Inquisition 21
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What will the next absolutist doctrine be? Inappropriate behavouir?
The Inquisition finds new prey
The blacklist is expanding
The legislation for malice is now in place
Due process has been eliminated in the UK for anyone who is interviewed by the police or against whom certain allegations are made, false or otherwise, as far as that person's reputation is concerned.
One's honour and integrity no longer depend on whether or not one has been convicted for a criminal act. You are blacklisted if anyone has made a certain kind of allegation against you. In the UK, the Criminal Records Bureau can place you on a file that stops you getting employment, even if the information about you is false or supplied to the police by a malicious informer. The sensitive jobs began with those working with children or vulnerable adults, but as with all such draconian measures the net of sensitivity is spreading.
When challenged that certain information about individuals may be false, inaccurate or slanderous, the police reply that it is still ‘soft intelligence’ and is being passed on to potential employers ‘in the interest of protecting children’ or vulnerable adults.
The first an innocent person may know about a malicious accusation is when their ‘enhanced criminal records bureau check’ comes up and they are told that they must step aside from their job, even though no criminal action may be taken. To be accused now is truly to be convicted. The legislation for malice is now in place.
Read another shocking case of a man accused of no crime who has been blacklisted because of an accusation. Did the police accidentally accuse him or was evidence planted after they wrongly accused him? Read it HERE.
See more on malice under Threats to liberty.
The Inquisition finds new prey
Brian Rothery
We appear to have emerged from over 20 years of high profile sex abuse scandals, beginning with Orkney and Cleveland in the UK, and McMartin in the US. About twelve of these were sensational by international standards, setting off what have since been described as ‘moral panics’, and most of them involved accusations by children against numerous adults, hostile police and prosecutors, and ideologically motivated expert witnesses. Many of the accused were jailed or had their lives ruined by the accusations. These high profile cases, generally alleging satanic ritual abuse and paedophile sex rings, encouraged many other accusations of single people, in which recovered memory featured rather than satanic- type group activities.
One by one over the period, the high profile cases collapsed, through retractions and retrials, so that out of what appear to this writer to be the top 14, only one, that of Peter Ellis in New Zealand released after seven years in prison, has still not been declared an injustice, despite the efforts of 170, mainly distinguished, supporters, and Lynley Hood’s award winning book about the case, A City Possessed – the Christchurch Civic Creche Case. The cases I chose as the top fourteen are those of Alexander in Sweden, Niko in Finland, Orkney, Cleveland, and Rochdale in the UK, Ellis in New Zealand, Klassen-Kvello in Canada, and, in the US, the McMartin Preschool, the Fells Acres Day Care Center, the Country Walk home, the Westchester-Tremont Day Care Center, the Wee Care Nursery School (also known as the ‘Kelly Michaels case’), the Faith Chapel centre, and the East Wenatchee Pentecostal Church of God House of Prayer.
Apart from these high profile cases, thousands of innocent people had their lives ruined because of false or exaggerated claims of sex abuse, many of the claims motivated by compensation, malice or simple ideology. An industry based on a belief in the moral panic of sex abuse came into being, employing social workers, police, expert witnesses, prosecutors and counsellors.
In the late 1990s, there began a wave of scepticism about the outlandish accusations, and the obvious bias of prosecutors and expert witnesses, and cases began to both collapse or be overturned, followed by some massive defamation claims against prosecutors and child expert witnesses. An immediate result was a dramatic drop in accusations and the discrediting of a number of sex abuse indicators, including ritual satanic abuse, recovered or repressed memory and paedophile sex rings. There was also scathing criticism in a number of high profile judgements against medical and other child protection expert witnesses, mainly therapists.
This resulted in a partial collapse in the markets of the child rights activists. Some ground has been won back in the US by the identification of a new class of sex delinquent – the child offender, which has demonstrated that some child rights activists are prepared to pursue the very object they set out to protect. See the NSPCC story below. Other ground was maintained by the continuing campaign against the Catholic Church’s ‘paedophile priests’, and by redress compensation schemes for residential sex abuse, but these also are now slipping away.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago has conducted a thorough study of every priest who served in the archdiocese over 40 years, 2,200 in all, and found that 40 priests, or 1.8%, were probably guilty of misconduct with minors at some point in their careers, many of these minors being teenagers over 16. There was no evidence of misconduct by 98 percent of parish clergy, the overwhelming majority.
