One of the things that really disgusts me about users of child pornography is that we probably all know at least one. Internet sites featuring the abuse of children are practically two a penny: the laws of supply and demand suggest that people’s appetite for them is vast (I don’t buy the feeble Pete Townshend-style argument about “curiosity”. Most “curious” people don’t need to see what children look like while they’re being raped).
Recent history has shown that viewers of such material do not merely consist of shuffling weirdos with pee stains down their nylon trousers, but, uncomfortably enough, encompass the whole of society, from apparently devoted “family” men, to policemen, teachers and judges, up to and including pop stars and actors.
Unlike them, Derek Williams, of Penygwdwn in Blaenau Ffestiniog, north Wales, looks exactly like you’d expect someone who’s admitted downloading 180 pornographic images of children to look — shifty, maladjusted, not your number-one choice of babysitter. Williams walked free last week after Judge John Rogers, QC, mindful of the home secretary’s directive about overcrowding in prisons — that only serious and persistent offenders should be jailed — gave him a suspended sentence.
Williams, 46, was interviewed by the BBC last Thursday night in his sitting room, near a child’s little chair in the shape of a lion. His wife Ingrid, who’d called the police when another family member found the images on their home computer, sat quietly by his side, the image of marital devotion.
He was completely unrepentant. Williams had a little chat and said the judge was “only doing his job” (or making a point, surely, about the unworkable absurdity of the prisons situation) and the news moved on.
Is this not really, really weird? Here is a man who has admitted to a taste for images of children being abused. And here he is, pottering about at home. And, presumably, pottering about north Wales this weekend, with his wife in tow — going to the pub, perhaps, doing the weekly shop, with everybody knowing exactly who he is, what he’s done, and what turns him on.
It follows that, although I hope Williams meets with distaste from some of the people he encounters, sooner or later it’ll all be forgotten, or at least put aside and it will pass.
I have friends who are friends with a relatively well-known man who is awaiting trial on similar charges, and the situation is comparable: they started off feeling horror and disbelief, progressed on to sympathy and sorrow (because, obviously, the man’s family life has been completely destroyed by his own grotesque actions) and eventually, some months down the line, evolved to a kind of benevolent compassion: is it right, they begin to ask, that X’s life should be utterly destroyed, both personally and professionally, because of, well, “a moment of madness”?
Point out that there was more than one moment — that the moments range well into the hundreds, actually — and you get a sharp look and a lecture about forgiveness, about how he’s a wonderful man, about how this is nothing less than a tragedy, if you please. And is it not a tragedy that children should be degraded and violated for this man’s pleasure? Well, yes, but . . . oh, you’d understand if you knew him.
I think this kind of reaction is played out all over the country, particularly by bien-pensant middle-class types, who are keen, rightly, to distance themselves from tabloid-style hysteria about “paedos”.
Not wanting paediatricians to have bricks thrown through their windows is commendable, as is refusing to keep your children locked up until they’re 18 in case someone looks at them in a creepy-seeming way.
However, you could argue that things have tipped slightly too far the other way and that, in some bourgeois circles, paedophilia is beginning to be viewed as a peculiar sexual quirk that isn’t really worth making a huge fuss about.
I hate to say it, but middle-aged gay men with a liking for “boys” fall into this category, especially if they are intelligent, articulate and witty: people just turn a blind eye, think about Thomas Mann and Death in Venice, and never express the opinion that an adult male fancying someone young enough to be their grandson is, well, distasteful.
Express the opinion that, in your view, old blokes drooling at 14-year-olds is really unpleasant and unattractive, and you’re accused of being a) illiberal; b) homophobic; and c) generally bigoted. And then people give you long lectures about the Greeks, as if you hadn’t gone to school. It’s absolutely extraordinary.
I’m not suggesting that people in Blaenau Ffestiniog will be queuing up this weekend to quote Herodotus and Plato at Williams — there are, after all, some advantages to not living in north London. But I do think that, with only a little time, even he will shed off the pariah status he so richly deserves.
I also think, prison overcrowding aside, that there is a general movement afoot among the self-styled intelligentsia that now believes that “boy love” (oh, please) is on a par with, say, sadomasochism: not necessarily something you’d elaborate about over supper, but not that wildly unacceptable either.
The heterosexual version, mercifully, still remains infradig when it comes to infants and young children, but a liking for pre-pubescent Lolitas is not as completely unacceptable as it once was — and we can see the consequences of that erosion in any department store stocking hideous, age-inappropriate clothing for very young girls.
As a parent, I find this distressing. As a human being, it makes me feel ashamed. We live in a society that sexualises children to an unprecedented degree, and we’re in danger of thinking they like it that way, that precocity is nothing to fuss over, being simply a natural consequence of living in the accelerated modern world, and that adults having sex with people younger than the age of consent, whether they agree to it or not, is not that big a deal in the great scheme of things.
But you know what? It is. And so is looking at images of children being abused for your sexual gratification, no matter how responsible a citizen you are in other respects, or how “nice” or intelligent you are as a person. It’s a very big deal indeed. It’s unforgivable.
India Knight