Inquisition 21
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Sex abuse
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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Sex abuse is the latest expression of absolutism
Reflections on Thomas O’Carroll
Brian Rothery
I first heard about Thomas O’Carroll through odd remarks from Arthur Blair, whose perceptive articles are on this web site, remarks critical of the charges used to convict and imprison O’Carroll in 2002 for the possession of child pornography. I was to learn that O’Carroll was despised and persecuted by the British establishment and public because of his published views about paedophilia, to the extent that it can be reasonably assumed that he was the first other writer apart from Salman Rushdie to be condemned for his publicly held and published views, and the first writer to receive such condemnation from a Western democracy. He was a founding member and head of an organization called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), one of whose major aims was for a change in the law on sex between adults and children. O’Carroll’s personal liking was for boys.
He was imprisoned twice, the first time in 1981 because of his published views, the second time in 2002 on the excuse, upon his return from working in the Middle East State of Qatar, that his luggage contained indecent photographs of boys, which he had taken on beaches while there. He had been working as a journalist for a British newspaper in Qatar.
Arthur Blair’s main interest in Thomas O’Carroll is in the light it casts on the UK child pornography laws, about which Arthur is expert. He believes that the seven images selected by the prosecution depicting children aged two to 10, mostly in what is now called ‘full frontal’ poses, were not child pornography. The prosecution did claim that they were taken without their parents' knowledge, which brought them into that new category of crime known as ‘inappropriate viewing’.
After he was sentenced to nine months imprisonment in 2002, the court was told about his 1981 sentence of two years at the Old Bailey in 1981 for conspiracy to corrupt public morals. The jury back then had decided that by publicising PIE's world-wide contact sheet, he had encouraged advertisers to have sexual contact with children. PIE, which had an international membership of 250 at the time, was described in court as ‘sick and a force for evil’ which attracted ‘dirty-minded predators’.
In the 2002 case, the judge tried to say that the new sentence was for possession of the images and not for what else he stood for, but there could be little doubt about how judge and court felt about him. He appealed and was released after about three and a half months in prison.
O'Carroll, who by now should be about 58, understandably appears to have gone out of public view, although should this come to his attention, I would appreciate an update on his activity. (This has now happened – see below.)
Dramatic though these events may appear, they were part of a highly dramatic life, because Tom O’Carroll had been running a gauntlet for decades from frenzied mobs attacking his meetings to being banned from hotels and pilloried in the British media. What unfortunately got buried in all of this was both his personal story and what exactly he was advocating.
Tom O’Carroll’s ideas
In 1979, Tom O'Carroll wrote a book titled Paedophilia: The Radical Case, which from reading one can tell he had high hopes of both changing the world’s views on love between adults and children and getting the book published. It is probably safe to say that it could be considered criminal to sell or promote it through any publisher or bookstore today, even though it is a serious, comprehensive and well researched work. It was published in some form by Peter Owen, London in 1980 as Contemporary Social Issues #12 and since then made freely available at Peter Owen’s web site, which contains other challenging titles.
As the whole book is still available, although for how long one cannot guess, I will confine myself to just a few remarks about it.
As far as I can establish, this book is the only one in the Western world that is considered so morally repugnant and revolutionary that its formal publication and sale would invite prosecution, perhaps of both seller and buyer. (I can add that others have since been written and either suppressed by their authors or rejected by potential publishers and attempts have been made but failed to suppress others.) Only picture books of children in ‘obscene’ poses would merit the same response, but this is not a picture book but one expressing ideas. It is the ideas that are being suppressed, although great philosophers have told us that a human idea, once expressed, cannot be suppressed, for a few years perhaps, but not completely. History teaches us that such attempts at suppression of ideas merely increase the interest in them. Is there any doubt that millions of us, formerly disinterested in, or unaware of, child sex abuse and child pornography are filled with ideas of it, and thoughts about it, today? We see the world ‘through the eyes of the paedophile’, but we also see children through those same eyes, because the censors have taught us well.
O'Carroll’s book tells us from its beginning that child sexuality, especially sexual play, at pre-puberty and puberty age, is a taboo subject. We must not even acknowledge it, let alone express ideas about it.
What is clear from the book is that O'Carroll carried a huge amount of optimism about the coming liberation of all human sexuality from the 1960s. He would have been 23 in 1969. He saw himself as spearheading a heady assault on the last bastion of sexual prudery. Why not, seeing that all the others had fallen – homosexuality, lesbianism, swinging? Why not now admit that sex does take place between children themselves and between adults and children and legalize it, thus as he argues solving many social problems? What he did not see was that as the so-called permissive revolution was taking place with adults, the monster of the newly-created Frankenstein, the paedophile, was only just emerging. Instead of the climate for adult-child love becoming more acceptable, it was worsening dramatically.
