PC’s acid test: they’re not paedophiles, they’re “minor-attracted people”

While I’m uneasy with World Net Daily’s indelicate bracketing of child abuse with homosexuality, that rather pales in the light of the rest of their report on the latest deliberations of B4U-ACT, an organisation that works with those sexually attracted to children in the state of Maryland.

WND reports that at a symposium held by B4U-ACT last week, speakers “promoted the idea that the American Psychiatric Association should remove pedophilia from the list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Pride yourself on your open-mindedness? See how these soundbites grab ya…

• “Dr. John Sadler (University of Texas) argued that diagnostic criteria for mental disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health professions from their role as healers.”
• Another speaker “argued in favor of acceptance of and compassion for people who are attracted to minors.”

An observer at the symposium, meanwhile, was horrified at other themes that it developed: the unfair demonisation of paedophiles, an objection to the word “wrong” being applied to them and the idea that children are not inherently unable to consent to sex with an adult.

I don’t know if this symposium had a title but ‘Moral Relativism Comes of Age’ wouldn’t have been far off the mark. So what did you do at work today, Daddy? Why, I attempted to sanitise child abuse, darling. Now don’t go spitting in Daddy’s face like that…

The irony is that those at whom the symposium was aimed are in this line of  work precisely because civilised people regard paedophilia as repugnant: no exceptions, no pleas in mitigation. If that sits uncomfortably with the refined intellects mouthing the inanities listed above then they need to find a desert island where they can set up the la-la-land they apparently crave.

By all means, care for your patients or ‘clients’ as you no doubt insist on calling them. Analyse them and attempt to understand them to the nth degree but be in no doubt that you do so not because their psychiatric intricacies look good on your c.v. but because you’re charged with that task by a Society who wants these people controlled, restrained and cured – that’s right, CURED, go on, say it out loud… – as far as is humanely possible.

And don’t you dare patronise ordinary people for their revulsion, tut-tutting that old shibboleth ‘demonisation’ as if it were some gigantic roadblock to your doing a decent day’s work. You work in the public sector, you dance to the public’s tune and that public happens to have zero tolerance when it comes to adults who view kids as sex toys. Do excuse our primitive ways.

You’re not paid to destigmatise, folks: you’re paid to find answers to one of Mankind’s greatest evils. Do your job and save the sordid idealism for your own time.

Why writers have it easier than musicians

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Older Son plays his song at a church flower festival this morning. Browsers and moochers mill around him like he’s just another ornament, while family and friends hang on his every note.

I have heard this song rehearsed for what seems like months now: belted out with style when the voice was good and dragged out like a cat from the fireside on those nights when his voice was ready for bed some time before the rest of him. I’ve heard boy and guitar examine the tune from all angles, most of them simply because they happened to be there.

All my pride in this self-taught, confident musician doesn’t mean there weren’t days when I’d have paid him money just to sing something else.

And yet this morning, I’m struck by how polished it sounds, as if I’d become blind to the fact that all those ragged practices might one day unite in a seamless whole.

Writers are lucky. Our rehearsals are secret affairs. The words appear and are rearranged silently and as long as we shoo away the over-the-shoulder audience, no-one beyond a few feet of us is any the wiser as to the almighty mess from which we fashion something presentable.

The musician without access to sound-proofing never knows this luxury. His creative gestation period is an unavoidable spectator sport from the moment the Muse starts kicking. Which is why, when near-perfection finally dusts itself down and emerges from the rubble, he astounds us all the more.

And that’s the trade-off.

The hollow ring of synthetic kindness

It’s not like the bullying that made him change schools in the first place, he assures me.

This is the dripping tap variety. It doesn’t frighten you; it simply wears you down. As being the butt of countless schoolyard ‘paedophile’ jokes will do.

So much for coaching courses broadening your horizons. He’d taught rugby to under-12s about 18 months ago. Enjoyed it, because he’s always related better to those younger or older than him, than he does to his own age group.

The kids enjoyed it too and when one of them fell and hurt himself and his coach took him to the school nurse for some treatment, it was the most natural thing in the world for the younger child to take the older one’s hand as they walked.

Alas, the older one’s peers saw it. And so it began.

“Paedophile.”

This much I already knew and I could just about imagine the dulling, wearying effect on the soul, of so baseless an insult somehow managing to run for 18 months and counting.

It’s what I didn’t know, however, that pains me the most.

“One of the teachers came up to me afterwards and said that perhaps I shouldn’t have held the kid’s hand,” he now tells me.

He was 15 at the time. Fifteen years old and your lesson for the day is How Not to Look Like a Paedophile.

A young child is upset, dazed and in need of comfort but you keep your distance. For appearances’ sake. The smart play.