In Ireland, a government programme advertising for victims of residential abuse to come forward, name their abusers and claim compensation, resulted in such a huge response that it galvanized some ex-residents into forming an organization (LOVE) to support the nuns and brothers that ran the institutions and to highlight the making of false claims.
The change in climate appears to be so great that Justice Baynton in his December 31st 2003 damming indictment of prosecutors and therapists in the infamous Canadian Klassen-Kvello case said that society had swung from seeking out and convicting sex abusers at the beginning of the past decade to seeking out the false accusers by the end of it.
If only it were so.
A whole new fertile market has opened up for the child savers, the police, and the prosecutors. This time around they will not be so easily discredited. Where prosecution evidence was difficult to obtain and examine for possible refutation in the past, such as how the testimony of accusing children was obtained, in the new cases it is virtually impossible to obtain the evidence. Where children could make false allegations before, now adults, child activists, censors and police can make them. Incriminating evidence can be constructed out of non-criminal activity and it can also be acquired through entrapment or ‘stings’, or even planted on innocent people.
The new, fertile field is child pornography, and into it has been transplanted all of the paraphernalia of the failed sex abuse industry. We have the mantra, first articulated in Nazi Germany, ‘for the good of the children’ – in the forms of ‘every pornographic image of a child is a child abused’ and ‘there are some crimes so loathsome that they must be rooted out’ and ‘the end justifies the means’. But nudity, eroticism, artistic depiction, burlesque, horseplay, posing, and even acting are now all criminalized as child pornography. The age of the ‘under-aged’ has been lifted in many countries from 16 to 18, thus at one stroke transforming into ‘child porn’ and criminalizing millions of existing images of young women in glamorous or erotic poses.
The laws are draconian. In the UK one is guilty even if one unknowingly possesses child pornography. The police are engaging in stings, enticing innocent people into web sites set up to entrap them. One can be spammed with real child pornography by opening an unwanted email, or if one is surfing through adult sex sites, an image of a child or children can be deposited on one’s hard disk through what is known as a ‘Trojan Horse’ technique. Internet porn trawlers and censors assist the police in entrapment and prosecutions. Those caught may have to accept therapy from the same industry that has been discredited in the passing of the child sex abuse obsession.
The ritual satanic abuse has resurfaced in claims that many images are too dreadful to behold. Police and the censors who assist them talk of ‘burnout’. The latest claims of perversity include the abuse of babies with umbilical cords still attached. From an inside contact in the European Hotline organization, I managed to get access to what was being described as one of the worst child porn images ever found on the Internet. Either seized by the police or leaked to them, it was an image of a man eating a live baby. The police had rushed it to the prosecution service, whereupon, to the consternation of all, the expert decision was that it was not pornographic - cannibalistic, yes, but it could not be deemed criminal under the child porn laws. If the photo had been taken while the child's genitalia were still visible (if the man had begun eating from the other end), graphic depiction of the genitals would have constituted child pornography. Later, it transpired that the image was a hoax, designed to entrap the Hotline and the police.
The paedophile rings have resurfaced in claims about child porn rings exchanging images. It seems clear that the only large collections of child porn images or of pictures of naked children are those created by the police or by child saver organizations, such as that of Max Taylor’s ‘Copine’ at University College Cork in Ireland. Taylor recently claimed that his collection, used by him and his team to analyze ‘forensically’ the activities of child pornographers, exceeded 50,000. No wonder his UK colleague, policeman John Carr, regularly issues dire warnings about escalating child porn quantities on the Internet.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many adults ensured they would not be accused of child sex abuse by not having contact with children or teenagers, such as through voluntary work or with clubs. Now the threat has moved to one’s own PC at home or at work. How real is this threat?
I believe that it is very real. Having studied most of the major sex abuse travesties of the past twenty years and being in touch with a number of individuals still seeking justice, I have learned that the tenacity and venom of certain police, censors and child savers are very great indeed. The extent of the injustice meted out to innocent people in the high-profile sex abuse cases is frightening, especially the ‘tainted tunnel vision’ (Justice Baynton’s words describing the experts and prosecutors in the Canadian Klassen-Kvello case), and the ideologies which poisoned even judge and jury. The same kind of tainted tunnel vision has re-appeared in the prosecution of child pornography cases.
Ironically, as Eolake Stobblehouse writes in his hilarious 'Beware the bogglywoggly!' article, there are tens of thousands of articles published in mainstream media about the great evil of child pornography, and he has never seen a single article that defined what they are talking about!
