[ Press-cuttings round-up ] Canada: _Ottawa asked to decriminalize child pornography_ UK: _Police 'can't keep track of paedophiles'_ UK: _Girl, 12, is youngest on sex offender register_ UK: _Abuse allegation payouts will increase_ UK: _British men fear to touch children_ UK: _Scouts facing crisis over leaders' stigma_ UK: _News update - 'abuse' teacher freed_ UK: _NCIS to create dedicated computer crime unit_ UK: _Doctors' alarm at paedophile proposals_ UK: _Civil rights fear over CPS proposals_ UK: _Man who had sex with girl, 12, goes free_ UK: _Priest convicted for Net child porn_ USA: _Clinton sets up study group for Internet censorship_ USA: _Child protection law could abuse youngsters_ Australia: _Paedophiles gain access to sensitive reports_ Australia: _'Wonderland' paedophile walks free from court_ Australia: _Porn paedophile fined_ Australia: _Paedophilia task-force investigate Children's Commissioner_ UK: _My four-year-old son fell victim to playground paranoia_ UK: _Editorial comment_ UK: _Must we ban children from kissing Granny?_ USA: Research: _Youth Violence Down, Study Finds_ USA: Research: _Washington's Other Sex Scandal_ (Culture notes and crypto news items are in a separate posting) Canada: ---------------------------------------------------------- _Ottawa asked to decriminalize child pornography_ Aug 11th 1999 EDMONTON - A group pressing for a change in the child pornography law, presented its recommendations to the federal justice minister Tuesday. The Civil Liberties Association wants obscenity and child pornography decriminalized. Members met with Anne McLellan at her office in Edmonton. Director Alan Borovoy says Canada's child porn laws deny artists their right to freedom of expression. The current law led to the arrest of Toronto artist Eli Langer a few years ago for drawing youngsters in sexual situations, says an association position paper. Although the charges were withdrawn, other artists don't know if their work could be seized, he said. It contends there's no reason to think kids would be safer even if all child pornography disappeared. "What would we expect pedophiles to do? Take up stamp collecting?" McLellan listened to the CLA point of view, but her response was disappointing, Borovoy told CBC News. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has several thousand members and seven affiliated chapters across Canada. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- 5th August 1999 _Police 'can't keep track of paedophiles'_ The sex offenders register is proving impossible to police, according to senior police sources. In London alone there are about 1,000 freed ex-offenders who cannot be fully monitored, it has been claimed. The manpower needed for police surveillance teams - 15 to 20 officers - means only high-profile paedophiles and other potentially dangerous sex offenders can be routinely watched. Round-the-clock surveillance is extremely rare. One officer who has experience dealing with sex offenders said: "It is a serious concern. There are an awful lot of them out there and they do reoffend. Yet we do not have the resources to keep track of them. They are supposed to sign on at their local police station every two weeks but they could move away or change their names. We wouldn't find them unless they were arrested again." In London 5.5 per cent of offenders who are supposed to register do not. [ Ianthe's comment, it's often not so much that they can't keep track of them, but that they don't bother, seeing it as a waste of police time. ] -- A coalition of six big charities, including Christian Aid, the NSPCC and NCH Action for Children, has launched a campaign calling for a change in the law to stop paedophiles travelling abroad. The coalition, Ecpat UK, says the 1997 Sex Offenders Act, which introduced the register of sex offenders, allows convicted paedophiles to escape registration if they leave the country within two weeks of leaving prison. Helen Vietch, Ecpat's campaign coordinator, said it was possible that persistent offenders would leave the country to escape registration. The organisation is demanding a requirement for UK sex offenders to notify authorities of overseas addresses if they travel or move abroad. The Association of Chief Police Officers has also identified the loopholes. Tony Butler, vice-chairman of the crime committee, said: 'The gap in the legislation denies UK police the opportunity to forward information to foreign law enforcement agencies so that they are able to put in place measures which ensure children are adequately protected from sex offenders travelling abroad. It obviously makes more sense to prevent offences being committed against a child than attempting to prosecute after the event.' ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- _GIRL, 12, IS YOUNGEST ON SEX REGISTER_ 21st July 1999 A LITTLE GIRL of 12 wearing a velvet Alice band in her hair skipped cheerfully around a court building yesterday waiting for her case to be called - then confessed she was a serial sex abuser. By the end of the day she had become the youngest female to sign the Sex Offenders Register after a judge ordered her to notify police of her movements for the next two and a half years. She left Manchester Crown Court smiling and holding her mother's hand, showing no apparent sign of remorse over the crimes she had just admitted. The girl, who cannot be named because of her age, was 11 at the time the five offences were committed over four months last summer. She admitted three acts of indecency with boys aged four, five and six, one charge involving inciting a girl under 14 to commit acts of gross indecency, and a further offence of indecency with a girl aged under 14. Manchester's Minshull Street Crown Court was told that the offences happened between May 1 and Aug 31 last year near the girl's home in Trafford, Greater Manchester. Six more charges are to be left on file, said Judge Adrian Smith. He asked her to sign a document he did not tell her it was the Sex Offenders Register brought in last year to control the activities of paedophiles. No details of what she did with the children were given in court and the case was adjourned for social services reports to be prepared. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- 4th August 1999 _Abuse allegation payouts will increase_ People who make allegations of sexual abuse will be given increased official compensation later this year under a shake-up of the 200 UKP million criminal compensation system being planned by Jack Straw. The review of criminal compensation would offer extra financial recompense to child sex abuse victims. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board currently makes payments "even if the person who assaulted you is found not guilty." The changes could be introduced in November as part of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- _BRITISH MEN FEAR TO TOUCH CHILDREN_ 25th July 1999 LOOK AT the picture on the right. What do you see? If you are French, Spanish, German or Italian, you see a family man who likes children and sport. If you are British, you see a paedophile. In a study of the 'Euromale', charting lifestyles and attitudes, British men were shown to have distorted or negative views about family life because of their obsession with child abuse. 'The response of all the British men was to wonder why a guy would be spending time with children who are clearly not his own,' said Nick Johnson of research company RDSi, which publishes the research, based on interviews with 1,000 men, this week. Such is the obsession with, and fear of, paedophilia in the UK that advertisers are being warned off using any images of men with children. 'It is sad,' said Johnson. 'It is partly because of all the press attention to high-profile cases, but also because we are not a touchy-feely society. We are only allowed to touch members of our own family without arousing suspicion.' -- A campaign being launched by the Institute of Childcare and Social Education, trade unions and a cross-party group of MPs will urge the Departments of Health and Education to set up a single register for all adults in the childcare business, including teachers, nannies, childminders and play workers. The Campaign for the Registration of Adults Working with Young People and Children (Cry) is backed by a mixed group of MPs, including Lib Dem leadership candidate Jackie Ballard. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- _SCOUTS FACING CRISIS OVER LEADERS' STIGMA_ 25th July 1999 SCOUT groups are closing at the rate of four a week, even though an estimated 80,000 boys are waiting to join, new figures show. A shortage of adult volunteer leaders has created one of the worst membership crises in the history of the Scout Association. Fear of being misjudged and branded a paedophile has been suggested as a main reason for the lack of volunteers. There is a stigma attached to being a volunteer, said Jo Tupper, a spokeswoman for the Scout Association. "If a man says he wants to work with young boys, people jump to one conclusion. This is an issue we are trying to overcome" A recruitment problem is also reported by the Guide Association, another "traditional youth movement" that has commissioned research to discover ways of attracting new leaders and bringing it into the 21st century. Latest statistics show that membership of the Scout Association has sunk to its lowest number for 40 years, from 521,000 members in 1960 to 447,237 today. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: News update: ---------------------------------------------------------- 6th August 1999 A SCOTTISH teacher arrested on paedophile charges in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, has been released from jail after charges were dropped. Gordon William Philip, 38, from Helensburgh, was charged with raping an 11-year-old girl and sexually abusing a 13-year-old. Khun Leang Meng, the clerk of the court, said "There was not enough evidence of sexual misconduct so the charges were dropped." Mr Philip, a teacher at the British International School, said the 13-year-old had falsified charges because he had thrown her out of his house for stealing. He cannot be put on the sex offender register in Britain because he has not been convicted of an offence in this country. He could however be placed on the forthcoming register of paedophile suspects. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: Snippet from The Times: ---------------------------------------------------------- _THE TIMES: DOCTORS' ALARM; NEWS IN BRIEF_ 14th July 1999 Doctors and civil liberties groups expressed alarm at government proposals to lock up paedophiles and psychopaths indefinitely, even if they have not committed a crime. They said psychiatrists would be used for crime prevention, not medical treatment. ---------------------------------------------------------- [ I've taken a look at the consultation document on this and I can't find any reference to paedophiles - the Home Office seems to have dropped this aspect of the proposed changes, but I wouldn't put it past Straw to have kept the measures enabled but hidden away in some civil-service double-speak. ] UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- 14th August 1999 _NCIS to create dedicated computer crime unit_ NCIS [National Criminal Intelligence Service, serves as an intelligence monitoring and dissemination service for UK forces] is creating a single national unit to monitor serious cases of computer misuse. The move to set up a national unit has the enthusiastic backing of Home Office ministers, and it is expected to be established early next year. It will be run by members of the National Crime Squad, which is staffed by officers seconded from local forces. The unit will primarily investigate electronic fraud, plus other criminal activities conducted via computers such as illegal gambling, blackmail, paedophilia, industrial espionage and the distribution of bomb-making information. NCIS also believes copying trade information from confidential databases [ie: hacking] should become a criminal offence. It is not at present regarded as theft; hackers can be prosecuted only for gaining unauthorised access. