Cause for concern

The subject of paedophilia has always been as troubling one for human society for all sorts of reasons – even over the past week boxer Tyson Fury has caused a media storm by making public un-PC comments about a number of things, including homosexuality. In his case, as I understand it, weight was added to the adverse reaction because he apparently linked homosexuality with paedophilia.

Today a piece by Sophie Jane Evans appears on the website of the Daily Mail covering a report stating that nearly 700 suspected paedophiles (in the sense that they appear to have accessed child porn images) have been arrested in Britain in the last nine months – see here – DAILY MAIL

Allegedly, one of the shocking aspects of these findings in that roughly one in seven of these individuals were either employed or worked as volunteers ‘in positions of trust’, e.g. in teaching, law enforcement, caring and government sectors.

Personally I find this score less shocking that the Daily Mail apparently does.

I’m risking being accused of espousing non-politically-correct mantras here, but it seems as obvious as the proposition that ‘night follows day’ to me: people with such inclinations will often naturally gravitate towards professions or volunteer ‘leader’ situations in which they may come into regular (apparently innocent and ‘above board’) contact with young people, vulnerable or not – and indeed whether they do so with deliberate intent to act upon their impulses, or alternatively would never even contemplate doing so.

However, in confronting this revelation, it is perhaps also important not to forget the underlying and depressing truth I first came across when interviewing a Midlands police chief some forty years ago, viz. that – in police circles – the biggest ongoing ‘undetected crime’ problem of all in the UK was widely acknowledged to be incest.

I must be careful here of not misdirecting myself and/or misrepresenting the facts. However, in my view, the supposedly-‘shocking’ finding in this latest report that about one in seven of those arrested for child porn offences in the last nine months have been adults ‘in positions of trust’ does nothing to detract from this more worrying issue.

I’m not necessarily saying that – in terms of strict logic – if one in seven of those arrested was in some ‘official’ position of trust, ergo the other six out of seven arrests must have involved people who were not in official positions of trust, i.e. for the most part must have been either total strangers and/or indeed fellow family, or extended family, members of the victim(s). Nevertheless, there is perhaps a hint of an inference that this is the case …