Don't use the term 'paedophile'

And other thoughts on the sexual abuse of children

I wrote this ten years ago, and figured it’s still current, unfortunately

Tom O’Carroll, founder of Paedophile Information Campaign,1977, during the time the National Council of Civil Liberties (now Liberty) gave PIE its support.

When it was discovered that Jimmy Savile, the television presenter and media personality, knighted for his charity work for sick and disabled children, was a prolific child abuser, the story of the true scale of child sexual abuse swept the nation and beyond. The myth that child abuse is a rare occurrence committed by mentally-ill loners was finally put to bed. As more and more of Savile’s victims spoke out, so did those who had been abused by other celebrities in the 1970s, reassured that they would finally be believed.

When it comes to the subject of child sexual abuse, there is no clear Left/Right divide. The sexual revolution of the 1960s led some left-wing liberals to believe that all sex was good sex, provided that both parties were consenting. But what about the argument that the age of consent to sex, currently 16 years old, is unnecessary, and that it is restricting the rights of children to seek sexual fulfilment?

This is the view of so-called paedophile rights campaigners such as the Paeodophile Information Exchange (PIE), active from 1974 until its disbandment in 1984. Its stated aim was “to alleviate [the] suffering of many adults and children” by campaigning to abolish the age of consent, which would legalise sex between adults and children. PIE gained a certain amount of credibility by cleverly allying itself with other sexual minorities that were engaged in effective liberation struggles, such as the gay rights movement. Homosexual acts had only been decriminalised in 1967, so any movement with the word “liberation” in its title was seen by many as a force for good. In 1975 a headline in the Guardian read, “Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib”, when PIE was invited to address a gay liberation conference in Sheffield.

Jacob Breslow

The word “paedophile” is bandied around with impunity, but no word in our language is so dangerously misused. It means, literally, “lover of children”. Child sex abusers seek solace in this term, and it is easy to see why it is to their advantage to embrace the label.

In 1977 the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) passed a resolution at its conference, supported by the vast majority of delegates, condemning “the harassment of the Paedophile Information Exchange by the press”. The scandalous fact that PIE was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) from the late 1970s to the early 1980s has been well documented. NCCL officer Nettie Pollard, who worked in the organisation until the late 1990s and played a leading role in CHE, voted to support PIE at its 1975 conference. Again, in 1983, at the CHE conference, Pollard defended PIE’s “right to speak and organise freely”. In 1993 she wrote an essay called “The Small Matter of Children”, which begins by talking of “children’s rights”: “But baby boys are born with erections and girls with genitals swelling and vaginal lubrication . . . Masters and Johnson found that lubrication resulted from sexual stimulation in baby girls. Clearly, birth contains elements of sexual arousal for babies.”

The current climate, post-Savile and the torrent of child grooming cases in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere, is one of general concern and disgust at the sheer scale and prevalence of the sexual abuse of vulnerable children that had been allowed to happen. But there still exists a group of academics, scientists and campaigners who appear not only sympathetic to the original aims of PIE but are actively promoting them.

In 2013, a conference on sexuality was held by the University of Cambridge One speaker, Professor Philip Tromovitch of Doshisha University in Japan, claimed in his presentation on “The Prevalence of Paedophilia” that “paedophilic interest is normal and natural in human males”. Also at the conference was a man who does not often get invited to respectable events, at least not since his high-profile convictions and subsequent imprisonment for the possession of child abuse images. Tom O’Carroll is a campaigner for the rights of paedophiles who gained notoriety in the 1970s as chair of PIE.

Following the Cambridge conference O’Carroll wrote on his blog that he felt “relatively popular” during his attendance. Having seen the publicity about this conference, I contacted him to request an interview. I wanted to try to understand how his viewpoint—that paedophiles are an oppressed sexual minority, rather than a danger to children—could possibly hold water in the context of recent widespread revelations about child sexual abuse. O’Carroll enjoyed support in the past from so-called progressives for his views and aims. It is now well known that, representing PIE, he sat on the NCCL’s gay rights sub-committee from the late 1970s until the early 1980s. His book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980), was favourably reviewed by Gay News and other gay publications. This was an era in which discrimination against the gay population was so bad that some would agree to link up with the unlikeliest of allies, so long as they were being similarly targeted.

Many of those who promoted the rights of the “paedophile”, such as PIE member Peter Righton, have since been convicted of sexual crimes against children.