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- 10th August 1999 _CIVIL RIGHTS FEARS OVER CPS REFORM_ THOUSANDS MORE people could face criminal prosecution under plans to make the Crown Prosecution Service 'more reflective of public opinion'. The Director of Public Prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith, said he would be issuing new guidelines for crown prosecutors and that he was prepared to lower the current threshold of evidence needed to bring a prosecution. Such a move would be hugely controversial. The human rights group Liberty warned that any lowering of the standard for bringing prosecutions could create injustice. John Wadham, its director, said: "We would be very concerned about the lowering of the standard. It's bound to mean that more people are arrested, detained, prosecuted and held in custody. A significant number of these people will be innocent." The Law Society was also cautious. It welcomed the debate but insisted that certain safeguards would have to be in place. Robert Sayer, its president, said: "There must be a proper system for testing the evidence and adequate professional advice." Mr Calvert-Smith said he would be willing to consider arguments in favour of reverting to the old prima facie standard of evidence, where prosecutions were brought whenever the police considered that was an elementary case to answer. Prosecutions are currently only brought where there is a "realistic prospect" of conviction. Mr Calvert-Smith admitted that a prima facie system would "cost millions" to administer and that it had been criticised in the past because of high rates of acquittal and the public perception that magistrates courts had become 'police courts'. He said: "The old-fashioned view was that if there was a prima facie case, the prosecution should not act as judge and jury." He said that the view was that only the judge and jury should have that role. If prima facie was reintroduced, the DPP admitted, "a lot of innocent people" being brought before the courts, which he said might be "a bit unfair". The DPP said he had received large amounts of correspondence from the public, asking why prosecutions, particularly in sex abuse cases, had been dropped. -- Newspaper editorial comment: ONCE UPON a time - not so long ago in the case of some societies - crime and punishment was not carried out by judges or rulers, but by the community. Witches were burned, false accusations were made, and interest groups swayed opinions. But at least the community felt that a certain barbaric justice was theirs, not an abstract principle imposed by men with whom they felt little affinity and whose logic often seemed the opposite of common sense. Presumably it is this warm glow of social approval that David Calvert-Smith, the Director of Public Prosecutions, seeks in his plans for new guidelines, as reported by The Independent today. The "public should own the system", he declares, suggesting that the rules for embarking on prosecutions should be changed. Instead of the DPP deciding whether a prosecution has a "realistic prospect" of conviction, as at present, the prosecution would be brought when there seems a basic case to answer. Sounds sensible enough. The public does get irritated by the apparent reluctance of the Crown to go after alleged 'obvious suspects' in a case which may not seem important to the DPP, given the cost of trials, but do exercise the public at large. At the end of the promised consultation period, Mr Calvert-Smith may be forced to limit the changes. The Government (although not always Jack Straw, the Home Secretary) is sensitive to charges of leaning too far to the right in legal reform. But coming on top of the Government's efforts to make the feelings of victims part of the process of punishment, to reduce the discretion of judges and magistrates in sentencing, to remove the right to jury trials and to toughen punishment in response to public disquiet, it is hard not to see a process of populism at work. The focus group may be an attractive place for politicians to deposit the law, as they have so much else, but it is a dangerously fluid foundation on which to establish legal practice. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- _MAN HAD SEX WITH GIRL, 12, BUT GOES FREE_ A MAN who had unlawful sexual intercourse with his 12-year-old girlfriend escaped a prison sentence yesterday. Lee Williams, 19, admitted the offence, which took place after the couple met at the Trocadero centre in Piccadilly Circus. But he said that he had not been aware that the girl was below the age of consent. The relationship between the two began in September 1997 and was reported to police after the girl's mother discovered a used condom in her bedroom at their home in Walthamstow, east London. Judge Simon Goldstein told the Old Bailey: "Perhaps I am out of date, but however sophisticated she may try to be, I don't believe a child should be going to the Trocadero at two in the morning, as so many of them do these days." He accepted Williams' defence that the girl's looks and behaviour made her appear older. "You and I both know that had I come to the conclusion that you had known that she was only 12, you would not be walking free," he told him. Earlier, the jury watched a video of the girl giving evidence against Williams, from south-east London. Williams told the court that he met the girl when she was 11 and he was 18. "She told me she was 16 and she convinced me she was at college," he said. Williams was ordered to sign the sex offenders' register and to attend therapy sessions. ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- _Priest convicted for Net child porn_ 14th August 1999 A Catholic priest and former schoolteacher has become the first person in Britain to be convicted for receiving child pornography from an Internet chat service [ICQ and probably initially via IRC ] that police say is frequently used by paedophiles. The Fr John W[......], 56, was today put on two years' probation for storing indecent images on computer at a Catholic girls' school in Kingston where he used to teach. He had material featuring teenage boys in homosexual acts on his computer, Bow Street magistrates were told. He was placed on the national sex offenders register. W[...] received the indecent images via an ICQ channel. The conviction follows trial attempts by police to monitor activity on Internet "chat rooms". Operation Kimbe, run by the Obscene Publications Squad of Greater Manchester Police, saw officers tracking down suspected paedophiles by monitoring the Internet. His officers infiltrated electronic "chat rooms" used to swap pornographic photographs and information. Insp Terry Jones, the head of the squad, said that officers had monitored the Net for only 60 hours, but their efforts had so far resulted in 19 arrests across 15 force areas. ---------------------------------------------------------- USA: ---------------------------------------------------------- 12th August 1999 _Clinton sets up study group for Internet censorship_ President Clinton on Wednesday set up a working group that will be made up of federal managers to study unlawful conduct on the Internet. Clinton issued an executive order calling for agencies to set up the working group, which will be responsible for issuing a report and offering recommendations on how to use existing laws and technology to aid in the detection, investigation and prosecution of criminal acts conducted over the Internet. As an example, the executive order refers to the illegal sale of guns, explosives, controlled substances, fraud and child pornography over the Internet. Daniel Boyle, SAS Institute Inc.'s director for the Defense Department and intelligence, said that the working group likely will consider ways of using data mining to deal with online criminal activity. SAS, based in Cary, N.C., is a major supplier of custom software to the federal government. With the daily tidal wave of data coursing through the Internet every day, it would be impossible to successfully wade through it and pinpoint criminal activity just through pointing and clicking, Boyle said. The government already is considering a plan to monitor many non-DOD [Defence] computers for signs of intrusion. In its quest to protect government computers from outside attacks, the proposed Federal Intrusion Detection Network unnecessarily sacrifices privacy, the Center for Democracy and Technology has said. ---------------------------------------------------------- [ A similar study in Britain concluded it couldn't be done. ] USA: ---------------------------------------------------------- July 20, 1999 _Child protection law could abuse youngsters_ WASHINGTON -- D.C.'s Megan's Law, meant to protect children from convicted child molesters living in their neighborhoods, may have the unintended consequence of exposing more kids to the courtroom. The newly beefed up law calls for persons convicted of sexual crimes to register with D.C. officials and, in some cases, have their names, photos, and addresses broadcast over the Internet. It also gives the police the authority to hand out fliers or to contact employers about offenders. The tougher new measures could mean that more cases involving child molestation may end up going to trial in D.C. Superior Court. Criminal defense lawyers say prosecutors have traditionally worked to 'plead out' child abuse cases to spare the alleged victim from having to testify in court. But the new law, which requires automatic registration and notification upon conviction of a sexual offense against a minor, could persuade many defendants to take their chance at trial rather than enter guilty pleas that would guarantee that their names and faces would be plastered all over the Internet and their communities. "Some defendants are going to go to trial because it's no longer jail time they're concerned about - they're concerned about future employment," says Kevin Oliver, a D.C. criminal defense lawyer. Notes Michele Roberts, a partner at D.C.'s Rochon Roberts &Stern: "In the case where there's a misdemeanor plea offer, which usually means [the government] has a very weak case, knowing that they would have to register could tip the balance toward going to trial." Robert Spagnoletti, chief of the Sex Offence Section of the Office of the U.S. Attorney, acknowledges that "we'll probably have some number of defendants go to trial who might otherwise have entered a plea to a sex offense." D.C. Councilman Harold Brazil, who