As Gary Glitter is frog-marched back to prison barely a month after being paroled on the most recent of a string of child sex abuse charges, it might be asked if it’s ever possible for a paedophile to be reformed? Glitter refused to participate in a sex offenders program while in prison (raising questions of why he was ever paroled early), but would it have even worked?
Some studies claim a lower rate of recidivism for child sex offenders than other crimes — yet others report the opposite. Whatever the facts of the likelihood of rehabilitating the criminals, a disturbing element of the “woke” left is clearly determined to rehabilitate the crime. If you can’t cure the paedophile, then simply make the crime of paedophilia go away, by reframing it, not as a crime, but a “sexuality”.
As I’ve written several times, the logic of this argument leads to only one conclusion: legalisation.
Don the mantle of victimhood and the Wokerati will welcome you into the fold, applauding your courage in speaking up about whatever hitherto unheard-of persecution you’ve been subjected to. The latest and most abhorrent example of this is the attempt to rehabilitate paedophilia – to project abusers as poor, misunderstood souls who simply want to express their sexual preference. The speed with which this movement is gaining momentum must concern anyone who cares about children.
If you think that sounds too crazy to be believed — and I get it, it does — then you’re not paying attention. When an adult man, a convicted sex offender no less, exposed himself to women and little girls at a women-only spa in Los Angeles, the left furiously, violently even, defended him. Mainstream leftists backed the flasher, because it was, they claimed, a case of “trans rights”.
The whole movement to reframe paedophiles as “minor attracted persons”, paedophilia as a “sexuality”, and opposition as a “phobia”, is a classic example of leftist language-shifting tactics. As Orwell pointed out, changing the language makes it easier to change thought.
Language is crucial in framing and shifting public opinion. Paedophilia has such negative connotations, involving the abuse of children and babies. If paedophiles become minor-attracted persons, it’s harder to distinguish who the victims are. Sounds pretty harmless really… Who could argue with such a mild-sounding epithet that obscurs the nature of the attraction and the harm to the minor?
There was outrage in Scotland when it came to light that police were working on a project ‘to develop understanding and approaches to avoid the victimisation of children by engaging Minor-Attracted Persons (MAPS) and providing them (the MAPS) with the necessary support, treatment, and guidance to help prevent criminal activities’.
Scottish police later clarified that they did not approve of the term. Similarly, when a manager at the Australian Broadcasting Commission asked for crime reports not to refer to child sex offenders as “paedophiles”, “because of the stigma”, there was a furious backlash.
But it’s all just two steps forward for every step back, as far as the left language czars are concerned.
Someone involved in the initial report changed the language to MAPS. Why change the terminology from paedophiles to MAPS? We don’t medicalise burglary, so why are we doing it with paedophilia?
The next step in the rehabilitation of any behaviour is to make it fashionable. Maybe you can get a fashion house or a celebrity to endorse the objectification of children and paedophilia as cool or edgy? Couple that with sexualised material being presented to children by sexualised presenters and the barriers to grooming start to fall. The normal protective behaviours of children towards those who might want to harm them are undermined – it’s discriminatory to question the motives of anyone presenting sexual material to kids, and providing a parody of womanhood to little girls.
Witness the repeated instances of cultural industries, from movies to fashion, advocating more-or-less openly advocating paedophilia, backing down — and then going right back to doing it again. Consider the furious reaction to criticism of the creepy “Drag Queen Story Hour” phenomenon (which has repeatedly featured, sometimes knowingly, convicted child sex offenders).
The soft-sell promoters of paedophilia need to be confronted with the reality of what they are selling. That it’s not just about a Woke social movement tinkering with labels, but the lives of real children who can do nothing to protect themselves. Sexual abuse of children has long-lasting effects. It’s the first betrayal that affects how a person views the world. But it’s never bought up in discussions about re-examining paedophilia, as if the victims just fade away without any consequence, or as if there are no victims at all. It’s a victimless crime… I guess it is, if the victims can’t put into words what has happened to them and advocate on their behalf. The goal is to treat paedophilia as just another sexual preference along the continuum of adult sexual presentations, consent is implied, no matter what the law says.
Spectator Australia
For all its obsessions with “victimhood”, real or almost always imagined, the left is more and more openly preying on the most helpless victims of all: children.
What’s the end goal, here? The sleazy Marxist ideology of Queer Theory offers us the answers: to overthrow capitalism, overthrow “bourgeois morality” — all of it. It’s said that 1984 was intended as a warning, not an instruction manual. Brave New World was intended as a warning by means of satire. Yet, who can read of its state-run creches teaching “Elementary Sex” along with “Elementary Class Consciousness”, without wondering: are we already in’t?