The most depressing feature for me in the sex abuse cases was not the poisoned and malicious mindset of the police, prosecutors and expert witnesses, but the commentary of the innocent accused on their defence lawyers. Over and over, I was told of lazy and greedy defence lawyers who did not bother to read their clients’ files until in court on the day, and who neither cared about nor believed their innocence. Richard Klassen, a self-educated man, sacked his lawyer and handled his own long, legal battle, but he was a superman compared with the rest of us mortals. As I write this, an email has arrived from the US, pleading for assistance in what the supplicant claims is a case of a false conviction for possessing child porn. Now released from prison, unemployed, tagged and not allowed to own a PC, he emails me thus from his local library: “I paid my lawyer (he names the sum), so I am now broke. I don’t believe that he made a good defence for me. Lawyers are too lazy, and in this kind of case they claim that they cannot do anything for you, so they just take your money and negotiate (the plea-bargaining and punishment).”
I had earlier put this problem to a contact in InHope, the European organisers of the hotlines, and he told me that he believed that defence lawyers were not interested in analysing so-called ‘child porn’, saying that their standard response was ‘we all know what it is, so let’s get on now with the negotiations’. While many expert witnesses are available for the prosecution, there is virtually no such thing as an expert witness for the defence in child porn cases – indeed, it does not seem possible to be one without breaking the law.
So, if one agrees that the dangers are real, and I very much believe they are and grow more concerned about them by the day, as do others who talk with me, a UK contact for example who was alarmed by the April 2004 amendments to the Sexual Offences Act, which criminalize children, such as those using meeting places like ‘Faceparty’ and which expose millions of adults to danger. First, however, what are the dangers?
On the assumption that most police will not invent evidence, the main danger is that one will have investigated (or enjoyed) what one believed to be an adult sex site, only to be told that some of the images downloaded are of girls over a certain age but under a new threshold, such as that in the US and created by the UK April 2004 amendments. The reader may need to be reminded that deleting a file or image merely deletes the link to it and that the deleted item remains until that space is later required, if ever. Trawling police can find the deleted object. Still using the same assumption of honest police, what the citizen may consider to be mere child nudity or eroticism or art is now likely to be considered child porn by police, judge and jury. Many images still available in artistic photography books are deemed illegal if found on the Internet.
The second assumption is that one can suffer accidental downloading of an illegal image or entrapment. In some countries, such as the UK, there is no defence of ‘unknowingly’ possessing child porn. All possession is criminal. UK police watchdog, John Carr, argues that everyone found in possession of ‘any quantity of any kind of child abuse images’ should be investigated with a view to establishing whether they have been involved in abusing children in the past, and a risk assessment carried out to determine whether they represent an on-going threat to children in the future. With police leaking stories of child porn suspects to the media, imagine the affect of such intervention on one’s reputation, apart from the possible criminal consequences.
If we needed further evidence of the wisdom of taking steps to protect ourselves, we have Microsoft’s recent promise to assist the law enforcement agencies in fighting the child porn scourge. Those at risk include writers, journalists and other researchers, for example anyone trying to investigate the possible criminal activities of police and the Internet censors.
All adults using PCs now need an easy method of hard disk clearing, such as new software that clears all deleted files and not just as they now do the references to the spaces that files occupy. Ideally, in case of police entrapment, independent, dated verification that a disk is clear is also desirable, but no such service appears to exist as yet.
If the 21st century Inquisition has moved from child sex abuse in its traditional form of direct sexual contact with the bodies of children to the mainly depicted body of a child described as child pornography, where might it move next? It would be a bold or reckless person who would make a firm prediction, but a guess might be reasonable. I believe that child pornography with all of its draconian implications for human liberty, justice, creativity and free speech will be here for some time, as its proponents have created legislation that will be difficult to repeal, but the signs suggest to me that the next, and probably additional, criminal perversity will be ‘inappropriate sexual activity’. This is already beginning with sexual harassment, and sexual contact between adults where one can be accused of having an inappropriate power or authoritarian position vis-à-vis the other, and where there are significant age differences between the individuals.
As has already been demonstrated in socialist Sweden, it is a simple step to go from inappropriate sexual activity to inappropriate social activity.