sponsored the legislation, says it's too early to tell whether the law will lead to more trials. The exact tactical and strategic changes wrought by the new law remain to be seen. The 90-day statute, expected to become permanent this fall, still needs approval from the mayor and the financial control board before it can be implemented. Nonetheless, the police have already begun drafting notification guidelines posting names on the Internet in about three weeks. The D.C. Sex Offender Registration Act of 1996 was riddled with bureaucratic snags. For one, it required the mayor to appoint an advisory council made up of mental health experts to review every sex offender case. The advisory council's results were then to be passed on to D.C. Superior Court judges, who were required to assign a risk level to each offender. Once that part was completed, the Metropolitan Police Department could begin notifying the public. But the advisory council was never funded or staffed. And although the police registered about 120 offenders living in the city, they couldn't do anything with the information. Last week, the D.C. Council dramatically changed the law, along the way bringing it into accord with federal standards. If it had failed to do so, it could have cost the District about $200,000 in Justice Department grants. The new law streamlines the sex offender registration process by abolishing the advisory council and judicial risk assessments. In other words, the law now gives little or no leeway to defendants. If convicted, the law mandates that they register with the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, the federal office overseeing D.C. prisoner-release programs. The amended law also adds several more crimes that require registration, such as any sex crime against persons under the age of 17, and enticing a minor into prostitution. Still, offenders who believe that they should not be included on the list, including those convicted before the D.C. Council approved the recent version of the law, can challenge their inclusion through a dispute resolution process in Superior Court. A judge would review the case and make a recommendation. But even if a judge rules that the offender doesn't have to register, the Offender Supervision Agency is not bound by the judge's decision. And although the U.S. attorney's office claims it cannot bargain away the posting requirement for a defendant who pleads guilty to a child-related sex offence, a provision of the law allows it to include on the registry even those not charged with a sex crime involving a minor. For example, if the prosecutor doesn't have enough evidence to charge a defendant with a sex offence, he can insist, as part of a plea bargain to a non-sex crime, that the accused register as a sex offender. ---------------------------------------------------------- Australia: ---------------------------------------------------------- 01st July 1999 _Paedophiles gain access to sensitive reports_ A Queensland Justice Department report was tabled on 30 June 1999 in the state parliament concerning Freedom of Information. The report prepared by the Human Rights and Administrative Law Branch said that FOI laws are permitting child molesters to access their psychiatric assessments. Issues raised by the report have brought pressure from Queensland Government departments to look at reviewing and tightening the FOI laws in place at present. The Queensland Police Service are among the groups to express concern of abuses of such laws. -- 7th August 1999 _'Wonderland' paedophile walks free from court_ A paedophile on 6 June 1999 walked out of the Melbourne Magistrates' Court a free man. Gregory Mark S [...], 37, a host of the international Internet porn club "Wonderland", admitted that he owned over 24,000 erotic pictures of girls under 16. When the site was removed, S [...] of St Kilda was the longest-serving member of the 180-member club whose members spread across 47 countries. The court heard that he had told police that the Internet had kept him off the streets. His lawyer said S [...] may be a voyeur but he has never directly harmed any child. S [...] pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and was placed on a community-based order for a year. He has to perform 150 hours of community service work. -- 07 August 1999 A paedophile was yesterday fined $9500 on pornography charges. Paul Leslie B [...], 47, computer consultant, with a wife and two children, was fined $9500 on 31 charges. He pleaded guilty to one charge of making pornography available for gain, and 30 charges of possessing 'objectionable' material. He was fined $250 on each of the 30 charges, and a further $2000 . Judge William Unwin said it was a modern crime. An Internal Affairs inspector of publications traced B [...]'s nickname and they swapped a pornographic image on the Internet, leading to charges of making material available for gain. When B [...]'s computer was searched, 1600 images were found. Craig Atkinson, prosecuting for the police, said investigators found 24,342 files on his home computer, some of which contained images of young children in 'sexually explicit poses', during a raid on Starow's home on 20 October 1998. Judge Unwin agreed that many of the images 'tended to promote paedophilia'. He accepted B [...] hadn't made money out of pornography. He said the Crown had been merciful and not sought forfeiture of the computer only because B [...] needed it to make a living. -- 19th July 1999 The videotaping of children's evidence for use in courts is expected to lead to a higher conviction rate in sex abuse cases. A new legal measure for the admissibility of the videotaped interviews takes effect on 1 August 1999. Conviction rates in NSW courts range from 70% to 90% for offences from break and enter to murder, but child sexual assault are the only prosecutions for which the conviction rate is below 50%, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. -- 10th July 1999 A Queensland police paedophile task-force has begun a mystery investigation into ousted children's commissioner, Norm Alford. Alford, who resigned from his post in March, 1999, has queried the validity of the investigation, claiming it was nothing more than a "fishing expedition". ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: ---------------------------------------------------------- _MY FOUR-YEAR-OLD SON FELL VICTIM TO PLAYTIME PARANOIA_ 25th July 1999 A FEW MONTHS ago my wife returned fuming from the London state nursery school my four-year-old son attends. A fellow parent had spotted another boy from his class examining my son's bottom, an act in which my son was cheerfully complying. The parent stormed into the head teacher's office and demanded an investigation, claiming my son had been abused. There it should have stopped. Such is the current climate of moral panic about child abuse which ridiculously infects even nursery schools, the head teacher agreed to hold an inquiry. Against our wishes, my wife was dragged in with my son to attend the meeting, while the mortified parents of the other boy were humiliated by the same inquest. My son, as best as he could explain it, told his inquisitors that he had not been interfered with. Finally, the issue was dropped. Months later I am still angry over how unnecessary and upsetting the whole incident was. Although the teachers were kind and apologetic - and even though in every other way they were the best of educators - it still struck me that something fundamental had been missed. Children are curious and sexual creatures. They examine the bottoms and genitalia of their peer group; they display and play openly and unselfconsciously with themselves. It is something that I went through - and all my colleagues whom I questioned - in childhood. Yet what was once dealt with by a careful (or less measured) explanation by a teacher or a parent to the child involved, that one should be respectful of one's body and not show it to anyone who asks (the appropriate setting-out of the socially acceptable limits of behaviour), has been superseded by paranoia. It reached its nadir last week when a 12-year-old girl had to sign the National Register for Paedophiles for 'abusing' younger children. In the same week the NSPCC weighed in by suggesting - dangerously - that even children as young as five can be 'paedophiles'. For children who have difficulties to be labelled with such an emotive word is extremely wrongheaded. Child psychologists, sensibly, have always tried to avoid giving problem children labels they believe will prove unhelpful to them in the future. The events of the past week not only label young children with difficulties in the most unhelpful way, but tragically it criminalises them before they have reached puberty. The events of the past week have introduced the paedophile witch-hunt even deeper into our nurseries and schools, so that parents now will not only fear their teachers and their carers, but also their children's classmates. The author wishes to remain anonymous ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: Comment-column newspaper comment: ---------------------------------------------------------- August 1999 We can have a mental image of the social worker as a demented, power-crazed nanny, but if ever we meet one we will sometimes be surprised to discover that she is an exceptionally pleasant and sensible person, concerned only to do the best she can for her charges. The reason for this great gap in public perception is that the rules she has to apply were drawn up by mindless fanatics. Whatever a child says must be believed. Parents are always in the wrong. By deliberately blurring the distinction between physical and sexual child abuse, charities have sought to transfer some of the revulsion that attaches to a paedophile upon a parent who speaks roughly to his child. I can offer no easy explanation for the current hysteria about child abuse, which also exists in the United States, except that in America, where it concentrates on physical and mental abuse, it seems to spring from a colossal sentimentality about children or "kids". This has produced one of the most revolting, undisciplined and spoiled generations the world has ever seen. In Britain, where our children are not yet quite as odious as their American cousins, the chief revulsion is from paedophiles. Although everybody agrees that physical cruelty should be severely punished, the children protected, it is the paedophile for whom no punishment seems too extreme. By deliberate elision between physical or mental abuse, the children's-power enthusiasts proceed to demand a similar reaction against any attempt to discipline a child. According to Friday's leading article in The Daily Telegraph the Home Office minister, Mr Paul Boateng, has been arguing that child abuse should be put on the same shelf as dangerous psychopathy: that anyone suspected of being "unsuitable" to work with children should be sent to prison for five years if ever he applies for a job which involves working with children - even if he has never been charged, let alone convicted, of a crime. But I cannot make out whether Mr Boateng's notion of unsuitability is confined to sexual abuse or whether it also embraces the physical and mental variety. If the latter, it will be sufficient to send a person to prison who applies for a job involving children if there is suspicion of any intention to tell a child who is making too much noise to shut up. Obviously, nobody with any sense will ever apply for a job involving children. Then one remembers that false accusations of abuse brought by schoolchildren are now a major hazard of the teaching profession. Is this how Labour's brain-boxes plan to tackle the shortage of teachers? ---------------------------------------------------------- UK: comment ---------------------------------------------------------- _MUST WE BAN CHILDREN FROM KISSING GRANNY ?