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.