While neither he nor anyone could have predicted this emerging moral panic, he made some other serious errors of judgement, apart from his many errors of almost being lynched. In an earlier draft of this article, I wrote that he confesses he hardly knew a mother's love, and that this was probably the reason he appeared to have no concept of family or parenthood. I was pleasantly surprised when he eventually replied to me in a most friendly way correcting me saying, “In Chapter 1 of The Radical Case, I wrote: ‘- - - my parents were happily married, so far as I could tell. I loved them, they loved me. Such physical affection as was evident in the family tended to be trans generational. My father, for instance, was not a distant or aloof figure, as some fathers are, and he was affectionate, in a rough, manly sort of way. My mother was the tender one - - - .The fact that I do not buy into the advertisers' fantasy of ideal happy families does not mean I am unappreciative of family life at its best. I owe an enormous debt to my parents for the love and security in which I grew up. I also believe child lovers and parents can be good friends. Please, don't tell me this too is a fantasy: I know from personal experience that it is not’.”
I stand corrected.
He demands rights for children to choose freely in matters of love and sex, and I hasten to add that he is generally advocating consensual and non-penetrative sexual activity, but these demands are quite impractical in any society that respects family rights. Very few fathers or mothers will allow an adult stranger or friend access to their children for love-making or sex; indeed, the very opposite is likely to be the case, as the parent may want to kill the adult that attempts it.
This is where O'Carroll’s well argued case begins to unravel, but he avoids one avenue I am suggesting that his argument opens up, although in his honesty I guess he never saw it. There is no argument against his evidence of child sexuality. Apart from the personal experiences of many of us, there is much scientific evidence of child sexuality. The horrific case of the Klassen–Kvello family in the Saskatoon story (Country by country in menu), reveals what happened between twin sisters and their brother when their deaf and dumb parents could not express normal affection to them. They engaged in rampant incest, which the therapists could not countenance so called it ‘their touching problem’. The brother was having intercourse with both sisters from an early age, while they were touching each other, and all three touching other children.
But before continuing with my theory of his case unravelling, let me return to some evidence that could support him. At one point he quotes Germaine Greer in support of his arguments, citing an interview she gave to a woman journalist in the American magazine Evergreen in 1971.
At the time, Germaine Greer was one of the editors of an extraordinary sex newspaper, published in Amsterdam, called Suck. It is important to know that this was before the unpleasant American expression ‘suck’ came into general use, and did not mean the same thing. It was ‘suck’ in the healthy original sense of sucking, whether on a lollipop or a nipple.
Claudia, the interviewer, said to Greer, “You are an editor of the European pornzine SUCK - a rather unusual position for one of Britain's leading feminists. In America, I couldn't conceive of a leading Women's Liberationist sitting on the editorial committee of a pornsheet. Do you see a conflict between your feminist ideals and your involvement with SUCK?
Greer replied, “I see no conflict at all. SUCK is not a pornzine in the American sense of the word. SUCK, as a matter of fact, is no more the equivalent of SCREW than I am the equivalent of Al Goldstein [editor of SCREW]. SCREW is a sadistic paper. Its emphasis is completely masculine and it treats female flesh like it was so much butcher meat. It's completely unerotic - very American. It makes me puke. Suck, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. The keynote of SUCK is that sexual relationships should be open and unpossessive. We are anti-possession, anti-conquest, and anti-demanding of the sexual object, be it male or female. We are pro-pleasure.”
O'Carroll continues in his book with an editorial for SUCK itself which Germaine Greer wrote: 'Our cause is sexual liberation. Our tactic the defiance of censorship. Thus expressed, our aims are political, for the patterns of sexual interrelationship are created by and in turn support the other social structures. The approved sexual relationship in all Western societies is exclusive, possessive, colonizing, exploitary; sex is recognized as intimately connected with violence, for the power of the one over the other must be enforced and enforceable. Butch rules bitch, pimp rules whore, man rules wife, queer rules queen. Like the most insidious tyrannies, it is spoken of as a natural law, nature red in tooth and claw. This organization, which is as clear and universal as if it were indeed the expression of an irrefragable law, has as its central pole pain instead of pleasure. The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy. Censorship is the outward and continuing expression of this distortion of the human erotic faculty. It is the one public point at which we can join battle with what enslaves us. Defiance of censorship is an emblem of the removal of the swaddling bands that have deformed our sexual personalities and it is our faith that they must be removed absolutely as a first prerequisite of freedom and new growth - - - .’