_ 2nd August 1999 CHILDREN must not be made to kiss adults goodbye - even their grandparents - because it might make them vulnerable to paedophiles, parents are being told by the NSPCC. And they must be told not to go anywhere with a stranger, even if someone is obviously in distress and asking for help. The strict guidelines are set out in a booklet issued today by the NSPCC as part of its Safe Open Spaces campaign. It tells parents concerned about safety during the long summer holidays they cannot be too careful in the light of recent crimes against youngsters. But child development experts are warning that such rules will mean an end to carefree childhood and create insular and paranoid teenagers. Eva Lloyd, chief executive of the National Early Years Network, yesterday spoke of 'a worrying movement to remove our children from all perceived risks and dangers' and warned: 'We are bringing our children up without the experience they need to let go of the apron strings.' An experimental programme to electronically tag young children, unveiled yesterday, sparked similar criticism. It enables parents to fit a child with a brightly-coloured tag which sounds an alarm if the child travels out of an area scanned by surveillance equipment. The parent is alerted via a pager. The Safe Kids scheme is being piloted in Tesco hypermarket creches and is set to be expanded into all its stores as well as schools, libraries and nurseries by early next year. Professor John Pearce, emeritus professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Nottingham, said: 'Knowing which situations are dangerous and which are not is a highly sophisticated skill, and even as adults we are still struggling to know what is dangerous. It is right to start children early with very simple things, and then it should get more complicated and you can allow them more freedom as they get older.' But opponents point out that fewer than ten children are murdered each year - a rate that has not risen for 25 years. Dr Gary Slapper, who specialises in children and criminology, said: 'Earlier generations of people were able to lark about on the village green and there were no social warnings like this. 'The price to be paid in ten years is that we will have a generation with much less social competence - people in their late teens who have profound forms of introversion and paranoia.' Margaret Morrissey of the National Confederation of Parent-Teacher Associations added: 'I think it's sad if we don't allow our children to grow up in a free society because we are so terrified of what could happen. It's really important that we allow children to have some responsibility for their actions.' ---------------------------------------------------------- Research - USA: ---------------------------------------------------------- _Youth Violence Down, Study Finds_ 4th August 1999 The amount of violence committed by teenagers -- both in and out of school -- has declined significantly since the early 1990s, according to a study whose findings run counter to the widespread public impression of escalating juvenile violence. A biennial survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed sharp decreases in several categories of violent activity by teenagers -- such as carrying a weapon or fighting -- between 1991 and 1997, the most recent year for which data is available. In other categories -- such as being threatened with a weapon or having property stolen -- the survey found no appreciable change. "None of the behaviors we studied showed any sign of going up," said Thomas R. Simon, co-author of the study, which surveyed 16,000 students in grades 9 through 12 and was published in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. More than a third of ninth graders have had sexual intercourse, according to the Centers. ---------------------------------------------------------- Research - USA: ---------------------------------------------------------- 6th August 1999 _Washington's Other Sex Scandal_ _Kulturkampf conservatives have just scored a 355-0 victory by smearing research on a sensitive subject_ On July 12, in an action that seems to have been without precedent, the House voted, 355-0, to condemn a scientific article. Granted, this was not an article about magnetic induction in supercooled fluids. It was about sexual abuse of children. Congress "condemns and denounces all suggestions in the article... that indicate that sexual relationships between adults and 'willing' children are less harmful than believed and might be positive for 'willing' children." Most people who noticed this news probably found it either puzzling or faintly amusing. I want to suggest that it was, in fact, faintly sinister. The July 1998 issue of *Psychological Bulletin*, a scholarly journal published by the American Psychological Association, carried a dense, 31-page article titled "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples." The authors are _Bruce Rind_ of Temple University, _Philip Tromovitch_ of the University of Pennsylvania, and _Robert Bauserman _of the University of Michigan. The article is not original empirical research. Rather, it analyzes 36 peer-reviewed studies and 23 graduate dissertations that examined how sexual encounters in childhood and adolescence had affected college students. The findings are startling. First, the students who had experienced child sexual abuse (called "CSA") were on average only slightly less well-adjusted than others in terms of objective psychiatric and medical symptoms. Individuals can and do suffer severely, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Second, most women (72 percent) recalled their childhood sexual episodes negatively, but most men recalled them positively (37 percent) or neutrally (29 percent). Third, only a minority of men and women reported lasting negative effects, although temporary negative effects were reported by a majority of women. Such findings, the authors state, "are inconsistent with the assumption of pervasive and lasting harm." As a result, the authors suggest that psychological researchers should abandon the current custom of referring to all adult sexual encounters with minors, regardless of the circumstances and results, as "child sexual abuse." Researchers could perform finer-grained analyses if they used "abuse" to designate injurious or unwilling encounters. Other encounters could be called "adult-child sex" or "adult-adolescent sex." The authors said they were talking about scientific definitions -- not law or morality. "The findings of the current review," they said, "do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on the behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even altered." As _Carol Tavris_, a social psychologist, wrote last month in the *Los Angeles Times*, you could reasonably interpret these results as very good news: Most people bounce back after sexual abuse. Instead, in December a group that promotes "reparative therapy" for homosexuals denounced the report as attempting to normalize pedophilia. In March, _Laura Schlessinger_, a syndicated radio personality monikered "Dr. Laura," took up the cause and turned it into a national crusade. "They are, in effect, suggesting a repetition of the steps by which homosexuality was normalized," she said. "Deviance became redefined as diversity." The study, she said, was "bogus science, more like propaganda." Legitimate criticism of the study fell into two categories. One concerned the authors' alleged bias. Were they "agenda driven," aiming to destigmatize pedophilia? In 1989, when he was 23 and just out of college, Bauserman published a cross-cultural comparison of attitudes toward man-boy sexual relations in a Dutch journal called *Paidika*, which had taken pro-pedophilia stands. This raises red flags. It does not disqualify the authors, but it does invite particularly rigorous scrutiny of their work. The second kind of legitimate criticism concerned methodology. The most prominent assertion was that the article relies heavily on 43-year-old data that lumped contact sex together with exhibitionism -- so, of course, after-effects seemed slight. The authors replied that exhibitionism is a recognized form of abuse that can indeed be traumatic, and they said that including this form of abuse in such studies is standard practice. Moreover, they noted that their main findings, which evaluated lingering symptoms, did not use the disputed data at all, and that omitting those data altogether did not significantly change the other results. I don't know who is right, and neither do you, and neither does the U.S. Congress. A lot of science is flawed, and most scientists have biases. The answer is for other scientists with different biases to do more science. Conscientious criticism, however fierce, helps drive that process forward. But the process counts on critics to make some effort to be truthful. Starting in May, a stream of conservative activists and Republican House members, including Majority Whip _Tom DeLay_, lined up to issue denunciations. "I am appalled and outraged that an influential American psychological association would publish a study that advocates normalizing pedophilia," DeLay said. Advocates normalizing pedophilia? Where? Rep. _Joseph R. Pitts_, R-Pa., said in a press release: "The authors write that pedophilia is fine... as long as it is enjoyed" (ellipsis in original). His office could provide me with no quotations from the study that support his remarkable reading. _Wade F. Horn_, writing in *The Washington Times*, said, "Apparently, these authors believe, it's perfectly fine for an adult to sodomize a 10-year-old so long as the child doesn't develop psychological problems because of it." _Eileen King_, the head of a group called One Voice/American Coalition for Abuse Awareness, said in a press release: "It would have us believe that giving pedophiles free access to our children is 'enlightened.' " The quotation marks around "enlightened," as if the study had used the word, was a nice touch. A columnist named _Kathleen Parker_ quoted the study itself as saying, "Sex between adults and willing minors should be described in more positive terms." That inflammatory quotation is spurious. When I asked for her source, Parker told me she had misplaced a quotation mark and was chagrined. Whoops. In June, Schlessinger declared on national television: "Two out of the three authors have written and traveled all over the world in the pedophilia circles to promote the notion of adult-child sex." This is a serious accusation. I interviewed two of the authors, Rind and Bauserman, and both said it is false. They said the statement's closest intersection with reality is that, on one occasion, Bauserman and Tromovitch presented their findings to a group of