Commentary on the Book Entitled Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar.

Commentary on the Book Entitled Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar. Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-3-03083147-9

Thomas O’Carroll

Accepted: 27 August 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

Abstract This Commentary is a subjective personal appraisal of the book in question rather than an objective Review. The rationale for this approach is presented. The author of the book engages with a series of “landscapes”, real and metaphorical, in his quest to “trail” child sexual abuse (CSA) in Britain over the last half century and more in its material reality and its representation in public discourse. It is an interdisciplinary work intended to sit at the intersection of diverse research areas: sexual violence; the history of sexuality; social and cultural history; media history and media studies; medicine and psychiatry; sociology and policy; criminology, law and sexual offending; childhood and family studies. Despite the titular focus on “sexual violence” against children, no definition of the term is offered in the book. It is a critical omission, with major ramifications, from a work that is otherwise studiously attentive to the changing language through which taboo acts of sexual engagement with children have been conceived and represented in media and other public discourse. The author’s use of the “sexual violence” concept is vigorously contested.

Keywords Age of consent · Child sexual abuse · Paedophilia · Paedophile Information Exchange · Pedophilia · Sexual violence Introduction

As a figure whose activism and writing are discussed at length and subjected to damning criticism in Nick Basannavar’s book on sexual violence against children, I offer a perspective grounded in my lived experience of the events in question. It has thus been designated as a Commentary rather than an objective Book Review, but it is underpinned by extensive reference to objective empirical research. As such, this format would appear to fall well within this journal’s stated “aims and scope”, in that it seeks to explore and analyse “issues related to sexual relationships and sexual behaviour”.

Commentary

From a high vantage point, as though we are in a police helicopter in search of telltale signs of a crime, we find ourselves looking down over a bleak moorland landscape. The scene is dramatically cut through by a single salient feature, a winding road, its silvery surface a glistening snail-trail.

The book’s cover photo is powerfully evocative of the work’s sombre contents, especially the Moors Murders – sadistic killings that became the most notorious criminal enterprise in later 20th century Britain, still regularly revisited in the media after well over half a century. The image of a snaking, silvery road primes us for a trail to be followed, as does the subtitle: Trailing Abuse.

The author takes us through a series of landscapes, real and metaphorical, in his quest to “trail” child sexual abuse (CSA) in its material reality and its representation in public discourse. Part I is a scene-setting overview called Landscapes. Part II, Moorland, focuses on the 1960s, especially the Moors Murders and the elliptical style with which the media of the day coped with trying to speak about “the unspeakable”. Part III, Borderland, follows a trail to the emergence in the 1970s of activism in favour of child-adult sexual contacts, a shocking idea for many but one which also gained some at least marginal influence in academia and radical politics, and introduced the term paedophilia to the general public. Part IV, Cleveland, is centred on the county of this name, where, in the 1980s, a sudden spike in allegations of parental CSA saw mass forced removals of children from their family homes, followed swiftly by a media and political backlash against perceived state heavy-handedness. Finally, Part V, Hinterland, is a review from the perspective of more recent times, in which revelations of “historic”, or “non-recent”, CSA have become such a major societal preoccupation.

In the introductory first chapter we are informed as to the general approach:

…this is an interdisciplinary work that will sit at the intersection of diverse research areas: sexual violence; the history of sexuality; social and cultural history; media history and media studies; medicine and psychiatry; sociology and policy; criminology, law and sexual offending; childhood and family studies. The book seeks to reveal the complex mechanisms of historical representations of sexual violence against children, making competing narratives accessible and visible. And it signals that the issue of sexual violence against children can act as a window onto broader cultural and social themes and histories.

For the most part, the author is assiduous in pursuit of this agenda. His scholarship is diligent, historically accurate at least with regard to the period primarily under review, and properly attentive to the language in which “representations” are made. Its subtleties and shifting conceptual basis are generally well explored, and he is explicitly conscious of anachronism as a problem in historical interpretation, notably with regard to the imposition of present understandings of CSA into discussions of times when understandings and values were significantly different.

So it is all the more surprising that in a book about “sexual violence” the term is never defined. In lieu, the author offers an explanation from which it becomes clear that key (but dubious) assumptions will be taken in effect as axiomatic, their truth being implicitly beyond any need of scrutiny or debate. We are told:

I have closely considered significant linguistic and thematic developments in the present, as well as the past, and deploy the umbrella term ‘sexual violence against children’ throughout the book. This covers many different forms of sexual violence including ‘child sexual abuse’, which, as we will see in Chap. 2, is itself an umbrella term.

