Our public discourse regarding pedophilia (or paedophilia, as it is usually rendered in England) is saturated in myth, hysteria, and unchecked irrationality. Media coverage of pedophiles is notoriously unprofessional, sometimes even farcical, and a perfect target for parody.

The brilliant satirist Chris Morris took a shot at this with his Brass Eye pedophilia special. Morris manages to dupe various celebrities into earnestly telling us that, for instance, pedophiles can control a child’s computer keyboard via the internet, causing it to release mind-altering gasses, and that pedophiles have “more DNA in common with crabs than humans”. All the celebrities in question, some of them respected household names at the time, believed they were taking part in a serious documentary and that the surreal nonsense being peddled was worthy of serious consideration.

There’s another scene in which Morris, posing as a Paxman-like interviewer, sternly places a magazine cut-out of a child up on a blank board. In another corner of the board is a separate cut-out of a penis. Morris moves the cut-out penis progressively closer to the cut-out child, and an “expert” is asked to say at what point this becomes illegal child porn. I think it was somewhere around three inches away.

At one point in the show, a pedophile activist (played by Simon Pegg of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead) is brought into the Brass Eye studio to have his say. But there’s one condition placed upon his appearance: he has to go onto the show locked into a set of stocks! Morris’s character brings in a schoolboy to stand a few yards in front of Pegg – a boy supposed to be the son of the Brass Eye anchorman himself. He then asks the pedophile activist if he fancies the boy. “No,” Pegg replies. Outraged, Morris asks: “Why not? What’s wrong with him?” Pegg’s reply: “He’s just not my type.” This only annoys the news anchorman even more: he’s indignant that his son would not be attractive to a pedophile.

Morris’s pertinent and hilarious satire obviously touched a nerve, because this particular episode of Brass Eye remains one of the most complained-about TV shows ever in England. The show provoked exactly the kind of automatic vitriol and panic that he was satirizing.

To illustrate how far this can go, one poor paediatrician in Wales had his house firebombed by a crazed mob of locals convinced that paediatrics was synonymous with pedophilia.

Let’s try to introduce some rationality to the subject. Take a moment to consider the definition of the word “pedophile”. A pedophile is an adult (legally speaking) who is primarily sexually attracted to children (again a legal category, though there’s some debate over the exact ages we should be talking about). This uneasy mishmash of law and pop-psychology is confusing and problematic, but at least we have some idea of what we’re discussing.

Pedophilia is a state of being sexually attracted to children rather than other adults. Nothing more or less.

One obvious problem with our media coverage, then, is the overuse and misuse of the term “pedophile” itself to refer to people convicted of any sex-related crime in which children are involved. This contradicts criminological evidence showing that most incidents of rape against children are committed by opportunistic situational offenders, usually family-members, who’re not even pedophiles by definition.

When the BBC News refers to a “convicted pedophile” (its favourite label for sex-offenders), the chances are that the criminal in question is not a pedophile at all. He’s a convicted child-rapist. Why not simply report that he’s a convicted child-rapist, then?

In truth, there’s no such thing as a “convicted pedophile”, because one cannot be convicted of being a pedophile. You can only be convicted of a specific offence, not of your sexual inclinations. If a type of sexual attraction was a criminal offence, then it would be a different matter.

Decades ago in Britain, homosexuality was considered a grave sin. Oscar Wilde, one of our best ever writers, was sentenced to several years of hard labour for the crime of buggery. This form of so-called justice ruined Wilde’s health and left him a shadow of his former self. But even during those unenlightened days, homosexuality itself was not a crime. Wilde couldn’t have been convicted of having gay daydreams or looking at pictures of naked men. Only Nazi Germany and certain Islamic countries have ever gone that far.

Criminalizing a person’s attractions or inner fantasies would make George Orwell’s notion of thought crimes a deadly reality. In Orwell’s novel 1984, thought crimes were part of the backdrop of an imagined world of perfected totalitarianism. We don’t yet live under a despotic rule, but some laws come close to making thought-criminals of us.

