We're all on the same side

There is no excuse for child abuse - ever

The first one was in 1963 or 64. I came home from school to find a policeman friend  talking to my parents in the kitchen of the restaurant they ran in Essex. The officer had just come off duty. He looked shaken and distressed. The conversation came to an abrupt halt and he left, giving me a sad smile as he went.

Much later I learnt that he had just come from a house where he had found unattended three children aged between seven months, two and four. The eldest was sucking his thumb in a corner, the toddler was crying and  baby was lying in a cot full of excrement with flies buzzing around. His legs were broken but he felt no pain: he was dead - and had been for some time.

The court was told that the scene was like something from Belsen - a reference that meant nothing to me at that time - the parents were jailed and the surviving malnourished pair were taken into care.

For an 11-year-old from a conventional family, the whole idea was almost impossible to comprehend. How could anyone do such a thing? Why have children if you didn't want to look after them? In my naivete I thought this was a one-off, that such a thing had never happened before. How wrong, how wrong.

It was just a tiny dot on a map of child abuse, so tiny it doesn't even register on today's internet searches. Two years later one of the biggest dots was placed over Saddleworth Moor;  children snatched from the street, sexually assaulted and murdered as entertainment. Stranger danger.

At this time, though no one dared speak up at the time, hundreds if not thousands of children were being routinely sexually abused by people who were supposed to be looking after them, parents, teachers, scout leaders, care home workers, priests.

Then there were the wicked stepfathers and pseudo-stepfathers. Children taken from places of safety and happiness and returned to the mothers and their brutal partners. Children like seven-year-old Maria Colwell who was beaten and bruised, then left to suffer in agony through the night before being taken to hospital in a pram when it was too late to save her.

The list is, sadly, endless. And these are the most extreme cases. There were the children who were groped by uncles and children who were passed round so-called sex rings. Children who were filmed in their distress and dumped back on the street, sometimes alive, more often dead.

Every one had - and has - the same power to shock and appall, there is no compassion fatigue where children's safety is concerned. We have all been children, so we can identify with every victim,  remembering what we were like at their age. As mothers we know how we cherished our babies. No matter how young or apparently grown-up these victims were, no sane person would ever consider them to be at fault. And the same applies no matter how great or apparently trivial the offence against them.

A few days ago I wrote a piece on my sister blog SubScribe about the Neil Wilson case in which a prosecuting barrister described a 13-year-old sex abuse victim as 'predatory'. This is the opening paragraph:

When a man pushing 40  has sexual contact with a girl of 13 there is one person who is absolutely in the wrong. And it isn't the girl.

SubScribe is a blog about journalism and the way various parts of the media treat various stories. The point of the post was that Twitter was light years ahead in catching on to the importance of the story. The Ending Victimisation website was particularly quick off the mark in getting a petition asking the Director of Public Prosecutions to investigate the language used in court up and running before any newspaper had even reported the case.

As SubScribe, I was concerned that even when the Press cottoned on to the story, most papers reported only on the outcry and did not properly cover the court case that had prompted it.

Of course it is wrong to describe a 13-year-old girl as 'predatory' or to say that she 'forced herself' on a man against his wishes. That is taken as read. I wanted to know if these were the full quotes. I was particularly curious about the predatory bit because, contrary to most reports, she was not said to have been 'sexually predatory' but 'predatory in all her actions'. What could have been the justification for that?

Yes we know that girls can be little minxes, but we also know that adults should never take advantage of them.  As the Sometimes it's Just a Cigar blog points out today:

What type of person needs to be told that, when approached by a kid truanting from school and cadging cigarettes, it’s not good practice to buy them a whole packet? What kind of person needs to be told that it’s not good practice to encourage a needy, slightly fucked up sounding kid to form a relationship with you then break it off?  Who in the name of all that is holy would then do that in a private place, and be surprised if a previously victimized kid responds inappropriately?

Quite right. The author was not impressed by the "frankly badly written" SubScribe blog, but you can't win them all.

The blogger makes an assumption in that quote above, that the child is 'previously victimized'. And she very possibly was. It is a view shared by Marina S in her blog It's Not a Zero Sum Game.

Her latest post is devoted to the SubScribe piece, with which she takes great issue. She says that notably absent from all the reporting on the case is the fact that sexually aggressive and promiscuous behaviour in young women is often a response to trauma.

Attention seeking from predatory men is not cause of abuse, it is a symptom of prior abuse. In this sense there is every chance that the QC and the judge have committed a double and devastating injustice against this young woman.
A deeper investigation into this case, it would seem to me, would interest itself in these kinds of background details. Clearly the identity and biographical details of the young woman are not available, nor should they be; but some kind of deeper look into what, if any, details of her past were in the case would go far towards demystifying the "acting out" elements of her interactions with  Wilson and placing the comments of the judge and the QC in better context.

Exactly. Try to find the context. Try to find the detail of what was going on. Try to get to the bottom of what the court was told and by whom. Not to try to excuse the words of the barrister or the judge, but to see if there was any possible explanation for them.

The newspapers did not publish any such information, so I went back to the reporter and to the official notes of the trial to try to make sense of it. SubScribe took as read that the language was wrong, the objective was to see why the basic court reporting was so sparse and if there was information available that had not been published. The whole point was to try to find facts, not hypotheses about what Wilson might have been thinking or about the girl's history.

The trauma point is a very good one, but it had no home in the blog unless it was said in court. All we know is that the girl was 13, that Wilson is now 41. We don't even know what time of day this happened or what he does for a living. These are basic facts that are usually presented in court. Why weren't they here? Wilson could be a tramp or a high-flyer in a company Jaguar. It makes no difference which because what he did was wrong, but don't you want to know?

I'm sorry that Marina S did not like the post, but it was not intended to 'change the conversation'. It was there to examine press coverage.

She is right that 'The Times has its own child abuse agenda' is not a pretty sentence. It's not a pretty subject. Andrew Norfolk has been at the forefront of exposing cases of child abuse and delving into the background of such crimes for several years, from the Edlington killings to the sex-grooming gangs in Rochdale and Oxford. When the whole of Fleet Street and every broadcaster were chasing the Madeleine McCann story he wrote a telling piece about the neglected hunt for Shannon Matthews (who was at the time thought to have been kidnapped by a stranger) and the class distinction between the two. He is a great journalist and was awarded the Orwell Prize last year for his efforts. Yes, there is an agenda. It is to protect children.

There was nothing 'untoward, premature, not to say - ahem - hysterical' about the reaction to the Wilson case. The fact that 45,000 signed EVB's petition 'is returned to and reiterated' is not a subtle signal 'too many, too fast, they must not have known what they were talking about', but  a rather-too-repetitive statement of respect for the way that @l_wales alerted EVB and how quickly they acted.

They checked their facts, the wording of the petition was precise and unsensational and it brought an equally swift and unequivocal response from the DPP. What more could anyone ask for?

Jane Fae and Ally Fogg immediately pounced on the barrister's unacceptable language from the news agency's initial tweet, but it took the mainstream papers 24 hours to sit up and notice - and they probably would not have done so at all had not EVB spoken up.

And the answer to the not-so-rhetorical question 'celebrate or worry about kneejerk politics'?  Both. We don't need some idiot MP leaping on this and turning it into propaganda.

But first we celebrate.