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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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