This sets the curious reader on what becomes a wild goose chase in which the definitional bird we are hunting is kept hidden under an umbrella (however improbably!), which is itself obscured beneath a bigger umbrella. This quest for meaning, and for meanings beneath meanings, is frustrating, rather like searching for the source of the Nile where it disappears into a diffuse morass, including an extensive “landscape” of institutional definitions of CSA.

But some enlightenment is to be found. It is acknowledged, for instance, that CSA is a “value construct” [my emphasis]. The significance of this for the purposes of this Commentary is that terms with built-in value judgements make poor scientific constructs, given that science aspires to objectivity. Although the term has been pragmatically adopted in a wide range of research studies, its unsatisfactory nature has been admitted by, among others, forensic psychologist Michael Seto, author of a leading textbook in the field (Mulya, 2018; Rind et al., 1998; Seto, 2008). Seto said sexual abuse “is not a good scientific term because it is not behavioural and it is emotionally and morally loaded, implying harm to the child and the intent to exploit or harm on the part of the adult” (Seto op. cit. pp. vii-viii, footnote). Basannavar is an historian rather than a scientist, but much of what is discussed throughout the book relies for its rhetorical force on unquestioning acceptance of this conceptual house of cards.

Also relevant is the quoted definition of CSA from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC):

…forcing or enticing a child or young person to take part in sexual activities, not necessarily involving a high level of violence, and whether or not the child is aware of what is happening. This can involve both contact abuse … and noncontact abuse. Britain’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) took an even broader approach, we are informed, holding that CSA includes offences “such as grooming, viewing sexual abuse images, and encouraging children to behave in sexually inappropriate ways”.

Looming through the mists over this quagmire, the sharp-eyed reader will already discern the faint outlines of a problem. If “sexual violence” is taken to include everything from the horrific, sexually motivated, torture so graphically represented in evidence at the Moors Murders trial (a child victim had been tape-recorded screaming, crying, pleading for mercy) right through to “encouraging children to behave in sexually inappropriate ways”, what discriminatory value is the concept left with? What is the point of a book that takes a nuanced view of language in every relevant area except the central issue announced in its title?

Once this thought is apprehended, it becomes hard to suppress the uncharitable suspicion that, despite initial appearances, nuance is not the point for this author, and that the real mission might be more propagandistic. If, for instance, the actual agenda were to unload an animus against minor attracted people (MAPs), to pick a topic not entirely at random, what better than to set the discussion within an undifferentiated concept called “violence”, begin with sadistic child murder and leave guilt by association to do the rest? In this way “paedophiles” (essentially a hate-speech word these days) would be framed as intrinsically violent, thereby negating any redeeming qualities that empirical studies of their personalities and behaviour might reveal: redemption is bound to be in short supply for those who are deemed by definition to be violent towards children, regardless of what they have actually done (Okami & Goldberg, 1992; Plummer, 1979; Wilson & Cox, 1983).

Basannavar himself gives credence to the feeling that he is a propagandist, when, to his credit, he candidly acknowledges a tendency towards sensationalist writing. In the PhD thesis from which his book developed, he admits his first ambition was to be a journalist, not an historian (Basannavar, 2019). While he claims to have worked hard to suppress any “tabloid” tendencies, my view is that his judgement is impaired by them, as exemplified by his decision to place such an early and strong emphasis on the Moors Murders, with the drastically unbalanced framing consequences noted above.

Anticipating such a charge, he concedes that the Moors case was indeed exceptional. He acknowledges that scholars have tended not to draw too many conclusions from an episode that was so unique as to be “apparently lacking in wider comparative meaning”. But he persists anyway, in the teeth of this consensus, on the grounds that the case “also contained numerous instances of what we would now term paedophilic activity”. This attempted linkage to the next of his “landscapes” is weak. Only one of the five Moors victims was a child of prepubescent age, which by psychiatric definition is the developmental stage to which paedophiles are attracted; also, one of the two perpetrators described murder as a hobby, he decapitated rabbits in his own childhood, and was clearly motivated by sadism, not sexual attraction to children per se.