Sex abuse/compensation
In the English-speaking countries of the West, the sex abuse/compensation obsession has been a central doctrine, in which neither the actuality of sex abuse nor the truthfulness of the so-called 'victims' could be questioned, but now there are signs of change. Led by courageous citizens, the media are beginning to acknowledge the reality of false allegations motivated by hopes of financial compensation. In 2002, the Irish government in a knee jerk reaction to media attacks on former residential institutions run by priests and nuns set up a 'Redress Board' and advertised for victims of abuse to come forward and look for compensation. For many, it was a state invitation to make false allegations and defame innocent people. Thousands responded. Now the redress concept itself is being challenged to acknowledge the reality of false allegations. Critics are questioning why redress is not as much the right of innocent people falsely accused as it is of the so-called 'victims'. That it should have reached this stage before generating a reaction is a cause for alarm.
A few of the new critics believe that a recent television documentary had fanned the witch hunt against the religious, a hunt made up of numerous false allegations which have ruined the lives of those falsely accused. Ironically that television documentary was called 'States of Fear', referring to the institutions, but the documentary itself had fanned the state of fear of a society already racked by the 'sex abuse' obsession.
The critics believe that many people are making spurious allegations in the hope of winning compensation, even conspiring to back each other up and split the compensation. A few journalists are finally emerging to acknowledge the possibility of compensation inspired false allegations. The sex abuse tide may be turning, but it may be that it is turning only in the cases of allegations against adults for compensation purposes.
Another clue of a possible turning , which almost passed unnoticed, was when finally it began to be admitted that much of the 'real abuse', or at least what was being called that in residential institutions was sexual activity between older and younger children. This admission did not stop the compensation claims, as the 'victims' could claim neglect on the part of the custodians who were negligent in not being aware that this was going on. For awhile it seemed strange to some of us that despite this new information, teenaged boys (it was seldom girls even thought similar activity went on in girl's residential homes) were being accused of sexual assault and even rape against boys only a few years younger. These acts were being hailed as crimes and perversions, never normal sexual behavouir between young people of the same gender locked up together during their years of burgeoning sexuality.
But, some of us were thinking reassuringly, at least this child to child activity is finally being recognized, and accepted. How wrong we were? The absolutists, now faced with the possibility of fewer and fewer adult sexual perverts, a diminishing enemy, and an appalling vista of no huge incidence of child sex abuse (other than the growing spectre of 'child porn'), now turned upon the very 'victims' who had provided their political bandwagons - the children themselves. They uncovered an even worse perversion than adults abusing children - child sex abusers. See the NSPCC story below.
Here is Jim Peron (see under New Zealand in Country by country in menu) talking about Judith Levine's book (see under Sex abuse): 'And one of the results is a spate of horrific cases where young children themselves are being incarcerated and tagged as sexual offenders and child molesters. Prepubescent children are labelled "budding sex offenders". Playground kisses end up with expulsions from school for sexual harassment.'
He continues: ' A hysteria that started out to protect children by the mid 90s had become a movement to incarcerate them.'
And again quoting Judith Levine: ' The evidence that was accumulating didn't justify the theory. So the abuse industry turned on the very people they pretended to be protecting. They started pointing their accusing fingers at the children.'
And then the clincher: 'But Levine points out the decision to brand children as sexual deviant was done without any understanding of what child sexuality is like. Studies are forbidden.'
The stone walls
Over and over in the study of the sex abuse inquisition one comes up against stone walls. Studies are forbidden. Kafka, Orwell, McCarthyism. In another review of a Rabinowitz book (see Sex abuse) Jim Peron remarks: 'In the witch hunt era of Salem, to question the existence of witches lead to the accusation that the questioner must be a witch as well.'
If you question child sex abuse, or raise the subjects of child sexuality, such as child eroticism, you will be accused of being a paedophile. When it comes to child porn, studies are completely forbidden. You cannot demonstrate the differences between child porn, child nudity and child erotica. You cannot put the case for using children in dramatic depictions or art. In some countries, such as that inhabited by this writer, you cannot even write certain things down for publication. I cannot even say what it is that I am forbidden to write down here on this page. In Canada, I cannot write certain things on paper for private fantasy without committing a criminal act. So, the absolutism has turned against the children, both directly by criminalizing child sexual activity and by the maintenance of draconian child porn legislation. Over the fifteen or so dreadful years when the sex abuse obsession reigned supreme and unquestioned, it was clear that political correctness was its lifeblood. Not until it moved into child pornography and prohibition of incitement to hate legislation did we experience its full virulent powers. Then, for the first time, language, image and even the expression of thought or opinion were constrained by legislation. The absolutism still reigns almost supreme in society's views about child pornography, and that state is likely to continue for some time after it drops or loses its doctrine of sex abuse. Even if every 'real act' of sex abuse, other than brutal assault and rape, comes to be seen as human weakness, or human sexuality, child porn will continue for some time to be the designated sexual perversion.