social workers and clinicians in the Netherlands. When I asked for substantiation, a spokeswoman for Schlessinger wrote to me that the authors "are obviously 'in touch' with" Dutch pedophilia advocates. All the while, the people churning out this stomach-turning stuff were condemning the study's authors for distorting truth to promote an agenda. They were also charging that the American Psychological Association had been "irresponsible." When a few members of Congress condemn a scientific report, they are expressing opinions. When the U.S. House of Representatives, with its vast power, condemns a scientific report, it is making an implicit threat. After holding its ground for a few weeks after the storm broke, in June the APA embarked on a campaign to placate Congress -- as well it might. _Raymond D. Fowler_, the APA's chief executive, told me he doubts the contretemps will have any large chilling effect on research or publication. "I think that any attempts to interfere with the normal scientific process wouldn't go very far," he said. Maybe. On the other hand, an activist coalition of Kulturkampf conservatives has just learned that by smearing research on a particularly sensitive subject it can score a 355-0 victory over the forces of darkness. Hmm. Would you be surprised if this happened again? And again? "I really believe in my heart that if that study had gone unchallenged, it would have done harm to children," says Rep. _Matt Salmon_, R-Ariz., the chief sponsor of the congressional condemnation. "I think it was shoddy science. I don't want to put a gag order on science, but let's make sure it's science." Who, precisely, is the "us" in "let's"? One might have expected a conservative to appreciate that "unchallenged by Congress" does not equal "unchallenged." If winding up at the business end of a 355-0 congressional resolution persuades researchers to avoid asking questions or publishing answers that provoke Tom DeLay, the result will be to stifle the advance of knowledge about sexual abuse. ----------------------------------------------------------- ends UK extracts from a review: ------------------------------------------------------------- The Letters of Wilkie Collins: Vol I 1838-1865, Vol II 1866-1889. Ed by William Baker and William M. Clarke. Macmillan, 267 pp and 616 pp. TWENTY years ago it was difficult to find any novel by Wilkie Collins in the bookshops, apart from The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Now paperback editions proliferate, and his "lost" first novel comes out to critical fanfares. Collins's fiction, popular with ordinary readers, is also a subject of academic study. An edition of his letters is long overdue. [snip] .... there is a curious series of letters to a young girl, Nannie Wynne, with whom Collins carried on one of those fantasy relationships dear to middle-aged Victorian gentleman, in which he addressed her as his "wife". Creepy as this sounds, it would be unfair, I think, to brand Collins as an incipient paedophile. Nannie's mother, almost always present at their meetings, accepted it, and although Collins was popular with children, often siding with them against parental discipline, his sexuality was promiscuously directed at adult women. [snip] ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: book notes: ------------------------------------------------------------- _50 BEST HOLIDAY BOOKS_ 3rd July 1999 [...] # 14 DREAM CHILDREN BY A.N. WILSON Incredible. AN Wilson succeeds in making a paedophile sympathetic. Oliver Gold, a distinguished philosopher, has retired to live in an all- female household in North London, where he is universally loved and admired, despite his secret sexual involvement with 10-year-old Bobs. The book treats weighty issues - free will, good and evil, the influence of childhood trauma - with impressive subtlety and unexpected wit, and the fast-paced narrative sweeps you along. If you'll forgive the cliche, I couldn't put it down. Details: Abacus, pounds 6.99, 280pp [...] # 19 ABOUT A BOY BY NICK HORNBY It seems a shame to spend the best part of a grand jetting off to the other side of the world and then reading a book so good that you will forget where you are entirely, but this is one of those books. Hornby does it again with a simply plotted but unputdownable tale of a young boy's friendship with an emotionally vegetative thirtysomething man. The writing style is as warm and satisfying as hot buttered toast, and Hornby's storytelling is as compelling and addictive as ever. LJ Details: Indigo, pounds 6.99, 286pp [...] # 25 LEARNING TO SWIM BY CLARE CHAMBERS If there were any justice in the world, this delicious novel would have been a bestseller. It wasn't, because it has a truly horrible cover, but behind the tacky packaging is the warm and intelligent story of Abigail, a girl from a repressed suburban family who finds magic, enchantment and love in the home of her new schoolfriend's bohemian family. It is a joy from beginning to end, lightly and cleverly written, and delivering so much more than it promises. A perfect novel. LJ Details: Arrow, pounds 5.99, 320pp ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: book review: ------------------------------------------------------------- 13th June 1999 _Manly Pursuits_ (Bloomsbury Pounds 15.99) Writing fiction about real historical figures is a perilous undertaking, and to do so in a first novel suggests considerable self-confidence. Writing about Cecil Rhodes would seem to be even more hazardous: among other failings, he has the distinction of being the subject of a spectacularly dud BBC costume drama. In Manly Pursuits (Bloomsbury Pounds 15.99), Ann Harries, not content with tackling Rhodes, has reanimated the shades of Alfred Milner, Rudyard Kipling, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris, Charles Dodgson and Olive Schreiner, bringing them together in an extraordinary narrative that shuttles between England and South Africa in the late 19th century. The link between this unlikely set of characters is Francis Wills, a desiccated Oxford ornithologist, who is summoned to Cape Town by Rhodes in 1899. Wills, who will not be found in the history books, brings with him a consignment of 200 British songbirds with which the madly colonising Rhodes intends to populate his large estate. Unfortunately, Rhodes has not taken into account the seasonal differences between England and South Africa: those birds that survive the journey arrive in the southern hemisphere's autumn, and are disinclined to sing. While attempting to coax chirrups and warblings from his charges, Wills ** inaugurates a fateful friendship with a small girl ** and gets caught up in a plot (involving blackmail and burglary) to avert the Boer war. By using Wills as her narrator, Harries presents history and historical characters from a fruitfully odd angle. Although reclusive, Wills has all the right connections and tends to be in the right (or wrong) place at crucial moments. He is capable of imitating bird-calls with absolute precision, and Harries's own impersonation of this prim, repressed bachelor is equally convincing. While Wills himself, as he acknowledges, has little sense of humour, he is a brilliant comic creation. Furthermore, since he is a biologist and a photographer, he is the conduit for the author's acute and detailed observations of flora, fauna and people. The darkly funny account of Wills's sickly and circumscribed childhood is particularly well done. It is here that Wills first encounters Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. 'I felt a curious contentment in this immaculately classified universe,' he recalls, 'and a certainty that this was the correct order of things as opposed to the terrifying tangle of animal and vegetable life that seethed beyond the vicarage walls.' The same might be said of the imperialists, notably Rhodes, whose concept of evolution is characteristically self-serving: 'Fish...birds...apes...man...the Anglo-Saxon race? Isn't that how it goes?' he challenges. Manly Pursuits is not only funny, well-observed and beautifully written; it is also clever. With cool irony, Harries draws together 19th-century notions of Darwinism, colonialism, masculinity, honour and betrayal, sexuality and science, suggesting connections as unexpected as those between her characters (which are based on fact). The title itself resonates throughout the book, encompassing everything from big game hunting ** to paedophilia. ** It has been observed before (notably in Ronald Hyam's magnificent 1990 study of Empire and Sexuality) that many of the most influential Victorian imperialists remained unmarried, their bachelorhood often confirmed by intense friendships with other more youthful males. Harries subtly conveys the various grades of male solidarity, and it is left to Mrs Kipling to point out that, apart from her husband, none of Rhodes's imperialist associates has made any practical contribution to his dream of populating the globe with Anglo-Saxons. Except for a scene in which Wills attends a London gathering that somewhat unconvincingly combines elements of the Travellers' Club and a flagellants' brothel, Harries hardly puts a foot wrong, and introduces her historical characters with wit and aplomb: 'My first meeting with Oscar occurred in the Succulent House of the Oxford Botanic Gardens,' Wills recalls; 'It was upon Frank Harris's lips that I first heard the word c***'. It is during Wills's first conversation with Wilde that the difference between the scientist and the artist is quietly suggested, a difference that reasserts itself with full and shocking force when we discover precisely where Wills's analysis of birdsong has led him. Intelligent, provocative and absorbing, Manly Pursuits is not only an outstanding first novel but a remarkable book by any standards. ------------------------------------------------------------- UK newspaper comment column: ------------------------------------------------------------- _'Enemy of The People' - the NSPCC_ 8th August 1999 'How do you do, William," said Mrs Brown as she shook hands politely with her son. "What are you planning to do this morning?" "Well," said William. "Me and Ginger and the rest of the Outlaws thought we might just sort of play in the streets and get into all sorts of scrapes and adventures that might later be turned into an amusing novel by Richmal Crompton." "Goodness," said Mrs Brown. "I really don't think you ought to do that." "Why-ever not?" said William, trying to tuck a catapult into his back pocket without his mother noticing. "Because the vicar's wife called round yesterday. She's the local representative of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. They're having a new campaign to stamp out child abuse and according to their guidelines, your father and I have a lot to learn. For example, from now on there will be no hugging and kissing your grandparents. It sets such a bad example, you see." "Oh, I don't mind that," said William, affecting nonchalance. "Kissing's sissy anyway." "And there will certainly be no playing in the streets," said Mrs Brown. "Not while there is a million-to-one chance of your being abducted. Which there is." At this moment, William's elder brother Robert came into the kitchen looking for his handkerchief. "You mean we might be able to have William abducted?" he said. "Chance'd be a fine thing." William ignored this remark and thought deeply for a moment. "How would it be if Ginger and me just went to the sweet shop down the road?" he said. "Certainly not," said Mrs Brown. "Sweet shops are especially dangerous. You must avoid anybody who offers you sweets." "Now look here, mother," said William. "If I can't go out havin' adventures with Ginger and Henry and Douglas, how am I goin' to occupy myself during the long summer holidays?" Suddenly, at the thought of the weeks that stretched ahead of her, Mrs Brown turned pale and looked around her in a desperate search for inspiration. The children's "safe area" was out of the question. With William playing there, how could any other child be truly safe? The Botts had already complained about the influence William was having on their innocent daughter, Violet-Elizabeth (who would have been electronically tagged if she had not threatened to scream until she was sick). "Oh dear," she said. "Why don't you ask sister Ethel if you can tidy her room?" At this suggestion, William exploded with schoolboy rage. "Golly!" he said. "I'll tell you what child abuse is, mother. Child abuse is keepin' healthy young boys boxed up indoors, it's denying him gobstoppers and sherbet and other essential foods, and it's forcing him to tidy up his sister's bedroom rather than have adventures with his friends." It was at this point that an idea struck him. Rather a good idea. "You know, mother, I've a good mind to report you to the NSPCC." ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: theatre notes (1): ------------------------------------------------------------- SCARBOROUGH'S FINEST IS OFF AT THE DOUBLE IN ALAN AYCKBOURN'S LATEST WORK WITH THE WRITER IN COMPLETE CONTROL OF HIS ENVIRONMENT. 22nd Jun 1999 [...] For Alan Ayckbourn, a play is Trojan horse. On the surface, his work seems friendly and unthreatening, but hidden inside are nuggets of substance. Both Garden and Home are set in typical Ayckbourn territory, a garden fete and a well-to-do country home, yet one touches on mental illness, the other on paedophilia. Michael Billington once said Ayckbourn was a 'left-wing writer using a right-wing form', a description the playwright doesn't deny, although he prefers to think of himself as an anarchist whoreists forcing political views on his audiences. [...] * House and Garden, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until 10th July. ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: theatre notes (2): ------------------------------------------------------------- _A PRUDE'S NIGHTMARE ON PRINCES ST_ 7th August 1999 The Fringe, which opens in and around Princes Street a week before the more high-brow International Festival for the second year, is fast upstaging its older sister. With more than 15,000 performances scheduled at 167 venues, [snip a round-up of the Edinburgh Festival fringe, from which... ] Maybe a play outing Charlie Chaplin as a paedophile is more your style. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: Theatre notes (3): ------------------------------------------------------------- _DEADMEAT_ CURTAIN THEATRE WEST YORKSHIRE PLAYHOUSE LEEDS WHAT DOES the nickname "Q" mean to you? Maybe you're of the generation that would associate it with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse and a prime exemplar of the kind of gentlemanly Eng Lit scholarship that Leavis and gang wanted to sweep aside. If so, you are unlikely to get much of a kick out of Deadmeat, currently playing in the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, for the "Q" who wrote the book on which this entertainment is based, is far removed from that old Cambridge belletrist. Described as "a Maverick Londoner, and multi-media celebrity" who has been "a regular feature of London's clubland over the last five years", Q has collaborated with director Jude Kelly on the theatrical version of a novel which, with a cast of urban blacks, sucks you into a world dominated by digital technology, drugs and chilling out. Accordingly, the Courtyard has been transmogrified into a kind of cyber night-club, resonating to the pounding Afro-beat of Tony Allen's hypnotic drums. The normal seating has been ripped out and replaced with a network of catwalks around which the audience gather, nursing drinks. Giant screens throw up website visuals and images that chime or strike distressing discords with the story. The dialogue regularly veers into heightened near-verse, full of internal echoings ("Freak me with those special treats that make me scream like a little girl") or into outright rap. There's stylisation too, in the body language - erotic confrontations present prize fights in a boxing ring between dressing-gowned lovers-aggressors. Some of the personnel only appear in filmed close-up, their disembodied faces looming intimidatingly over the life-size actors who are present in the flesh. Ian McKellen, in this mode, plays a pervy, corrupt art dealer, though the interaction between screens and stage was a trifle complicated the night I saw the show as Sir Ian was also very much there in person, plus entourage, gazing intently at himself and, at the end, executing a beautifully acted moment of modest resistance to taking a bow. My reaction to the event was: great atmosphere, shame about the story. This latter focuses on "cyber-solicitation"; paedophiles who allegedly stalk children in chat rooms - or rather, chat-up rooms - on the Internet. Tracking down these men, there's a Cyber Vigilante who is leading a string of bloody corpses in his wake. My worries about this plot are technical and moral. As plays such as Closer have shown, part of the attraction of communicating via the Web is the licence it gives to pure (and impure) pretence, the invention of identities. Q's story depends upon only non-paedophiles being wise to this characteristic. It attributes touching naivety to child molesters. Secondly, Deadmeat seems to exploit paedophilia for its sensational aspects. The questions it raises are couched so crudely (if you knew who the Cyber Vigilante was, would you shop him?), that as a sensitive, ethical debate, the evening is utterly worthless. Until 5 June. Box office: 0113 213 7700. Web-site: www.deadmeat.com ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: comment on media coverage of abuse allegations: ------------------------------------------------------------- _THE PREJUDICE THAT SHOULD MAKE US ALL FEEL GUILTY_ 08th August 1999 In an episode of NYPD Blue a few years ago, a priest is found murdered and partly clothed in a park frequented by male prostitutes. A teenage boy complains to police that the priest 'wouldn't keep his hands off me'. We are led to believe the murder victim is yet another paedophile priest. But there is a twist to the tale. We discover that the accusation is false - the priest is innocent. It says a lot that we have reached a point where the surprise in a drama is not that a priest is guilty, but that he is innocent. This episode came to mind when the conviction for rape against Nora Wall, a former nun, was quashed late last month. I am ashamed to admit that I am one of those who simply assumed that Wall was guilty. There was no doubt in my mind. I didn't even follow the case. So used are we now to religious and priests being convicted of child abuse that when one is charged with this offence the automatic assumption is that the person is guilty. Just as with the episode of NYPD Blue, it comes as a surprise to us to discover that the priest or nun may be innocent after all. It seems that the presumption of innocence, the right of every citizen in the land, is no longer given to priests and nuns accused of sexual abuse. Tom O'Malley, a law lecturer at University College Galway was quoted to this effect last week in The Sunday Times. He said: 'Nowadays, if an allegation is made against a priest there is a presumption that it is correct.' That this should be so is, perhaps, understandable. It did, after all, come as a shock to many people to discover that some members of the most trusted group in Ireland, the clergy, were guilty of the most appalling abuses of trust. This could not fail to be front-page news, especially when the first wave of scandals broke. In addition, the manner in which some of those in authority in the church handled these cases when they came to their attention was itself a scandal. That said, some newspapers seemed either blissfully or wilfully ignorant of the effect their coverage would have on public perceptions of priests, the vast majority of whom are entirely innocent of any kind of criminal offence, let alone paedophilia. It is a classic recipe for prejudice to either intentionally or unintentionally blacken an entire group because of the crimes of a few of its members. Most newspapers are well aware that were they to continually draw attention to the crimes committed by the members of a given ethnic minority this would very quickly give rise to racial hatred. I attended a press conference once at which Mervyn Taylor, then minister for equality and law reform, castigated newspapers for running stories with headlines such as Traveller found guilty of... or Traveller charged with... [ In the UK, 'Traveller' is a polite local-newspaper word for 'gypsy'. ] In Britain, through the 1970s and 1980s, any Catholic from Northern Ireland was automatically suspected of having IRA sympathies. An entire group was under a pall of suspicion because of the crimes of a tiny minority within it. Any Irish person arrested in Britain in connection with IRA activities was automatically assumed to be guilty. This led to many famous miscarriages of justice. It is a dangerous thing ever to lose sight of the presumption of innocence, and while we may sometimes be able to understand how this happens it is no less excusable for that. In fact, it is especially when some members of a clearly identifiable group are found guilty of heinous crimes that we need to be most wary of losing this presumption. Even now the widespread prejudice that exists against priests and nuns seems to be working to the detriment of Nora Wall. It seems what we nearly had was a gross miscarriage of justice, but - a few comment pieces aside - there was no sense of outrage. Where were the front-page headlines? Where were the thundering editorials? This is important, because the public needs to be made aware that not all cases of sex abuse are cut and dried. In Britain there have been several high profile cases of people being falsely accused of child abuse. In Ireland, there have been none, although they happen. This imbalance of reporting further reinforces the presumption of guilt in these cases because it does not train the public to be more sceptical when people are accused of abusing children. What is more, since forensic evidence of the sort that exists in other criminal cases is almost never present in cases of child abuse, especially when it has happened decades before, courts are reliant instead on personal testimony - which makes this a fertile area for the unscrupulous and the unstable. Add to this the prospect of substantial compensation payments and you have what will be, for some people, an irresistible temptation. Anybody professionally involved in the care of children is well aware of this. The presumption of guilt in cases of alleged child abuse applies most strongly to priests and religious, but it affects any and all at whom the finger is pointed. Very often such accusations arise in cases of marital breakdown. This means that most men are potential victims of a false allegation. So next time you are watching some priest or nun being led off in shackles - complacently assuming all the while that he or she is guilty - remember that you, or someone close to you, equally could be the next victim of the presumption of guilt. ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: TV tennis (!) notes: ------------------------------------------------------------- 28th Jun 1999 [...] The extreme youth of some of the [Wimbledon tennis] girls - even in the Guardian I don't think we need call them women - was a continuing theme throughout the week. On a programme called The Sundays on Channel 4 in the early hours of yesterday morning the novelist and professional controversialist Howard Jacobson claimed there was a whiff of paedophilia about the Wimbledon coverage. 'These girls are physically equipped to play top-class tennis at 14 but we're not mature enough to handle them,' he said, clearly making a Freudian pitch for Julian Clary's gig. Wise old Uncle Des steered the BBC's coverage mostly clear of the phwoar zone, although there was a short montage sequence featuring shots of Anna Kournikova cut to the song She's In Fashion by Suede. 'She's such a favourite here,' said Des. I wonder why. The coaching of the younger players was also an issue because of Hingis's abandonment by her coach/mother. Virginia Wade reckoned there was probably a middle way to be found somewhere between a mother and a dirty old man. 'Your coach should be more objective than your mother, but you do need the support of a member of the family, a close friend, someone like that,' she said. For some players the cutaways were of a coach or mentor. The bearded chap supporting Jelena Dokic appeared to be Terry Waite and the man with the grey moustache rooting for Lorenzo Manta looked like the star of a 70s porn movie. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------- UK: book review: ------------------------------------------------------------- _THE END OF INNOCENCE_ _A Game We Play_ by Simona Vinci (Chatto and Windus, 10 GBP) 28th July 1999 Simona Vinci, who is 29 and lives near Bologna, has been catapulted into controversy in Italy by her novel A Game We Play (the Italian title translates as We Know Nothing About Children). The book, which has won the Elsa Morante prize for a first work, started out as a short story in a collection of hers which has been shortlisted for the Campiello Prize, Italy's equivalent of the Booker ('I hope I don't win, I'm too young,' she says. 'I don't want to be part of the literary establishment so soon'). It is about what five children two girls and three boys, the youngest 10 and the oldest 15 get up to in a shed one hot summer, and it's enough to make any parent's blood run cold. In short: sexual awakening, pornography, violence and death. Written in a powerful, simple style, the story is made all the more disturbing by Vinci's ability to see the world through children's eyes. Her descriptions of childhood sexual feelings are instantly recognisable, and you're immediately pulled in by the tale. Martina and Greta are flattered to be invited by Mirko, the 15 year old, to go with him, Luca (14) and Matteo (10) to an abandoned shed in the middle of a field just five minutes by scooter from the apartment block where they live. They listen to loud music and talk. Then Mirko brings out a stack of porn and Martina feels a familiar shiver, 'something that she had been feeling at night in her bed for a long time'. But what, she wonders, does that feeling have to do with the bodies in the magazines? Sexual games ensue, with the children copying the pictures in the magazines. Afterwards, Martina has an feeling that somehow she has lost something, while Matteo feels a 'horrible cold, in the core of his heart. This must be how grown-ups feel, he thought.' These visits to the shed gain momentum, always with Mirko directing operations. Mirko's power, of course, lies in the fact that he's a teenager, an exciting figure worthy of respect. Soon the girls have intercourse with the boys. The porn (shadowy men hand packages over to Mirko in the street) becomes increasingly hardcore and SandM. Finally Greta is violently abused by them and dies. Who is to blame? None of the parents, who we see only through their children's eyes, seem abusive or neglectful. Reactions in Italy, where there have been public debates about the novel, are polarised; some critics praise Vinci's courage in writing on a taboo subject, others condemn the novel as trashy and perverted. Vinci says that the characters and plot are imaginary but possible, while the locations are real; she's observed children and teenagers in Granarolo, the town where the novel is set. It is certainly not an erotic book; it's the children's minds rather than their bodies that are explored. But Gitta Sereny, whose book about Mary Bell (Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill) raised such a storm last year, has grave doubts about the wisdom of publishing A Game We Play, although she agrees it has literary merit. She feels that it's an alarmist book; that this kind of relationship between such a psychologically damaged teenage boy and a group of younger children is exceptionally rare, and would never go on so long unremarked. 'The author may have had a bad experience herself; she has a very vivid sexual imagination and she's translated it into this nightmare. It's a pornographic book which, it's clear to me, will be recommended to paedophiles. And for parents in our society to be made even more self-conscious on the subject of sex that's the last thing that's needed in England.' She also has concerns about the effect on young teenagers who happen upon the book (which they may well do, as Vinci is also the author of two children's books and is currently writing a trilogy for teenagers about a female kick-boxer who fights racism, drugs and prostitution). Vinci implies, says Andrew Samuels, professor of analytical psychoanalysis at Essex University, that there is a direct link between the children looking at the magazines and then acting out what is in the pictures. Would this really happen? 'It's statistically very rare,' Samuels continues. 'This is Lord of the Flies terrain, where children in their natural state may revert to brutality. It's a very controversial position for a novelist to take. She can retreat behind artistic licence, but this is more than a novel. She's fired a salvo.' Did her British publishers have qualms? Yes, admits Rebecca Carter, the novel's editor, who found herself physically shaking after finishing it. 'I did worry that people would think we wanted to shock, that it was gratuitous. But it tries to address a subject we should all think about. Children are so exposed and vulnerable to adult sexual imagery.' How can we help our children deal with today's pervasive sexualisation? John Lenkiewicz, director of the Institute of Sexuality and Human Relations, cautions, 'Let's not forget that children can explore with their peers without disaster. Even young kids sometimes have intercourse; it's not supposed to happen, but it may not be damaging until adults get their spokes in. Corruption is a parent's word.' 'Sex is one of the most important things in life,' says Vinci. 'We must try to look at our children and be honest, and not hide.' A Game We Play by Simona Vinci (Chatto and Windus, 10 GBP) will be published on August 5. ------------------------------------------------------------- Exhibition note: ------------------------------------------------------------- August 1999 "The Artist's Model: Etty to Spencer" isn't exclusively about nakedness. It's an exhibition about artists and models, in Britain, from the mid- 19th to the mid-20th century. Still, nakedness is obviously one of the things it focuses on, being one of the main things the artist's model offered. And the kit-on section of the show is fairly small. I suppose only about 20 per cent of the images got together at Kenwood House depict the fully dressed. [snip] It's a pity, with these absorbing topics, that there aren't better pictures to exercise them on. For instance, you can wonder whether Henry Scott Tuke's July Sun (1913) or Mark Gertler's Young Girlhood (1925) show signs of paedophilia, and answer yes, vaguely, and yes, certainly. But the one is too tepid and the other too superficial for the question to matter. The desires don't run deep - as they do in, say, Lewis Carroll. [...] There are some curiosities. John Tenniel (who illustrated Alice) has a watercolour of Pygmalion (1878) embracing his awakening statue, and gives her a prim, demure expression, as if being brought to naked life was an awkward social spot, to be handled as best one can. * The Artist's Model: Etty to Spencer, Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, London NW3; until 26 September; admission pounds 3.50. Then at Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, 16 Oct to 12 Dec. ------------------------------------------------------------- Computer culture: ------------------------------------------------------------- August 6 1999 _Girls make friends not enemies with computer games_ A NEW computer game aimed at girls is based on the belief that, unlike bloodthirsty boys, they want to make friends not war. The CD-Rom world of *Lego Friends* has none of the savage fighting, gore or shootings common in games for boys. This leaves the five teenage girl characters free to meet, form a band and compose music and dance routines for their school concert. A real-life band of teenage girls, called Loose Chippin's, has been signed to promote the game when it goes on sale worldwide next month. The game's gentle premise would be patronising, said Mark Livingstone, managing director of Lego, if it were not for extensive research showing that this was what girls aged five to 12 wanted. "It would be a very sexist product if boys and girls wanted the same things from games," he said. Research had found, however, that girls wanted more creative, open-ended games. They also behaved differently at computer consoles, enjoying games they could play as a group. Mr Livingstone declined to say how much Lego had spent on the *Friends* series, which is expected to follow the virtual band as they rise to fame. The company is hoping, however, that the market will grow to rival the boys' game market, estimated at 4 billion UKP a year worldwide. Nintendo and Sega have found girls difficult customers because they are turned off by fights and sport. *Lego Friends* uses the band, called Tuff Stuff in the game, to give girls strong roles with which to identify. There are virtual sleepovers and a virtual diary to give girls the social interaction they are believed to crave. Mr Livingstone denied that friendly pursuits would leave girls unprepared for the adult world, which some say more often resembles mortal combat than Sunnyvale, setting of the CD-Rom. "When you watch girls play they are every bit as competitive with each other. When they try to write a better song or better choreography, they are just as sharp as boys," he said. The only rival to the 24.99 UKP CD-Rom is a