When will they admit that sex with children is wrong?

Mar 18, 2019 by

by Will Jones, The Conservative Woman:

THE Conservative Woman has commented here and here on the extraordinary evidence given by David Steel to the Inquiry into Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse linked to Westminster; on his confession that he did nothing about Cyril Smith, in spite of ‘assuming’ his guilt in relation to offences concerning young boys, and later recommended him for a knighthood.

It is deeply shocking, but fits a depressingly familiar pattern. Well-known figures such as Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Michael Jackson were able, under the eyes of those who knew and suspected them, systematically to abuse children.

What no one seems able to grasp, even now, is why they didn’t care sufficiently to act. Some may have been in denial. Others may just have thought it not that big a deal. The free love movement of the 1960s, after all, had taught the flower-power generation that sex was a liberation for all, regardless of orientation and even, sometimes, of age.

For others it was simply a fact of life, albeit wrong and unpleasant. In 2001 a Barnardo’s policy officer for child protection acknowledged that ‘the commercial sexual exploitation of boys is the most hidden form of child abuse in Britain and the one about which least is known’. Her comments did not trigger a national outcry.

Over the ten years from 1974 to 1984, a movement to normalise sex between adults and children, the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), operated openly in the UK and in the US, where it was called the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). It was defended by major civil liberties organisations such as the ACLU in America and Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties, now called Liberty. To some on the Left, sex with children was just another boundary to be swept away. In 1997 Peter Tatchell wrote to the Guardian about the harmless nature of it all, in words he has never retracted: ‘Several of my friends, gay and straight, male and female, had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy . . . It is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’.

There was also the support the former Labour MP Patricia Hewitt, who served in the Labour Cabinet till 2007, gave to PIE and Home Office advisers in 1979 who argued for lowering the age of consent to 14 and reducing penalties for sex with girls over 12.

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