But in the spirit of examining where the absolutism might seek its next controlling mechanisms, let us for the moment imagine a world in which we come to accept that all acts with or against children can be both imagined and depicted and even acted out, as we can depict and act out the unfortunate reality of the murder of children. Let us go further and imagine that child nudity and eroticism are eventually de-criminalized and restored as manifestations of beauty.
We would still be left with the full paraphernalia of political correctness, with its capacities to turn conventions into rules and laws. In the US, political correctness rules on many campuses, the former cauldrons for new ideas and expressions of liberty. What you can say and write, or not say or write, are laid down as if enshrined in a constitution.
The Internet as a tool of Inquisition
The latest target of the absolutists is the Internet itself. Microsoft and others have set themselves up as judges of what we should and should not do in chat rooms, all in the interests of that great weapon of the Inquisition 'the good of our children'. But even before this development, the servers could, should they chose, use a filtering system to delete or adapt a string of words which might appear on the web sites of their customers. Swear words and those such as 'nigger' and 'queer' can be changed automatically by the server. 'Fucking' becomes 'Bleep-ing' and 'queer' becomes 'I am having problems with my gender'. If servers impose this filtering with no opt-out facility, their customers can neither discuss these words nor use them in a literary or dramatic context. We have moved from the criminalization of the depiction of children in certain sexual contexts to the censoring of the use of certain words and expressions. The normal next step in this process is to make it illegal to use such words, as has already happened in the prohibition of incitement to hatred legislation.
Here is what our UK correspondent, Arthur Blair, has to say on the subject:
“Microsoft was drawn into ‘the fight’, I believe by a valiant Canadian policeman, who, wearied by his duties of viewing horrific images, emailed Bill Gates during a coffee break. He expected to hear nothing, but the chairman of Microsoft Canada called him back, saying that they would see what Microsoft could do. More.
“Now that Microsoft is ‘on team’, I suspect that it is only a matter of time before Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system become a police spy. Internet Explorer could download a patch from Microsoft, install it - this would be the monitoring software - and every now and then it could download a list of porn sites known to the police, and upload a list of any of those sites that have been viewed on that computer. Microsoft would then pass this information on to the police, or might even set up a department to specially monitor this data itself, thereby adding ‘public service’ value to Microsoft in its battle with evil. Entirely plausible, but maybe I'm being too paranoid?”
Indeed, we hope Arthur is a bit paranoid, but when we see UK policemen publicly gloating that soon no-one will be safe from exposure, prosecution and public shaming, we fear that he may not be paranoid. The Internet could be changed from a great human liberating device into a vast monitoring and controlling instrument. We need independent operating systems and browsers and pray that they come soon.
Addendum
Since the above was written, the ‘Honeypot’ sting has become widespread, as police and their partner censors have set up numerous web sites that pretend to sell child pornography. When the gullible respond, the police pounce. When we consider that there are already extortion rackets involving innocent people having child porn planted on their hard drives and then blackmailed into paying for its removal, who is to say that some police, the legal possessors of most of the child porn images, are not involved in these rackets also? What journalist will risk the research required to identify these criminals? What innocent person being blackmailed thus would call on the police for help?
The law, and only the law, has brought about this terrible state. Just as the law did with Prohibition crime and with the creation of the criminal drugs industry.
The rapid rise and extent of the absolutism
What is most scary about the absolutism is how quickly and almost completely it enveloped us with the doctrines of sex abuse/victim redress and child rights. It stole the high moral ground, branding dissenters as perverts, or apologists for perversion. Ironically, the sex abuse absolutism came from the left, not as some of us had naively thought it might, from a McCarthyism or Nazi fascist right. We never noticed the jackboots under the skirts of the social workers, but now we see them clearly on the Internet censors. Professor Maxwell Taylor is a self appointed Internet child porn censor, running a project called Copine at University College Cork in Ireland. He and his department carry out 'forensic analysis' of child porn images as well as assisting the police to hunt down and capture downloaders. Here he is being quoted in the UK's Sunday Herald on 19 January 2003. In a reference that appears to follow his assertion that the US is 'the world's biggest child-porn market', he is quoted thus: "It's been said if you nuked America out of existence, you'd nuke abusive images of children out of existence." He refused to reply to me as a journalist, or to confirm that he had meant to say this.