“In the 1970s I thought we were going to be embarked upon a journey like the gay people,” O’Carroll told me when we met in a central London wine bar. “I would have quite liked [to be labelled as] ‘kindly’ because ‘kindly’ . . . relates to the Dutch and German kinder—children. So yes, being intimate, but also being nice with it.

“I would say that if someone had sexual relations which were in the realm of what I called earlier the ‘kindly’ sort then that would not be abusive. Although these days one has to be careful because anything you do, no matter how kindly it is, it’s always subject to trauma later on—secondary trauma as a result of society’s hysteria over the whole thing.”

The writer and broadcaster Francis Wheen personally experienced the effects of child sexual abuse, and the attempts by PIE and its supporters to claim that the abuse did not happen. In 1968, Charles Napier, who would subsequently become treasurer of PIE, joined the teaching staff at Wheen’s boarding preparatory school, Copthorne, in Sussex.

“Napier was much younger than most of the masters there and he was quite friendly with the children so we quite liked him at first, because he seemed more on our level and not so forbidding,” says Wheen. “He had a little room off the workshop, and he would take us in there and offer us beer and cigarettes.

“I was 11 at the time, and it was incredibly thrilling, rather naughty and exciting. The word ‘grooming’ had never entered our vocabulary at that stage. One day he plunged his hand down my gym shorts and grabbed me, and I pulled his hand off and recoiled, and he then started slightly sneering at me and said, ‘Oh Francis, come on. Don’t be a baby.’ Very clever, tried to make me feel inadequate, to have to prove my maturity by going along with it. Other boys spoke about it. I wasn’t the only one.”

Napier left the school in the early 1970s and went on to hold jobs working with children in Cairo and Sweden. He was convicted of child abuse-related offences in 1972 and 1995, but carried on being employed in positions of trust.

In 2012, Wheen noticed that Napier was speaking at the Sherborne Literary Festival, which was being held in a school. Appalled at a convicted child abuser being given such a respectable platform, Wheen wrote in Private Eye about being assaulted by Napier as a child.

“That was what kicked it off. The police got in touch with me and said ‘could I put them in touch with anyone else who’d been abused by Napier?’” says Wheen. “The police then spent ages tracking down pupils from the late Sixties, and they did a hell of a job.”

Last year, Napier was convicted of sexually abusing 23 boys between 1967 and 1983, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. The judge remarked that a number of his victims had been profoundly affected by the abuse, with one committing suicide, and others seeking help for mental ill-health.

“Soon after [the case],” Wheen says, “I had a letter from O’Carroll, complaining I was being very unfair to his friend Napier, and if I only I could understand, and that Napier was a very brilliant, witty chap, and it was very cruel of me to write about him like this.”

It is not only child abusers who refuse to accept the harm done to their victims. Some so-called experts in the field argue that for some adults sex with children is a “natural” desire. Glenn Wilson is a psychologist who, in 2001, was ranked among the 10 most frequently cited British psychologists in scientific journals. Wilson is co-author of the book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation (2008), which states the case for a genetic basis to same-sex attraction and orientation. He is also co-author of The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (1981), in which he writes that “the majority of paedophiles, however socially inappropriate, seem to be gentle and rational”.

Qazi Rahman, Wilson’s co-author on Born Gay, is a highly respected and much cited biologist, based at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. I asked him if he believed that the urge to abuse children is actually hard-wired. He said: “There is growing evidence of biological and brain differences, where the brains are cross-wired.”

What about paedophile rights? If Rahman and Wilson use the “gay gene” argument to ask for our rights, why not then for child abusers? All they have to say is that there is a medical or genetic basis, as opposed to the fact that they chose to abuse children for power and sadism. Rahman agrees that this can be problematic: “Should we feel sorry for paedophiles? As soon as the liberals get that rhetoric going, we will not be able to make any subtle distinctions as to who is dangerous and who is not.”

Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at Essex University. Plummer, who is gay, contributed to a book called Perspectives on Paedophilia (1981). It was a supposedly objective look at paedophilia and was designed to be used on social work training courses. Plummer was a member of PIE in the late 1970s for “research purposes”. 

In 2012, on his personal blog, Plummer wrote: “As homosexuality has become slightly less open to sustained moral panic, the new pariah of ‘child molester’ has become the latest folk devil.” Both Plummer and Pollard are warmly thanked in O’Carroll’s book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980).

Meanwhile, countless victims of horrendous sexual abuse in childhood are choosing not to disclose it to the police because of a fear that they will be told it was all their fault.