I surely can’t be alone in seeing the irony of this. All the rules and protocols we’ve come up with – from health and safety to sexual propriety – supposedly designed to produce a kinder, fairer Society and what have they made us?

A people more detached, more reserved and more suspicious. An already selfish species now positively encouraged to cover its own back before covering for its neighbour.

I feel just about as desolate as he does.

Liberty / apathy border goes up in smoke

“…and then he apparently rubbed his tobacco in the other student’s hair.”

Right at the end of a lengthy chat about my son’s progress at school and what needs putting right, his teacher mentions a skirmish that he’s supposed to have got into while on the school bus.

Even more than the fact that he hasn’t been smoking for the best part of a year, I’m struck by how the reference to “his tobacco”, is made purely in passing. Time was when it would have been item 1 on the rap sheet.

But now? A 16-year-old is supposed to have smokes on him and his school act like it’s a bunch of pencils.

I can imagine all sorts of reasons I could be offered for this.

Young adults needing their space.

Personal liberty.

And, of course, the overbearing imperative to avoid judgementalism.

No doubt I should rejoice that he and his generation are so free. So why is it I have this nagging sense of young people not being looked out for quite as much as they once were?

And why doesn’t it feel remotely like progress?

Bare breasts and the innocence of youth

One from the Something Not Quite Right Here Dept, as I finish doctoring Younger Son’s new laptop, rendering it hopefully impregnable to the pornographer’s art.

He’s not stupid. He knows exactly what I’m doing; what I mean by the phrase “unsuitable sites”. It won’t be long before he’s pubescent and utterly dismayed at being denied this Pandora’s box.

But not just yet.

“That’s all sorted then,” I mumble uncomfortably, like a debutant circumcisionist fumbling for the correct post-op conversational protocol.

“Thanks Dad.”

I look at his face. My God, he actually means it.

Movember – hairy lips and home truths

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Two colleagues are discussing their involvement in the Movember appeal, while admiring their hirsute upper lips in the mirror above the sink.

“Very nice,” one of them observes, with perhaps a hint of irony.

“Yes, and so much less hassle than all that stuff women have to do for breast cancer,” says the other. “They run marathons; we grow moustaches…”

He leaves the rest unspoken but has said enough to leave me thinking the unthinkable.

That old boast, beloved of male blowhards everywhere – “If it was men who had kids, we’d have come up with a better way of doing it years ago.”

What if it’s true?

Teachers who’d be one of the gang – they still don’t get it

He’s in Sixth Form now and starting to see those who teach him for what they are.

The jokers who try to be so cute, they just become irritating.

The subtle bullies who harbour grudges just as fervently as any 14-year-old, apparently trained in every facet of child protection save for the blatantly obvious: that bad youngsters who’ve changed deserve some carrot to go with the stick.

Then there are the would-be cool cats, who think their disorganisation points to the child within instead of just an utter lack of professionalism.

This comes completely unprompted from his lips: “It’s the teachers who expect discipline but are fair with it: they’re the ones who get the best out of me.”

We might have to talk about ‘Year 12′  rather than ‘Sixth Form’ these days but it’s good to know that the important details remain timeless and imperishable.

Beware, as always, of the school teacher who would be ‘your mate’.

Nothing quite like grown-up chats with your kids…

By text yesterday:

“Dad, there’s a new album I want to buy.

One review claims: ‘It’s like having a plastic bag taped over your head for an hour, while Satan uses your scrotum as a speedbag’.

Sound any good?”

Official: divorce no big deal

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It is the scariest statistic I’ve read for some time.

In a survey on family time, one of the questions asks – is it important that children grow up with both their mother and father?

Three-quarters of children polled said yes.

The adults? Just over half.

Only one in two people old enough to vote and drive cars think there may be certain repercussions if either Mum or Dad isn’t around to help bring up their children.

By extension, that’s one in two people, presumably, who won’t tax themselves too much with thinking about the kids when deciding how divorce factors into their ‘life plan goal setting’.

The best spin I can put on this is that it represents denial.

The worst, that it represents an arrogance that makes me fear for this country. Although some would argue that I worry too much…

Examinations or just cursory glances?

Chris Moyles sounds like he’s just beheld a human rights abuse when a listener texts in, announcing that he’s about to sit a three-hour exam.

“Three hours??!!!” Moyles asks incredulously. “In an exam for three hours?!”

Well, yes, why not? There was a time when three hours was standard and I can recall plenty of my own exams where I’d have welcomed a fourth, just to get everything written down.

Thirty years on, my son has a GCSE this morning. Forty-five minutes .

I feel like a grizzled old combat veteran. Which is ridiculous.