[no subject]

Remember: paedophiles are people too
Could the monster Gary Glitter once have been one of
the innocent abused children we so want to protect?
By Johann Hari
15 January 2003


Poor Pete Townshend, who probably isn't even a
paedophile, is the latest victim of our  yes, our,
not his  sick obsession with child abuse. Every time
a child abuse story is thrust on to our front pages, I
search fruitlessly for coverage that will answer basic
questions about paedophiles. And every time I am
shocked to realise that, in all the rotting acres of
newsprint expended on this topic, there has been
almost no discussion of such serious questions as: Can
paedophiles be treated? How did they become this way?
How can we reduce the odds of them abusing children,
either for the first time or as repeat offenders?

Let us, for once, look instead not at the froth but at
the facts. Press coverage and popular myth invite us
to see paedophiles as cold, clever Machiavellian
plotters. Sometimes this is true: the people who ran
the "Wonderland Club", the foul paedophile ring that
was finally shut down in 2000, do seem to have been
intelligent and worryingly calculating. But far more
often, they are sad, pitiful losers, the furthest of
outcasts from our society.

Last year I visited Maidstone Prison's Sex Offenders
Wing, where Britain's most notorious child molesters,
including Jonathan King, are held. Far from being the
Hannibal Lecters I had expected, these paedophiles
were mumbling, pitiful wrecks  barely literate, with
no social skills or ability to make adult contact. One
of them, Ray, did not look at me once during a
half-hour conversation, his eyes fixed on the ground
and his vocabulary fixed at the level of a five year
old.

The lengthy and extensive sex offender treatment
programmes they were on did seem to have genuinely
made them think for the first time about the damage
they were causing; when they had abused children
before, they had been too mentally limited and
socially stunted to understand that they were causing
horrific damage. After all, they had grown up being
told by their own abusers that this sort of behaviour
was normal. Although what they had done was
undoubtedly horrific, they, too, were clearly victims:
of severely low intelligence, of their own distant but
ever-present sexual abuse, and too often of poverty.

Even the intelligent paedophiles  like the two as yet
unnamed Members of Parliament whom the police are
investigating  have a strong chance of having been
molested themselves, and therefore of having had their
sexuality moulded at the earliest possible age into a
horribly deformed shape.

Our hysterical climate about paedophilia had actually
made them more likely to offend. As Jim, a
thirtysomething man, explained to me: "I could never
tell no one [sic], not even my best friend, how I felt
because then they'd know I was a paed... a paedoph...
[he couldn't quite say the word] and then they'd say I
was just evil and totally beyond the pale. If I had
been able to talk to somebody about it, I think I
might have been able to control it more. I might not
have, you know, actually hurt a kid. I might have been
strong enough to get help. But because everywhere it
was saying I was evil, even if I had not done nothing,
I began to think I was evil and then I done it."

He began to abuse a six-year-old girl. If we had a
culture that saw paedophilia not as an irrevocable
sign of the beast but as a sad reality that will
always afflict some people  people who then need our
support and help to ensure that they do not act on
their sexual urges  then that girl and hundreds like
her might have been protected.

Pete Townshend says that he was a victim of sexual
abuse, and that was why he felt so strongly about the
subject that he looked at child porn. I do not know if
he is attracted to children, but if he is, it would be
typical for him to have suffered at the hands of a
paedophile. Ray Wyre, an expert on paedophiles (they
do exist, though we rarely call them), explains that
"66 per cent of paedophiles claim to have been victims
of sexual abuse, although that falls to 36 per cent
when you use a lie detector". He added: "Paedophilia
is often about learnt behaviour. The abuser almost
clones himself by taking power over his victim,
because, as the victim grows, he mimics this
behaviour."

Most of the paedophiles I met had given credible
testimony of sexual abuse. We do not like to admit
this, because it muddies our moral indignation. Could
the monster Gary Glitter once have been one of the
innocent abused children we so want to protect? Can
there be mitigating factors that make paedophiles
human?

All of this will be hard for right-wingers to accept.
They want straightforward evil; to condemn, not
understand. But there is a hard truth that we on the
left will have to accept, too: paedophilia is an
intractable sexual orientation, like heterosexuality
or homosexuality, that cannot be "trained out" of a
person. This goes against our natural belief in the
possibility of redemption and the possibility of
criminals being allowed a "fresh slate" after their
release.

Research by the Australian psychologist JK Marques and
his colleagues, published in the journal Criminal
Justice and Behaviour, indicates that a man who is
sexually attracted to children always will be.

We cannot hope for a cure  that is not realistic, and
paedophiles can never be released from the hell of
being attracted to people who are incapable of
reciprocating. However, they can undergo counselling
that reduces their chances of reoffending
substantially. (I was persuaded of this by the wealth
of evidence forwarded to me by academic psychologists
since I last wrote about this topic, where I said I
suspected that even limited treatment would not work.
Home Office research has proved me wrong).

The best we can hope for, then, is to help paedophiles
to control their urges and to desist from harming
children, and to imprison indefinitely the small
minority  such as Sidney Cooke  who do not want to
stop. This can obviously be done through the sex
offender treatment programmes in prisons  and the
prison officers and counsellors in Maidstone who toil
at this horrific work every day are quietly heroic 
but it would also be a good idea for the Government to
launch a high-profile campaign that can reach
paedophiles before they begin to offend.

This could take the form of adverts on national
television, which should carry the message: "If you
find yourself sexually attracted to children, we will
help you to make sure you do not act on it."

After all, most people who find themselves attracted
to children have memories of their own abuse, and,
when reasoned with, do not want to inflict that on
somebody else. There needs to be a point where
paedophiles can find help other than in prison. We
should promise therefore to provide them with a
therapist who will be available 24/7 to stay with them
if ever they feel tempted to offend; who will keep
them occupied and not alone; and who will, if
necessary, house them in secure gated communities
where they will never have access to children.

Instead of driving them underground as we do at
present, where their only source of friendship and
comfort is to get involved with on-line paedophile
rings, we need to draw them out into an environment
where they can be supported in their efforts not to
offend. It is not perfect  but it is far better than
the current situation, where under the guise of caring
about children, we are making it far more likely that
child molesters will strike.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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