Operators like Copine and other censors and abuse organizations have contributed to the sex abuse absolutism, which has caused terrible injustices and given rise to the evil compensation culture. It has brought great wealth to the legal profession, but it has grievously undermined both it and the judiciary, and justice itself. The media have been gravely negligent in not recognizing it, but, of course, the media also have been deeply infected with political correctness. Even civil rights groups in the UK and Ireland have been reluctant to recognize the absolutism of the sex abuse doctrine. Their own politically correct view of victims may have caused them to be hoisted with their own petards.
Some commentators believe that a growing target for absolutism is the 'unhealthy deviant'. This would include the obese, but so many obese are found in racial minorities that it is politically incorrect to target them, and obesity is now spreading into all sections of Western communities. Obesity, however, is an ideal target, because it has most of the attributes required to qualify as 'a designated perversion'. It can provoke hatred, and especially disgust - specifically dissmell, that most toxic 'affect' identified by US psychiatrist/author Don Nathanson (Pride and Shame), where we 'hate the smell' of someone. Through dissmell, the obese person can be seen to possess characteristics similar to those of the hated 'pedophile'.
Ageism may combine with paedophilia to create a new designated pervert - the 'Senilophile', the drivelling, dirty old man. There is a strong anti-ageism element in the present young to middle aged generation - the grown up Boomers, in particular in regard to the idea that older people can be sexual in any way. Police officers dealing with older men accused of sex abuse find it hard to disguise their disgust and contempt for them. Here we have the classic despoiling of the designated purity (child) by the designated pervert (horrible old man). The very thought that semen could figure in such a possible confrontation has made some journalists feel physically sick. This is exactly the 'affect' of dissmell that Don Nathanson talks about - the smell of the semen of the older man near or on the child. It is not a pleasant thought, but under absolutism it becomes hatred, and soon the sweat of the middle aged obese woman could give rise to a similar reaction. As could the thought of a masturbating older man.
One cannot help casting an eye on Islam and comparing the fanaticism of religious fundamentalism with our Western tendency to adopt absolutist doctrines that give rise to, and cause for, a continuing Inquisition. Religious fundamentalism was at the root of the regime which created the residential abuse obsession in Ireland, and perhaps also that in Canada and Australia, and parts of the US such as Boston, where priests, nuns and Christian brothers are also being pilloried for 'abusing' orphans in residential care from thirty to fifty years ago. One does not read about the fundamentalism that created these institutionalized orphans. For example, despite all the religious bashing in Ireland, no one seems to want to acknowledge the conditions in the homes that many of these orphans came from, nor the kind of fundamentalist society that put some of them into care. In the period from the 1920s to the 1960s, 'immoral mothers' who dared to have more than one illegitimate child, and brazenly let them play on the streets in an affront to all good citizens, could have their children rounded up by what was the equivalent of today's social services and locked up in industrial schools.
Perhaps the fanaticism of those crusaders who rounded up street children is again equalled by their successors, today's social crusaders who have new targets of perversion and new holy states, and above all a new politically correct dictionary.
And a last word for now. In his book Man's Emerging Mind, N.J. Berrill says this about beauty. "To destroy or repress the growth of body or spirit or recognizable beauty in any of its manifestations is evil. I believe it is the only evil that we know - that instinctively we acknowledge the supreme values of the emergent quality we sense within us and recognise without in all of nature, and insofar as we realise it and hinder its expression we feel guilty of sin, the only sin there is."
He went on to express the hope that should our brains grow larger and better with a corresponding development of mind, we might 'stop sinning against the light'. These are interesting words. To repress beauty in any of its manifestations is evil. When we do so we feel guilty of sin. How we see this in the hatred of the censors and oppressors.
Finally, an educated guess at what new target the Inquisition may be seeking. For now, it looks like ‘inappropriate behavouir’. It has already begun by criminalizing ‘inappropriate sexual behavouir’, such as that described in the latest amendments to child protection laws in the UK and Canada, where even inappropriate looking is now proscribed, and ‘inappropriate’ remarks about minorities are already criminalized under incitement to hatred legislation. The very expression is full of the a priori bias so necessary to absolutists. Inappropriate behavouir under a totalitarian regime where the ideology is supplied to the judiciary by social workers and therapists would make for an ideal Orwellian state.
Berrill has this quote from William Blake in the Prelude of his book:
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.
See the next article below for the wider scope of the absolutism.
Bullying is now being criminalised
The criminalization process continues as we move closer to the framing of an ideological structure to define and legislate against ‘inappropriate social behavouir’. The legislative creep has been demonstrated in Ireland by Patricia Murray, an ‘organizational psychologist’ and government health and safety inspector producing a report ‘highlighting serious gaps in the way workplace bullying is currently addressed’.
