Re: Hartford Advocate for the defense

["Helen" <elbo@xxxxxxxxx>]

As Pete says he`s stumbled across a website that claimed sex with children
and child porn not to be illegal in Russia. Hey I live here and this is
dirty lies! This is very serious here too. Kids suffer. But the authorities
don`t do what they should do. That`s why Russian porn movies illegally made
are sold to other countries. I read articles in Russian newspapers how some
adults went to the beach to look for some children, gave them candies and
told them they`ll make them movie stars. Then they made them "work" for
them. You guess the rest.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Cady" <brianinatlanta2001@yahoo.com>
To: "oddsandsods" <oddsandsods@thewho.net>; <thewho@igtc.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 2:36 PM
Subject: Hartford Advocate for the defense


> Thanks to John at The Shout for pointing this out:
> From the Hartford Advocate at:
> http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content.html?oid=oid:1276
>
> Behind Blue Eyes
> The witch hunt of Peter Townshend
> by Alan Bisbort - January 23, 2003
>
> Pete Townshend was an unlikely rock star. Long-limbed
> and long-faced, arms flailing awkwardly at his guitar,
> fingers bleeding, eardrums splitting, he seemed to be
> conducting an elaborate rite of self-punishment
> whenever he took the stage with The Who. Even in the
> earliest interviews, he was articulate but
> self-effacing. Early photos revealed piercing, wounded
> eyes that were memorialized in 1971: "Nobody knows
> what it's like to be the sad man, to be the bad man
> ... behind blue eyes."
>
> Because Pete was never a rock "god"; he was special to
> many fans who came to his music from broken homes
> and/or miserable places. We found solace in his rock
> operas Tommy and Quadrophenia, feeling that the
> shadows that fell on his characters touched our worlds
> too on some deep, unspoken level.
>
> I say all this not to minimize the arrest this month
> of Townshend for having viewed a website that featured
> child pornography. (He was released after being
> questioned and not charged with any offense, except
> perhaps stupidity, although his computer and other
> files were seized.) The sting that bit him is really a
> bit of a witch hunt. British authorities have arrested
> 7,200 since the start of "Operation Ore" last year. If
> you click on the wrong website, bang, you hear a knock
> at the door. Nice. Ashcroft would love this.
>
> Pete Townshend is and always has been a deeply
> conflicted man. Now his fans are deeply conflicted
> about his arrest, just as we were about the
> institutionalizing of pedophilia by the largest
> Christian denomination on the planet. And yet, we must
> find a way, as a sane and civilized society, to get
> our minds around pedophilia and sex abuse of children
> without becoming hysterical.
>
> The prevalence of children's sex abuse is larger than
> anyone out there on the moral high ground would ever
> suspect. This was obvious to Townshend. I take him at
> his word that his Internet search was conducted as
> part of his research into child sex abuse and in
> preparation of an autobiography, which includes his
> own childhood abuse. I take him at his word because I
> have his word. That is, for the past week, I've pored
> over Who albums, his solo stuff, interviews. I kept
> thinking I'd unearth a "Rosebud" that would make sense
> of this. I was looking in the wrong places. I should
> have simply gone to Pete's own website, where last
> January he posted an essay on his efforts to help
> those who have been victims of pedophilia.
>
> The piece was written in the wake of the suicide of a
> close friend, a woman he'd met at an alcohol
> counseling program that he (a recovering alcoholic
> himself) had helped set up. The woman, it turns out,
> had been sexually abused by her father; and her
> suicide was the endgame of a long struggle against a
> flood of guilt, shame and loathing. It was triggered
> by her learning that her father "was in a new
> relationship and had access to young children," writes
> Townshend. "The greatest terror for an adult who
> remembers sexual abuse is the thought that other
> children might suffer as they did. This terror echoes
> for me. In my writing in the past -- especially Tommy
> -- I have created unusually unmerciful worlds for any
> infant characters. I am often disturbed by what I see
> on the page when I write -- never more so than when I
> draw on my own childhood."
>
> He concludes that the Internet is a door through which
> sex abuse of children can flourish and describes how
> he came to learn this firsthand: "There is hardly a
> man I know who uses computers who will not admit to
> surfing casually to find pornography. I have done it."
> He then relates an experience he had searching for
> information on adoption of Russian orphans: "Within
> ten minutes ... I was confronted with a 'free' image
> of a male infant of about two years old being buggered
> by an unseen man. The blazer on the page claimed that
> sex with children is 'not illegal in Russia.' This was
> not smut. It was a depiction of a real rape. The
> victim, if the infant boy survived and my experience
> was anything to go by, would probably one day take his
> own life. The awful reality hit me of the
> self-propelling, self-spawning mechanism of the
> Internet. I reached for the phone, I intended to call
> the police and take them through the process I had
> stumbled upon-- and bring the pornographers involved
> to book. Then I thought twice about it. I knew I must
> NOT download anything I saw [as 'evidence']. That
> would be illegal."
>
> Since writing that piece, Townshend had been
> researching this predatory underworld in an effort to
> stop sex abuse of children, he says, not perpetrate
> it. But don't try to find his essay. The British
> authorities made him take it off his website two weeks
> after he put it up. They deemed it "inappropriate."
>
> One year later, the British authorities are busting
> Pete for doing what they were wholly incapable of
> doing themselves. Could it be that he was trying to
> save lives, and not destroying them?
>
>
> =====
> -Brian in Atlanta
> The Who This Month!
> http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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