Genuinely paedophilic desire, by chalk and cheese contrast, is often expressed and satisfied in contexts that offer something attractive to the child. Grooming, at its worst, may involve cynical manipulation, including false promises, but mutual affection between child and adult cannot be ruled out either. It explains why children remain reluctant to testify against their alleged abuser in those (many) cases where there has been no evidence of coercion, and from which fear of the adult can be ruled out as an inhibiting factor (e.g. Jahnke et al., 2023). The motivation in such cases, not uncommonly verbalised by the child, is loyalty, grounded in friendship and love. Children have even insisted that their relationship with a paedophilic adult was beneficial to them, and maintained that assertion deep into adulthood, though you would be most unlikely to spot so positive a narrative among the media’s endless parade of “survivor” accounts (Burns, 2015; Kilpatrick, 1992; Leahy, 1992; Okami, 1991; Rind, 2003; Sandfort, 1984).

Such talk will sound like heresy to many. Any hint of softness on paedophilia, is bound to be greeted with reflexive suspicion and hostility, although in an academic forum such as this it is to be hoped an effort will be made to keep an open mind, with due attention given to what is said below and to my cited sources.

It is time to declare the nature of my personal interest. Born in 1945 and aged 77 at the time of this writing, in the 1970s I chaired the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), the organisation on which the author focuses attention in Part III, Borderland. In this part we find Chap. 6, titled “PIE and the ‘Radical Case’”, which has much to say about my book, Paedophilia:The Radical Case, as well as the organisation. Chapter 7, “Speaking About PIE, Speaking About Paedophilia” turns to the public discourse prompted by the appearance of paedophile activists on the scene, including me.

In PIE we campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent, arguing for its replacement by an alternative legal approach that we believed would more effectively protect children from abuse. This would focus criminal law enforcement efforts more tightly on encounters that were clearly not wanted by the child, and in which there was evidence of coercion or manipulation. We felt there was a case to be made for general freedom of intimate contacts, without age as a criterion, and saw a role for the civil law as a far more nuanced means for adjudicating cases in which consent was in doubt than the blunt instrument of the criminal process, which is often traumatic for child witnesses as well as accused adults (Grondin, 2011; Heller, 2016; Malón, 2009; Oellerich, 2002).

We were an open, democratically-run organisation with a formal constitution. We lobbied parliament and presented our law reform proposals to the government (PIE, 1975). Word reached me that Roy Jenkins, arguably the greatest Home Secretary the country has ever had, let it be known to a senior civil servant he thought our ideas were excellent, before adding that we “didn’t have ‘a cat in hell’s chance’ of success”. This lowly estimation of our prospects made it into Basannavar’s book, but not, alas, Jenkins’ high opinion of our proposals.

As for my book, it discussed children’s rights and grounded PIE’s case on philosophical foundations, while adding my own personal caveats. We were emphatically opposed to violence against children and explicitly took a stance against corporal punishment in schools, which was both lawful and still quite prevalent in those days.

So to see our work framed as promoting sexual violence, and indeed somehow sexually violent in itself, does not fill me with joy. But this is a Commentary in an academic journal, and I will endeavour to be as objective as I can. This quest for objectivity is fortunately made quite easy in one key respect: there is little temptation for me to take issue in a partisan way with Basannavar’s historical narrative, especially as it concerns PIE and me personally. His accuracy is not the problem.

For instance, Basannavar readily admits that PIE distinguished paedophilia from abuse “with considerable care”. Much of the PIE episode, he says, was platformed in academic debates, as well as in its own journals and papers. He pays attention to arguments for children’s liberation, including the validity of minors’ sexual consent, that were put forward at the time not just by PIE and in my own writing, but also by leading intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, along with some institutions that might have been expected to be more conservative (Pillaudin, 1978). He notes that “extended and earnest debates” discussing the nature and morality of paedophilia “were played out with contributions and letters from age-of-consent lobbyists such as O’Carroll…” He adds that a lengthy article in the respected journal Gay Left, co-written by the Collective, argued that PIE had a right to be heard, and framed paedophilia as an urgent social topic. He also points out that my 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case was reviewed by prestigious journals, including The London Review of Books. These findings, he says, “show that less popular, ‘high’ forms of media (along with radical academia) had been for PIE a more fruitful area for furthering their aims than the ‘low’ popular press, although all media forms had come to represent paedophilia in one way or another.”