Before returning to O'Carroll and the possible unravelling of his argument, this rather long side contribution demands still further elaboration. I was also well aware of SUCK as I saw it while vacationing with my wife and two children in Amsterdam around 1970 when the sexual revolution was in full swing, in many ways literally. In a large newsagent, as our kids were selecting their copies of Asterix, to my astonishment I saw that the front page of the current SUCK tabloid, close by the children’s magazine racks, headlined a ‘Special Family Edition’, was adorned with a full page drawing of a little girl, standing with nightdress raised and drooling with pleasure, as her mother’s fingers masturbated her.
While agreeing with O'Carroll and Greer about SUCK, I believe that it went even further than they say. I believe that it was saying that while ‘fucking’ may be necessary for the continuation of the human race, and at a personal level the creation of a family, and also has its place between couples for sexual fulfilment, where possible ‘sucking’ in the sucking/licking/kissing sense is better. But - - -, and this is the big but, it meant sucking regardless of the gender or age of the partners, or whether between parent and offspring or in the case of the latter also between each other or their friends. It was very revolutionary, undermining as it did views of traditional and conventional and ‘morally acceptable’ sexual activity. It went further: it published photographs and drawings of both adults and children naked and in sex play and it sold openly on the newsstands of Amsterdam. To be found with a single copy today would result in almost certain imprisonment.
Back at last to O'Carroll who wanted the world that SUCK proposed, and at a personal level admitted openly that his paradise was a version of it filled with boys. Can I first say that I had to read O'Carroll before coming to the conclusion that I will now propose? Which I hope is further evidence of why we should never censor ideas.
Elsewhere on this web site (under Country by country) one may be surprised to read that in Sweden the sexual freedom we have all known about for years goes hand in hand with a repressive social regime, because the state controls sexuality. And because the state controls it, it is liberalized. There are many children in state care in Sweden, mainly in state controlled foster homes. Sex between children in an institutionalised non-family setting is not unusual, but it needs to be controlled.
While O'Carroll certainly does not want a Swedish or Big Brother state, he does want the removal of parental control over children in matters of their sexuality. Not only do I now believe that this will be possible only in a state that like Sweden has taken control of the lives and social behavouir of children, I believe that, as control by social workers increases, the likelihood of the managed sexuality of children will emerge. The question I cannot answer is who will be the ‘appropriate adults’ in the new adult child relationships?
I will close on the note that O’Carroll was twice imprisoned for his published views on adult-child love, which also brought out the lynch mobs. Germaine Greer published equally radical views and illustrated them with highly explicit images of children indulging in sexual activity with adults, and she was never charged or convicted, nor did her views give rise to lynch mobs. She even wrote a book recently about the love of older women for boys (child boys in the legal sense).But we all know the difference between Greer and O’Carroll.
(In his response to the above article, Thomas Carroll also wrote: “As for what I've been up to, I am currently working on a book on Michael Jackson. After that, I plan to revisit the territory covered in The Radical Case in the light of developments over the quarter century since it appeared. I hope at some point also to write about my recent trial, imprisonment and post-release ‘risk assessment’, and the backdrop of populist, illiberal democracy against which these experiences have been played out. I hope to continue ‘resisting the absolutism of our times’.”
Follow up story below.
A sordid British story
Here is a sordid story from the police state of Great Britain. It is about Tom O'Carroll (above) who is the first other writer, apart from Salman Rushdie, to be condemned for his publicly held and published views, and the first writer to receive such condemnation from a Western democracy. He expresses his ideas about adult-child sexual relationships, and for this he has been imprisoned and pilloried. Now he has been set up and caught in a disgraceful police entrapment.
Here he is now speaking directly.
Now that I've had a couple of months to recover from the initial shock of being raided, plastered all over the Sun and local press, having my windows smashed, losing my home, all my personal files, my computer research archive of 20,000 text items and a number of writing projects I have been working on -- including a nearly completed book about Michael Jackson's brushes with the law -- I can begin to face, and talk about, the stunning, bizarre reality of what this case is all about.
Scotland Yard's Paedophile Squad trumpeted it as a major operation to smash an international child porn ring centred on Ipce, an organisation they claim I founded following the demise of PIE (the Paedophile Information Exchange) in the UK in the 1980s. This is rubbish. I joined Ipce (www.ipce.info/ipceweb ) many years after it was founded. Ipce is an entirely respectable, scholarly forum for the discussion of issues relating to sexual relations between adults and minors. The main attribute of its website is an excellent academic library. It is not a porn ring, but it seems the police are desperate to smear it as such in an effort to hit their key target: what they privately call ‘political paedophiles’.