A friend of mine used to write stories about sexual relationships between adults and children. These narratives were crafted to be provocative as well as somewhat titillating. Can you imagine how our media would portray her today? By the current standards of our discourse, she would be branded a pedophile and a maker of child pornography who ought to be locked up or shot.

This is a problem because, although my friend has committed no criminal (or indeed ethical) offence, she could be lumped together with various child-rapists and psychopaths in the perception of the nodding multitudes. Has she ever expressed any sexual desire for children? No. Is she a pedophile, therefore? No. Her offence, in the eyes of wannabe book-burners, is to put certain words together and to let others read those words.

A few years back, the author and sexologist Judith Levine published a book called Harmful to Minors. Writing in thoughtful and cautious prose, Levine dares to question whether our obsession with protecting kids from sex, at all costs, is healthy or sane.

In her book she recounts that she had a sexual experience as a child, with an adult. She questions whether such experiences are always harmful, as is widely assumed. After all, her experience seemed fairly positive and non-threatening to her, and she is now a successful/well-balanced woman with no particular issues about it.

Levine’s book was not as polemical as the kind of book I might have chosen to write on the subject, but it ignited a firestorm of controversy and fierce criticism from all sides. The bitterness and hysteria aroused in Levine’s critics was out of all proportion, especially given the considered tone of her writing. She was accused of producing a “child-rapist’s charter” and, basically, of being a closet pedophile.

The swivel-eyed detractors had nothing particularly meaningful to say about Levine’s thesis, other than… they didn’t like it. The opposition was based not on rational debate but on ideology. Shouting “pedophile!” at an opponent is always an effective means of attack wherever reason fails.

The widespread condemnation of Levine’s book was a small victory for fervent irrationality and conservatism, but her arguments remain lucid and sensible. I recommend Harmful to Minors, if you can find a copy that hasn’t been burned; you’ll be enlightened.

Caution is recommended. A lack of blind panic and rage over this issue can be dangerous for your reputation. You may soon hear the words

You pedophile! You are a pedophile!

That word has a resonance of fear and vicious mob-hatred about it... they’re coming to get you, whether you did it or not! I wince whenever I hear or read it. But the p-word is so overused, and it is applied to so many different types of behaviour, that it has virtually lost all meaning. It has mutated into a general term of abuse to hurl against anyone who treads on a particular taboo in our culture. And, as taboos go, children and sex come together to create the greatest of them all.

Why is this? Why is sex itself still such a taboo, before children are even mentioned? Even nudity is still a taboo, as you’ll soon discover if you strip off and go for a stroll around the suburbs.

We seem to be the only species on earth simultaneously so obsessed with sex and so neurotic about it, and I don’t pretend that I’m less uptight than anyone else. Dolphins and bonobos may have a healthier attitude to life. They might seem to have dodgy family values, but in both cases communities of dolphins or apes get involved in the rearing of the kids. We see something similar in polyamorous set-ups in human society, although people are attacking the growing trend of polyamory in America as either being the same as polygamy (it isn’t) or being associated with hippies. As for the majority of humans, the standard way is monogamy and a large dose of sexual inhibition in most situations. I’m not arguing that this is wrong, only that it is highly unusual. It seems so normal to us because we’ve known nothing else since birth. In the context of all other animals on earth, we’re the anomaly. So, how did human society come to be like this?

From the Darwinian viewpoint, monogamy might have become the social norm initially due to it being an effective strategy for propagating DNA and ensuring that each genetic investment was nurtured to become a successful breeding adult. Excess promiscuity could result in more offspring, but perhaps the offspring were less successful than those raised by a monogamous couple. At some point, religion also took up the cause, and monogamy became a kind of dogma that shouldn’t be transgressed upon.

Of course, there may be an even better strategy for gene-propagation than strict monogamy, which is to get the best of both worlds – be generally monogamous and raise your kids, but have secret liaisons with others on the side. And this behaviour is precisely what we see in society: monogamy as the norm but with soaring rates of affairs and subsequent divorces. We have over-ridden our genetic directives to propagate DNA by developing contraception, but our underlying instincts seem to be the same.

