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| Column14 January 2003 |
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Who's got a dirty
mind?
Pete
Townshend says that he accessed child pornography
to be a 'vigilante' against paedophilia. That's
pretty sick, too. |
| by Jennie
Bristow | |
Pete Townshend, The Who
guitarist arrested for accessing child pornography
on the internet, claims that he is not a
paedophile.
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On the contrary, he says, 'I
have…been shocked, angry and vocal (especially on
my website) about the explosion of advertised
paedophilic images on the internet'; and he acts
'as a vigilante to help support organisations like
the Internet Watch Foundation, the NSPCC and
Scotland Yard to build up a powerful,
well-informed voice to speak loudly about the
millions being made by US banks and credit card
companies for the pornography industry' (1).
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Oh yes, and he believes he was
'sexually abused between the age of five and
six-and-a-half' - although he 'cannot remember
clearly what happened' (2).
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Let's take Townshend at his word,
and assume that he accessed child porn 'purely to
see what was there' (3), to aid his research and
campaigning work. Even so, the resultant scandal
raises an interesting question. How clear is the
moral line between those interested in child
pornography for perverted paedophilic purposes,
and those interested in it because of their
self-appointed role as anti-paedophile
crusaders?
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After all, as Guardian
columnist Zoe Williams points out, 'most of us
have no idea what child porn looks like, nor will
we - unless we have a professional interest - ever
meet anyone who admits to knowing'. The only
people who do know, she says, 'are the police -
the same police, remember, who can be found
storming art galleries because they contain
pictures of children on beaches without any pants
on' (4). (And the same police, we might add, who
have found some of their number embroiled in the
current scandal, presumably on the basis of an
alleged interest that was not purely
professional.)
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Although the police are not the
only ones to have a familiarity with online child
porn. Paedophiles do, and so do campaigners
against child porn. That's assuming that we can
presume these campaigners to have seen the thing
that makes them so angry - that they are not
campaigning for ever-greater penalties for
accessing or creating something that is only
presumed to be out there.
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Even if anti-paedophile
campaigners haven't actually seen the images that
they find so abhorrent, they have certainly
invested a great deal of emotional energy into
imagining them, and the purposes for which people
use them. Either way, I find it pretty disturbing.
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Paedophiles get off on looking at
child porn. That's sick. Anti-paedophile
campaigners - by whom I don't mean people who
think child abuse is wrong, but I mean
organisations whose entire existence depends on
mobilising revulsion at child abuse - are obsessed
with thinking about how attractive child porn, and
child abuse, is to other people. The assumption is
that child abuse is a far bigger problem than we
ever imagined - that, in fact, child abuse is all
around us, and most people are only one temptation
away from committing acts of unspeakable
depravity.
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You can see this in the pat
response to the Townshend case delivered by John
Carr, an internet consultant for NCH Action for
Children: 'We've got to stop thinking about
paedophiles or people who use child pornography as
the dirty old man in the raincoat.' (5)
Implication? That the most normal-looking man or
woman could be a secret kiddie-porn surfer, that
the appeal of child pornography is much wider than
people imagine.
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You can see it in the NSPCC's
'awareness-raising' ad campaigns, depicting
cartoon children being thrown down the stairs - as
though the TV-watching masses needed to be told
that this is a bad thing to do.
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Or in the charity's arguments that
everything from playground bullying to parental
shouting amounts to a form of child abuse; in
statements such as 'One of the chief aims of the
FULL STOP Campaign is to change attitudes towards
children - to inspire a society in which children
are loved, respected and valued' (6), as though
our society currently hates and abuses its young;
in claims that 'the murder of 10-year-old Damilola
Taylor in Peckham, London, was a tragic example of
the violence and victimisation which many children
and young people face' (7) - when the shocking
thing about this case was that it was an
aberration.
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This obsession with the most
degraded aspects of human behaviour runs right
through policy-making, where the government spends
hours of official energy, and millions of pounds
of public money, on imagining all the terrible
things that normal parents, teachers, people might
do to children, and scrutinising every area of
life for potential signs of abuse.
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This isn't paedophilia. But it's
sick nonetheless. What is moral about fantasising
about other people's perversions? What is good
about viewing the world through the prism of
paedophilia? How does it help children, to presume
that they're all at risk?
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Pete Townshend claims that he is
not a paedophile, but an anti-paedophilia
vigilante. To confess to being either would be
admitting to a dirty mind.
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Read
on:
Talking 'bout
my degeneration, Mick Hume, The Times,
13 January 2003
(1) In his own
words, Pete Townshend, Observer, 12 January
2003
(2) In his own
words, Pete Townshend, Observer, 12 January
2003
(3) In his own
words, Pete Townshend, Observer, 12 January
2003
(4) Panic on the
screens, Zoe Williams, Guardian, 14 January
2003
(5) Operation Ore:
Can the UK cope?, BBC News, 13 January 2003
(6) The Child in
Society section of the NSPCC website
(7) What is Child
Abuse? section of the NSPCC website
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