I first heard that phrase when an academic friend of mine told me he had heard it uttered by Bob McLaughlan, former head of the Paedophile Unit, a few years ago. My friend, a sociologist, had been engaged in research which involved him talking to McLaughlan, who let slip that the Unit's biggest ambition was to nail politically minded activists. He wanted to harass and discredit those campaigning for the acceptance of consensual sexual relations at all ages. In other words, McLauglan and his team were bent on shutting up, by fair means or foul, anyone exercising the democratic right to freedom of expression in this controversial area.
I am delighted to report that the operation has failed to impede Ipce's work, partly because the organisation has done nothing illegal but also because it is based outside the UK in a country where the police appear to have more respect for civil liberties.
So much for Ipce. So far as the action against me and several of my friends is concerned (most of them NOT Ipce members) the really crazy, incredible thing is the huge level of resources thrown at it by the police. The government could have done something a whole lot more useful with the money, like building new hospitals or raising the basic state pension.
You think I exaggerate? Well, yes, I suppose I do, a bit, but consider this: I have calculated that the raids alone, on myself and five friends, took nearly a thousand hours of police time -- at just two of the houses the searches went on for an entire week each, with numerous officers deployed. That's longer than the police in California took to go over Michael Jackson's enormous Neverland ranch. And all these cops -- totalling around 100 according to the Sun -- had to be accommodated in hotels because the unit was working away from its London base.
Even more astonishing in its way was the elaborate cloak-and-dagger stuff leading up to this great orgasm of profligacy. I was under surveillance for three whole years, during which an undercover agent called ‘Derek’ went to extraordinary lengths to win my confidence, finally setting up a trap for me at an apartment in a country mansion, which had been represented to me as his home.
He succeeded -- mainly because, despite niggling doubts I had about him, I simply could not believe I was a big enough fish to warrant such intensive and long-lasting police attention. I told myself I was being paranoid and it would be wrong to let that paranoia poison my relations with people, especially ones like Derek who had actually been very good to me (and now I know why, of course) over a sustained period.
What he did was to manoeuvre me into feeling a sense of obligation towards him. I must admit I liked the guy too. He was a friend, or so I thought. He was witty, with an appealing line in self-deprecating humour -- and, as a hugely fat man, I guess he needed it. I felt sorry for him, really. So, when he said he would like to get hold of some porn, I foolishly did what I could and did not ask a penny for it.
Not that it was much, just a few very old videos from about the late 1980s. I was never a Mr Big of child porn, never a commercial distributor or indeed a disseminator of any kind. The only Mr Big was Derek himself, in the most literal sense.
On the advice of my lawyer and in the face of overwhelming evidence, I admitted the essence of the sting (in which the handover of the tapes had been secretly filmed) in a police interview late on the day of the raid, towards the end of January. The admission enabled me, at an early stage, to put on record the fact that I had been lured by the police into an act of distribution which would not have happened but for them. British law enforcement has traditionally fought shy of such acts of entrapment in the belief that the courts would throw out police-generated crime as an abuse of the criminal process. Now, doubtless under the influence of the USA where police sting operations are routine, it seems such scruples are being ditched.
As for the part played, or not played, by the others who were raided, I ought really to remain silent. What I can tell you is that five other people were raided, of whom two were arrested and are now on bail, like myself, until 19 April when we may face questioning on the content of our computers.
End of direct Tom O'Carroll message.
It appears that the police are targeting Ipce for political reasons. O’Carroll is ex-PIE Chair and author of Paedophilia: The Radical Case, so they seem to want to take him out. No matter how much one may disagree with O’Carroll, and this writer expresses disagreement on key issues in the article mentioned above, but I also add in that article that I learned important things from reading him.
Ipce and O’Carroll are the enemy within, but the same legislation masquerading as ‘for the good of the children’ has already spread to incitement to hatred censorship, ‘extreme pornography’ and thought control.
But the costs involved here! Nearly a thousand hours of police time. At just two of the several houses the searches going on for an entire week each, with one hundred police officers deployed. O’Carroll under surveillance for three whole years. The elaborate cloak-and-dagger drama of the fat man undercover agent called ‘Derek’, and the filmed trap.
Will some MP with courage ask a question about the money (a quarter to half a million?) spent here?
Sex abuse
Age of consent - Gerald's story.
A 21st century tragedy
'Speed assaults’ on children
Parents, your children are now truly at risk
The Australian inquiry
Death penalty for sex acts in Georgia
The atrocities of consensual sex
Jessie and Tyler - did the dog do it?
His art became his life
Reflections on Thomas O’Carroll
Salivating over paedophilia
Another front is opening up
God help human sexuality!
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