Government minister Frank Fahey, responsible for workers, has jumped on the bandwagon by suggesting yet another statutory body to investigate alleged bullying in the workplace. In her report, Murray, said that, without third party control, “It is akin to asking sexual harassers to assess themselves when it is obvious they find their behavouir acceptable on their own terms.” The health and safety authority that Murray works for already has an anti-bullying unit, which demonstrates how far health and safety has already crept into the social arena.
We now have laws for many aspects of sexual behavouir, and these have spread from rape and from sex with children to several forms of sexual activity with teenagers up to 18, including grooming and the possession and exchange of images. Grooming now extends to certain ‘inappropriate’ contacts and communications, while the photographing of other people’s children is forbidden. The incitement to hatred legislation criminalizes certain written and verbally expressed opinions, including what one may consider to be truthful and requiring to be expressed. Now sexual harassment legislation, already draconian and in contradiction with human nature, is combining with bullying to create a major building block in the attempt to construct a society of legalized appropriate behavouir.
The combination of bullying and sexual harassment legislation is particularly potent, and it has a huge potential to criminalize many people. It will not be long before the bullying legislation is used to identify and hold up for inspection and possible prosecution any display of pressure or influence by the stronger and more privileged upon the weaker and less privileged, such as in interactions between older men and younger women, and men and boys in a homosexual context. When the grooming legislation is taken into account, it is dangerous for any older man to hold a conversation with a younger person. The social inspectors will protest that those who do not have an inappropriate relationship, or desire one, with the weaker or younger person will have nothing to fear. It is the same argument as that heard about innocent Internet users having nothing to fear before we learnt that no-one was safe using the Internet and the censors were declaring that being naïve enough to allow oneself to be invaded or hijacked was a crime in itself.
As the bullying legislation was being proposed in Ireland, the House of Lords in the UK refused to pass legislation designed to criminalize all smacking of children by parents or others, but allowed through a proposal for limited smacking, thus further opening the door to state supervision of the behavouir of families within what used to be the privacy of their homes.
What the social inspectors chose to overlook in all of the social legislation is that human beings are sexual, that they use power and privilege and experience, and youth and beauty and seductiveness, and that this interaction is fundamental to the maintenance and evolution of human civilization.
Obesity is under 'State intervention' in menu on left.
The holding of hands is forbidden
In the August 2004 edition of the newsletter of the Scarrif Community School in County Clare in Ireland, P.J. Mason, the school principle, has issued what he calls ‘a pre-emptive’ strike before the high school’s Autumn term begins. It warns of a new ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards teenage couples holding hands or engaging in other forms of ‘inappropriate holding’ on school grounds.
Interestingly, he use a label already seen in high profile cases in the US, Sweden and elsewhere – that of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ which we have already identified as the next target for the criminalization of a human activity. He describes repeated hand holding, arms around waists, kissing, and other expressions of boy-girl affection as ‘persistent inappropriate behaviour’. He wants relationships to be ‘respectful and appropriate’.
For those writing him off as a fanatic, the Irish Times of August 2 2004, reports that his initiative has been supported by the National Parent’s Council for post-primary students. That council’s president, Ms Eleanor Petrie, said, “Inappropriate touching between couples is not tolerated in other places of work.”
Not only was it embarrassing for teachers, but: “You must also be conscious of what impact this would have on younger children.”
And revealingly, perhaps, on the question that most teachers might turn a blind eye to mere hand holding, she replied, “If you are going to enforce rules, you have to start somewhere.”
The NSPCC criminalizes children
The NSPCC in the UK has identified a new target – children who sexually abuse other children. They say that ‘tragically the number of children referred to the NSPCC's Sexually Harmful Behaviour Services is rocketing’. Most are ‘abused’ by other children. They reveal that ‘five year old children are abusing other youngsters’.
NSPCC spokesman Kevin Gibbs adds: “Mostly, these offences are the result of something traumatic happening to the child. But 40 per cent of children who abuse others have not been sexually abused themselves.” (Editor – that’s an ideological change)
Every year about 400 children under 10 are referred to treatment clinics for offences ranging from rape to groping.
The NSPCC reveals that one third of all sexual offences, including those by adults, are committed by youngsters aged 17 and under. (They obviously treat some under 17s as adults). They go on to say that the likeliest age bracket for a sex abuser is 13 to 18, and that the criminal age of responsibility is 10. Between 1993 and 1999 the figure was 227. Last year, it was 1,200.