However, all these indications by Basannavar that PIE’s ideas were gaining a significant foothold turn out to be just the prelude to an attempted take-down of our credibility, both intellectual and moral. He asserts: “Whilst there was a vocal group within radical academia who supported PIE’s right to be heard in the 1970s and 1980s, scholarship now takes a dim view of the group’s activities.”

This is misleading. The author’s two references supposedly supporting this claim are from an “activist” and a journalist. They do report scholarly opinion, but they say nothing about PIE’s activities. In one of them, activist Ian Pace takes academic scholars to task for supporting “the claims of paedophiles”. In the other, journalist Andrew Gilligan castigates academics who were still “making the case” for paedophiles decades after PIE’s demise. On this evidence, scholarship had not rejected PIE’s aims (public and legal acceptance of consensual child-adult sex); and judgement of our activities has been another matter entirely.

The two are conflated at this point in Basannavar’s account. In his keenness to undermine PIE’s moral standing he has wrongly implied that our intellectual position has been discredited. While the latter may ultimately hang on the former, they need separate consideration.

Turning, then, to moral credibility, Basannavar, in common with wide-ranging public discourse then and since, has made much of the fact that PIE was subjected to two major police investigations, resulting in some of its leadership, including me, being convicted and imprisoned for offences including “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”. True. But so what? Do gay men stand morally condemned for breaking the law against their sexual expression in the UK until the 1960s? Not the same thing at all, it may be said, because sex with children is harmful to them. Or so it is asserted. However, Basannavar’s claim that we were morally bankrupt rests not on showing that anyone in the PIE leadership had ever harmed any children (there was never any evidence to that effect, not a shred) but on quite different grounds. Unable, as he admits himself, to point to even a single victim, a single act of “sexual violence” instigated by PIE or anyone in its leadership, he relies instead on the claim that we were hypocritical, expressing ourselves idealistically in public but behaving in private with cynical disregard for anything but personal gratification.

We were “entryists” to the gay movement, according to several sources he cites with apparent approval. The term is pejorative, implying a hidden agenda, or false representations. PIE is said to have “attempted to portray its members as suffering from a similar mire of persecution in the mid-1970s as homosexuals had experienced until changes to the Sexual Offences Act of 1967”. But there was nothing either hidden or false in what we said. The persecution of MAPs was and remains just as real as that experienced by the pre-1967 generations (Mirkin, 1999). This fact would be blindingly obvious but for the understandable confusion that arises because a substantial element of the persecution takes the form of apparently legitimate prosecution and its consequences. Prison sentences and other penalties are intended to hurt; they are punitive. The problem is that they hurt in an illegitimate, persecutory way when they are imposed on adults and minors alike in victimless cases where the younger party gave de facto consent. That is why we were campaigning for legal reform. What is more, even MAPs who never come into conflict with the law also face persecution thanks to the stigma and pariah status that attaches to “paedophiles” generally, a fact increasingly recognised by research (Elchuk et al., 2021; Lehmann et al., 2023; Lievesley et al., 2020; Walker, 2021).

PIE was also said to have “hitched itself to the countercultural movement of the late 1960s, hiding the serious and systematic abuse of children under a cloak of libertarian rhetoric”. Again, not guilty, Your Honour: there was no “abuse”. This finds support from a lawyer in the “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” case, Peter Thornton KC. Shortly after the trial, he wrote an article for Rights, the journal of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), in which he criticised the use of the conspiracy laws in this instance. In this article, headed “Unacceptable charges exposed in recent trials”, he wrote that the case had “produced little clear evidence against the organisers of PIE” and that “it was probably only O’Carroll’s disarming frankness if not naivety, in the witness box that left him to take the brunt of a largely unsuccessful prosecution” (Thornton, 1981).

Basannavar does at least admit that assigning a cynical motivation to PIE’s members is “a difficult historical concept to prove”. Difficult for a very good reason. We were not cynics. We were certainly guilty of naivety, as Thornton notes, along with so many others in the 1970s. We naively supposed our arguments would find traction once the initial fuss had died down and they came to be investigated empirically in greater depth. What we failed to allow for was that the tide of history would turn and that evidence in support of our claims would be consistently either censored outright, trashed unreasonably, or else just ignored, and further research discouraged and starved of funding (Hubbard, 2016).