Inhibitions about sex and nudity are a separate matter from monogamy, and for a change I don’t think we can lay all the blame at Abraham’s door, though his influence hasn’t helped. No, the culprit seems to be older than Abraham, and it is probably something pretty innocuous: …yes, it may have begun with clothing, of all things.

It’s probably far more complicated than the following account, but one obvious theory is that, when we began wearing clothes regularly, we also began to develop inhibitions about nudity and sex (and all manner of related issues) simply because these issues were literally covered-up and unseen for so much of the time. Our inhibitions gradually ossified into social customs and taboos. If anyone broke the developing customs, they could be punished with violence. Some social conventions became wrapped-up with religion, but most of these taboos cut across all cultures and societies.

There have always been dissenters. In England we have a few militant nudists who’ll walk round public areas, naked of course, to strike a blow for nudism. Persistent offenders against fashion can be given terms in prison. Naturism isn’t my cup of tea, but I find it bewildering to see how offended some people can get at the sight of some naked skin or some genitals. I find it even more bewildering that people could be thrown in jail for stripping off in public.

Anti-nudist zealots claim that children (here we go) might see some genitals or boobs and be offended or scared, or even be scarred for life! By that logic, breastfeeding should be outlawed immediately, and so should infant siblings bathing together. In fact, a boy should be kept permanently clothed to stop him ever catching a glimpse of his own penis. And don’t even think of sharing a bath with your child, you repugnant pedophile.

No, the objections are based on something other than sense or reason.

Dissent against anti-nudism is easy. You won’t be hounded and besieged for it, in general. But, as mentioned, there are some brave dissenters to the moral panic surrounding pedophiles, too, whatever people mean by the p-word at any given moment.

Of course, nobody argues that we should defend convicted child-rapists, or any rapists. That dead-end is an attempt to muddy the waters and prevent debate.

But there are those of us who say that law-abiding pedophiles, who are unfortunate enough to be saddled with a forbidden sexual attraction, should be able to live in peace without being rooted out like the witches of the fourteenth century.

Whether we like it or not, law-abiding pedophiles also have the same rights to free speech as you and I do, and we should never deny these rights. Pedophiles can argue for changes in the law, if they want to, as everyone else can. We cannot impose our views by physically bullying lawful people into silence or taking their basic rights away. Not unless we want to wake up in the Fourth Reich or Orwell’s 1984, anyway. And then we might be silenced next.

I feel lucky that my attractions, on the purely physical level anyway, are generally limited to the human, the adult, and the feminine. It’s possible but unlikely that I’ll fall for a ravishingly gorgeous transsexual, since I’ve never even met any transsexuals at all. I’d like to, but I don’t even get out that much. Being somewhat conventional in terms of sexuality puts me out of the firing line of most phobic bigots. I’ve been abused and bullied before for other reasons, but I’ve never had humiliating homophobic insults during my adult life, for example.

I don’t know how pedophiles face the daily grind at all. Imagine knowing that your only sexual attraction is a desire so utterly forbidden in our culture. Any kind of sex-life is impossible, and you spend each day listening to the media telling you that you’re the scum of the earth, deserving death or chemical-castration. You are completely fair-game for anyone who wants to attack you, on TV or on the street. You are the only acceptable scapegoat that society has left, and society will gleefully wallow in sadistic delight at your situation.

Do vitriolic anti-pedophile campaigners realize how they’ll be perceived in a few hundred years time? How do we now perceive the attitudes of Alf Garnet as he rants and spews hatred about the “C00NS”? And how long ago were such attitudes universally popular in Britain? 50? 60 years ago?

Is it right for an entire society to systematically demonize one tiny minority, even if you do consider their inclinations to be a mental illness? Would it be right for an entire civilization to methodically demonize and abuse people with schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s?

Remember, I’m talking here about people who have never committed a crime but who are just wired a certain way. How are they to blame for their own internal wiring? Show some empathy and some sympathy, please. What goes around has a nasty habit of coming around.








Next: an uncanny essay about the ingenious Adam Curtis, I think... :)