The NSPCC continues: “Between 1993 and 1999 the figure was 227. Last year, it was 1,200. Since April this year, the services have treated 962 children. All have gone through a terrible experience. (Editor - yes you might have to re-read this - including the 5 year olds groping each other).
The NSPCC is launching a new TV campaign against child sex abusers. They say, “Those who want to prevent children turning on other children should know there is someone who can help. That's what our latest campaign highlights. We ask people to aid us in any way they can.” They also publicize the ‘support line’ for donations.
For books that expose the deceptions used in campaigns against child pornography, and examples of what should not be seen as child pornography, see Beauty is immanent.
The Inquisition reaches into nursing homes
You could be fooled for thinking that the latest headlines from California were about the abuse of the elderly by nursing home staff members. You would be wrong. The new drive is to identify, name and root out ‘sex offenders who also live among the frail and elderly’ – that is frail and elderly sex offenders who are in nursing homes.
The initiative comes from an organization called ‘A Perfect Cause’, founded to protect the elderly inmates. Its leader, Wes Bledsoe, is ‘on a countrywide crusade to alert families with loved ones in nursing facilities’ about ‘predators who may be living amongst them’. He and others have succeeded in getting Californian Assemblyman Juan Vargas to prepare a bill to root out elderly sex offenders living in nursing homes.
"You could have a predator under the same roof with our loved one," Bledsoe said. He added that they have no business in nursing homes, and that he has found more than 400 elderly sex offenders in nursing homes nationwide and 66 in California alone. Paul Greenwood who runs the district attorney's elder abuse unit says that ‘disclosure’ should be required – that is, name and shame and expel the elderly offender.
The California Association of Health Facilities is scared by the development and has sent a memo advising nursing homes ‘to evaluate the needs of residents and potential risks posed by sex offenders’.
This new direction of the moral panic of sex abuse is very interesting and might be seen in the context of the general assault on white males. One of the most despised ‘designated pervert’ is the elderly sex abuser for whom there appears to be no mercy.
We may be seeing here the merger of at least three current processes of monomania – the assault on the Western white male, the fear and loathing for the sex pervert, and the growing dislike, and even contempt, for older white males.
When trying to make up becomes harassment
JW, who was 35, lives near Coventry in the UK and recently had a brief relationship with a 25 year old woman we will call Jill. He had lost his wife two years before the new relationship began. Jill, about whom he still harbours fond feelings, displayed what he described as ‘rather extreme behaviour’. She told him about elements in her past that could have contributed to this.
Jill became friendly with a female neighbour, at which point her relationship with JW soured and she broke it off. JW then made a serious mistake. Still smitten by Jill, and overlooking the fact that the law is enforced locally by the infamous West Midlands Police, he sent her text messages asking why her attitude to him had changed upon her forming this new friendship.
He claims that strange things then followed – ‘stupid girlie games, odd phone calls, his car being vandalised’. These however paled into insignificance when he was arrested by the West Midlands Police under the UK Harassment Law.
The trial came out clearly on the side of his two female accusers, about whom no questions were asked. As he puts it: “I was made to look like a right weirdo.” He was fined and imprisoned for a month. Warned to stay away for two years, he also has to do 180 hours of community service, working with people he describes as ‘real morons’.
He wrote us first through a comment on this web site, asking “How many other men have had this sort of treatment?” He would like to put a petition before the Prime Minister and asks for emails at JW.
He says: “The UK Harassment Law stinks. Get a copy from the Home Office and read it for yourself. I am sure I am not the only bloke who has suffered like this. Any girl or woman these days can go running to the nearest police station either aided or alone and make exaggerated claims and nobody asks questions.
Response
First response from Editor
JW, you want other men who have had the same experiences to respond and I hope they do. However, my first advice to you is to be careful. There are some danger signs in your story. You still have fond memories of her and you think that it could be OK if you ‘met again at some future point’. Also you ‘would still like to make peace with her’.
You are trying to make it all go away by re-creating what was there before. These efforts could be delusions that will land you back in prison. I don’t think many other men would make the same effort for someone who had landed them in prison. Expressing these yearnings also leaves you open to further charges of harassment.
The subject of harassment is so important however that all men should be aware that trying to make up could land them in prison. I would also like to hear more about the ‘morons’ you have to work with on your community service, as we are building a picture of what is going on in ‘social and sexual rehabilitation’.
What will be next?
The wider scope of absolutism
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