Barbie dressing-up game, said the European Leisure Software Publishing Association, which represents the industry. "Barbie didn't do as well as expected two years ago, and the market is still completely boy-dominated. So far the only games that sell to girls are puzzle games like *Tetris* or action strategy like Mario," a spokesman said. At the introduction yesterday at Legoland, Windsor, children confounded gender expectations. Boys were almost more excited by the game, provided they were not told that it was a "girly" game. Sarah Johns, 5, was keen to use the mobile telephone option to ring virtual boys, but "I'd prefer fighting games on my computer at home". ------------------------------------------------------------- Tech culture (1): ------------------------------------------------------------- 18th July 1999 LASERS could soon give anywhere on the planet cheap high-speed internet access and peer-to-peer communication. The new system, OpticAir, uses a transceiver that encodes data into a laser beam that can then send it up to 6.2 miles to a second transceiver at speeds of up to 80 gigabytes (GB) a second - the equivalent of about 120 CD-Roms. OpticAir, developed by Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, is likely to be available next year. Gerry Butters, Lucent's group president of optical networking, says the system was developed originally for top-secret military use. "About four years ago we were approached by a US government 'black' organisation to come up with a reliable way to allow satellites in space to communicate with each other," he says. "We were also approached by the US Navy, which wanted a high speed way to communicate with ships when they were in port." OpticAir works in almost the same way as fibre-optic cables, except that data is sent using a high-powered laser rather than down a cable. "The laser works over an area about two metres wide, thereby making it safe," says Butters. The main cost is the laser, although Lucent says the price will drop quickly as manufacturing increases. "The system takes only a few hours to set up - it's basically just a matter of pointing the two transceivers at each other," says Butters. "We also have the big advantage that we don't need to have any kind of licence, unlike other wireless systems. This makes us ideal for transmitting data between countries, for instance, where otherwise you would need dozens of permits." Lucent says the system is more secure than fibre-optic cables that can be cut open easily and monitored without the owner knowing. However, it is impossible to intercept the laser system as the two transceivers must be in clear view of each other before any data are transmitted. OpticAir will be able to transmit at only 2.5GB a second. However, a system running at 80GB a second is in development. Lucent is working with BT on even higher-speed versions. Butters says the laser system will eventually catch up with traditional fibre-optic systems that can transmit up to 400GB of data a second. ------------------------------------------------------------- [ No license, impossible to intercept, can go across borders, cheap and fast. The 'CB radio' of the new millenium ? ] Tech culture (2): ------------------------------------------------------------- _New prepaid phones link criminals_ PRE-PAY mobile telephones have become the criminal's latest weapon, hampering police investigations by allowing crooks to communicate secretly and without fear of being traced. Digital pay-as-you-talk phones offer encrypted conversations that are hard to intercept and callers cannot be traced because calls are paid for by inserting a card that can be bought in Post Offices and petrol stations. A National Criminal Intelligence Service spokesman said: "Criminals are using these prepaid phones for a short time and then disposing of them." Until now, investigators have been reluctant to discuss the issue publicly, to avoid alerting criminals to the phones' potential. Researchers have shown it is possible to crack GSM encryption, but the process is difficult and pointless - as eavesdropped conversations on prepaid cellphones cannot be traced to users. One in five cellphones is sold without any contract between the buyer and a network company, which has caused a boom in the use of mobile phones by enabling people with poor credit histories to own a cellphone. Despite the concerns of law enforcers, none of the four British cellphone networks plans to demand proof of identity from buyers of prepaid phones, which represent a lucrative market. The phones use the same encryption system as standard GSM cellphones, so speech is secure. Although the networks log the origin and destination of all calls made from any mobile, calls made between two pre-pay phones can be anonymous. -- _Starium promises phone privacy - with sub-$100 2,048-bit crypto phone_ 12th August 1999 MONTEREY, California -- The sleepy coastal town of Monterey, California, is not the kind of place where vision-fired entrepreneurs come to change the world. Monterey Bay is better known for sea lions than silicon, and for Cannery Row -- made famous half a century ago in John Steinbeck's gritty, eponymous novel. Today, the third floor of a converted sardine factory on Cannery Row is home to a startup company developing what could become a new world standard in privacy protection. By early 2000, Starium Inc [http://www.starium.com/] plans to begin selling sub-US$100 telephone scrambling devices so powerful that even the US government's most muscular supercomputers can't eavesdrop on wiretapped conversations. Such heavily armored privacy is currently available only to government and corporate customers who pony up about $3,000 for STU-III secure phones created by the US National Security Agency. By squeezing the same kind of ultra-strong encryption into a sleek brushed-steel case about twice the size of a Palm V -- and crafted by the same San Francisco designer -- Starium hopes to bring crypto to the masses. "Americans by nature don't like people reading over their shoulders," says Lee Caplin, president and CEO of Starium. True enough. But whether Americans will pay extra for privacy is open to question, especially since both people in a conversation need the Starium "handsets" to chat securely. And there's another big obstacle: The US government has repeatedly tried to keep similar products off the market unless they have a backdoor for surveillance. Its export rules prevent Starium from freely shipping its products overseas. Starium's three co-founders -- the company has since grown to eight people -- claim they're not fazed. "The technology is out there. Whether they like it or not, it exists," says Bernie Sardinha, Starium chief operations officer. "You cannot stop progress. You cannot stop technology." The company's directors include Robert Kohn, former chief counsel for PGP and Borland International, and Whitfield Diffie, distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-inventor of public key cryptography. Starium at first planned to call its product CallGuard, but abandoned the name after discovering another company owned the trademark. The firm is considering VoiceSafe as another potential name. Customers will use the device by plugging it into their telephone handset -- a feature allowing it to work with office systems -- and plugging the handset into the base of the phone. At the touch of a "secure" button, the modems inside the two Starium units will form a link that, theoretically, creates an untappable communications channel. The units digitize, compress, filter, and encrypt voice communications -- and reverse the process on the other end. The Starium handset uses a 2,048-bit Diffie-Hellman algorithm for the initial setup, and a 168-bit triple DES algorithm for voice encoding. The four-chip unit includes a 75 MHz MIPS processor, an infrared interface, a smart card port, and possibly serial, USB, and parallel interfaces, the company says. The final version will operate for over 2 hours on a pair of AA batteries. Starium's business plan is nothing if not ambitious. In addition to selling the portable units, the company wants to add crypto capabilities to cell phones, faxes, and even corporate networks. Target markets include the legal, medical, banking, and even political fields. "I've gotten a call from the George W. Bush people for use in the campaign," CEO Caplin says. The company says it's working on deals with major European cell phone manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia to offer the same voice-encryption in software. Newer cell phones have enough memory and a fast enough processor to handle the encryption. Best of all, a software upgrade could be free. "You take your phone into a mall or a kiosk and they simply burn in the new flash ROM," Sardinha says. The idea for Starium came from longtime cypherpunk and company co-founder Eric Blossom, who was inspired by the Clinton administration's now-abandoned Clipper Chip plan to devise a way to talk privately. "I got interested around the time of Clipper. I was scratching my head saying, 'This is offensive,'" says Blossom, a former engineer at Hewlett Packard and Clarity Software. Blossom created prototype devices and sold them online. But they were clunky -- about the size of a desktop modem. They were also expensive, and didn't sell very well. ------------------------------------------------------------- Tech culture (3): ------------------------------------------------------------- _The Canadian government hasn't just ditched encryption regulations - it's now actively promoting the stuff_ 6th August 99 While the US Congress and the UK Home Office recoils in horror at the prospect of a population armed with cryptographic tools, a government department in Ontario wants to make it clear that encryption is good. More than that, in a paper released Thursday, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commission [http://www.ipc.on.ca/] said it wants everyone to learn to use encryption. "What we need is a shift in the mindset of how to use information," said Ann Cavoukian, Ontario's privacy commissioner. "A lot of people still think that their email is safe from prying eyes or tampering. That's not true. We have to protect ourselves, and we have to know how to use the tools... We have to get that message out." It's a message driven home in a how-to pamphlet available at the commission's offices, by mail, and on the Web. The pamphlet, which also points readers to crypto software vendors, is part of an initiative to get Ontarians to protect their privacy with personal encryption. "In the first sentence, the commission says that encryption is necessary, and that's true," said David Jones, president of Electronic Frontier Canada. "It's good to see a government department endorsing this technology and that encryption is something that everyone should know about and use." The Ontario Privacy Commission initiative is the strongest endorsement of personal encryption technology in Canada since federal Industry Minister John Manley announced Canada's crypto policy last fall. ------------------------------------------------------------- -- United Nations' International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Article 19: "everyone shall have the right ... to receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers." -- ends