Arguably, among the true cynics in all this were Basannavar’s beloved tabloid press, which was already becoming increasingly sensationalist in the 1970s after Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch had extended his empire into the British market. The shortcomings of this sector were laid bare not just through a phone hacking scandal that shocked the nation but also in the uncritical credence later given to absurd accounts of fantasists alleging they had been sexually assaulted as children by a range of high-profile figures in public life (Leveson, 2012; Murphy, 2019).

The most famous of these fantasists was anonymised as “Nick” in tabloid coverage quickly taken up by the Metropolitan Police in their Operation Midland. Fatally, at the height of the “always believe the victim” dogma, the Met also showed too little scepticism, with disastrous consequences. Those falsely accused included a former prime minister and others who were said to have committed all manner of atrocities including murder. This was eventually exposed as a pack of lies; and “Nick”, by this time named as Carl Beech, was given a long prison sentence for perverting the course of justice (Murphy, 2019).

And of direct relevance to media representations of PIE is a yarn spun by another such fantasist, “Darren”, who accused my late friend and former PIE committee member Peter Righton of murdering a Down’s Syndrome man by having him torn apart when roped between two vehicles, one driven by Righton the other by an accomplice. Righton, who had died some years before this allegation so was in no position to defend himself, was even said to have made the victim dig his own grave beforehand (Murray, 2019). The scenario is like something out of a mafia movie but I knew Peter Righton as a gentle, cultured social worker, which is indeed consistent with how his colleagues had remembered him in an BBC documentary, The Secret Life of a Paedophile (Seddon, 1994). Although they deplored his alleged sexual “abuse” of boys, it was conceded that, far from being a brutal thug, he clearly had a good rapport with adolescent boys from troubled backgrounds. The claims made by “Darren” were taken up by Operation Midland and then passed to Suffolk police for investigation; eventually they were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence (Murray, 2019).

Significantly, Basannavar alludes briefly to Operation Midland, saying it looked at “alleged paedophilic offences and homicide in London locations”, but nowhere does he mention that precisely zero allegations were substantiated. Instead he chose to focus on an equally baseless claim that PIE had received tens of thousands of pounds of government funding. The IICSA investigated the matter and asked for my input. I gave a witness statement that was accepted as “in keeping with other evidence”, and the claim was duly rejected in the Inquiry’s report (Jay et al., 2022).

My point here is not primarily to express a grievance against the media, or the police, or the fantasists to whom they gave too much credence. Rather, it is to sketch a critical context preliminary to noting Basannavar’s own bias towards implicitly endorsing unfounded allegations and his uncritical reliance on media sources that favour his preconceptions. Media representations are hugely important in any modern culture, but over-reliance on them (he admits “a large proportion” of his sources are media-based) undermines the scholarly quest for objectivity.

For the most part, Basannavar’s instinct to hunt with the tabloid pack is kept carefully under wraps in a book that is primarily scholarly in tone. In any case, it would be unreasonable to expect emotional detachment and moral neutrality where genuine sexual violence against children is concerned. From the perspective of my own lived experience, though, the author accuses too readily, showing too little imaginative or sympathetic engagement with alternatives to his implicit hypotheses. He should heed Native American wisdom: Never judge someone until you have walked a mile in their moccasins.

I might add more objectively that Basannavar also fails to engage with a substantial body of rigorous empirical research which refutes the conventional view that “CSA” is inevitably traumatic, and which in doing so implicitly absolves non-coercive childadult sexual contacts from the assertion that they are violent (Clancy, 2009; Rind et al., 1998). Landmark research in the field near the turn of the millennium provoked an enormous political backlash in the US but has since been quietly accepted into the canon of the scientific literature – albeit largely ignored by an immense child protection industry, the more dubious side of which has an existential interest at stake (Hubbard, 2016). This literature would have been available to Basannavar at the time of his writing and earlier PhD research. It has since been reinforced and complemented by further studies, some of which have demonstrated both children’s de facto consent to child-adult sex and the efficacy of their consent in leading to outcomes perceived as positive by the children themselves (Daly, 2021; Danese & Widom, 2020; Felson et al., 2019; Junco et al., 2022, Laajasalo et al., 2023; Lahtinen et al., 2017; Mulya, 2018; Rind, 2022, 2023).

Funding No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.

Declarations

Competing Interests The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose

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Source: Commentary on the Book Entitled Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar. Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-83147-9 ThomasO’Carroll

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