘you will be believed’. This is why we have seen the police and child-protection industry actively solicit allegations. Because it is a task, a crusade, a determination to find and purge. And why? Because it answers the contemporary lack of moral absolutes, the lack of moral certainties. In the absence of knowing what our common values are, what morally coheres us as a community, what we are for, too many reach for a societal self-definition in terms of what we are not, what we are against. And what could be more unambiguously evil today than the sexual abuse of a child? It’s this need to morally affirm ourselves in terms of what we are not that generates a demand for the constant, near infernal discovery of evil, witches to be burned, folk devils to be purged.

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