by Webb, Simon;
Even if a report was made to the police and resulted in a court case, as did happen from time to time, the chances were that any conviction would only be registered at the local magistrates’ court, rather than finding its way to the Criminal Records Department of Scotland Yard. Providing that the case was not reported in the local newspaper, there was every possibility that the offender would be able to move from the scout group where he had carried out the abuse and simply begin running the local church youth club or helping out at the air cadets or some other location which would give him access to children. In this way, men at that time were able to abuse children for many years with complete impunity. Sometimes, a case would reach the papers, necessitating a move to another town which gave a fresh start and the continuation of sexual abuse, perhaps under a different name.
Following a number of well-publicised murders, including that of two little girls at Soham in 2002 by a school caretaker about whom insufficient enquiries had been made before allowing him unlimited access to children, matters changed dramatically and anybody working with or having regular access to children was required to undergo background checks, including a search for convictions at the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). This made it very difficult, indeed next to impossible, to conceal a murky past which included convictions for, or even suspicions of, sexual activity with a child. One might think that nobody in his or her senses could possibly object to moves designed to prevent predatory paedophiles from gaining access to new victims, but one would be quite wrong. There was enormous opposition to the new system when it was first introduced. Baby boomers who had grown up at a time when the sexual abuse of children was a constant background in their lives were, surprisingly, in the vanguard of the struggle to ensure that child molesters continued to enjoy easy and unrestricted access to their prey. Admitting that abuse was distressingly common when they were children would have run the risk of tainting the fantasy world which many of them had constructed and it was easier to object to the process of CRB checks as just one more aspect of the ‘Nanny State’. Rules and regulations dealing with adults working with or coming into regular contact with children are often dismissed as unnecessary red tape by older people who should know better. To understand the point, it will be necessary to look in some detail at an unappetising topic, that of what child molesters actually did to their young victims in the 1950s and 1960s.
With modern, twenty-first century attitudes to sex, there is a tendency to assume that sexual activity almost invariably entails genital contact. This was not at all the case sixty years ago, especially where child molesting was concerned. Often, the activity took place while the adult participant at least was fully clothed. What Arthur Marshall described as ‘amorous mauling among the rows of pendent mackintoshes’ provides us with a good example of this type of thing, the technical name of which is frottage. Even in the old days at which we are looking, the sight of a naked teacher or scout leader fooling around with a child might have been expected to raise eyebrows a little, and so much of the abuse was conducted by means of men rubbing themselves, fully clothed, against the children in whom they had a sexual interest. This could be done in the course of play-fighting, tickling, sport, seemingly innocuous cuddles or while a child was seated on the man’s lap. This activity gave the adult perverts a pleasurable thrill and could even result in orgasm, given the right circumstances. There is a very detailed and appallingly accurate passage in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita which describes precisely how this process takes place. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, has manipulated a 12-year-old girl into laying across his lap. This gives him an opportunity to rub his clothed genitals against her body for some time, until he ‘crushed out against her left buttock the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known’.
The practice of frottage, sometimes known as ‘dry humping’, was one of the commonest types of sexual abuse carried out against children. There were a number of advantages from the point of view of the abuser, chief of which was that there was always an element of what might not inaptly be termed ‘plausible deniability’. In cadet units and scouts troops, there was often play-fighting and rough games in which an adult might join in without anybody remarking on it as being peculiar. This gave some men the chance to rub their groins against young boys, thus gaining sexual satisfaction. The same end might be achieved with young children by hugging them, teaching them sports, showing how to hold a musical instrument or sitting them on one’s lap. At the end of such an episode, even the child might not be sure just what had been going on and to spectators, the whole thing might look like a bit of harmless rough and tumble, with a grown man entering into the spirit of children’s play with a refreshing and charming lack of self-consciousness. This is another way in which the abuse of children could take place, quite literally ‘in plain sight’.
Most British baby boomers will know about the practices outlined above, which makes it all the more mysterious that some of them are still seemingly opposed to putting an end to the conditions which allowed child abuse like this to flourish for so many years. Whenever any change relating to people’s safety is proposed, a new regulation or law which prohibits or restricts some supposed liberty which was previously enjoyed, some baby boomer may always be relied upon to raise the cry of ‘Health and Safety gone mad!’ or ‘The Nanny State!’ Sure enough, when attempts began to be made to limit physical activity between adults and children, by suggesting that the less grown-ups rubbed their bodies against those of little boys and girls the better it would be, this too was denounced as a pernicious interference in the natural relations which should exist between the generations. Frank Furedi, the well-known professor of sociology, even wrote a book on the subject. The subtitle of this book, Licensed to Hug, was How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector.
The psychology of the baby boomers which leads them to adopt such a strange attitude towards the protection of children from sexual predators is curious and we shall be seeing other examples later on in this book. Essentially, the position held by many older people in Britain is that their own childhoods were pretty well perfect and should be held up as the model for modern childhood. If children today are not getting as much exercise as they did themselves or are eating more than children did at a similar age in 1955, then there is something wrong. In the same way, if children today are slumped in their bedrooms chatting on the Internet for hours, instead of queuing up outside a red telephone box, then this must mean that childhood today is somehow disordered and in need of repair. Any deviation from the childhood pattern of the 1950s and 1960s is automatically seen as a change for the worse.
This peculiar frame of mind leads to government initiatives intended to encourage children to walk to school, as they did sixty years ago, and eat a healthier diet, as was allegedly once the case. Childhood in the days when the baby boomers were growing up is the ideal to aim at. Unfortunately, as we saw in the last chapter, the memory of our own childhood is not an infallible guide to how things really were when we were little. The idea that an awful lot of children were being sexually abused or even murdered by lust-driven paedophiles does not accord with the image of a supposedly gentler, safer and more civilized era and so is subconsciously rejected by many older people. This in turn means that all these CRB checks and vetting is viewed as a lot of expensive and time wasting nonsense; the only practical effect of which is stopping adults from cuddling a distressed child.
Furedi’s book Licensed to Hug promotes the notion, popular among baby boomers, that safeguarding is pretty pointless. In a chapter entitled ‘Child Protection and “No Touch” Policies’, Furedi, himself of course a baby boomer, suggests that policies formulated by official bodies or voluntary organizations to discourage adults from pressing their bodies against children are unnecessary and in fact harmful to children. He quotes research by academics at Manchester Metropolitan University into ‘the problematic of touching between child
ren and professionals’. This was said to explore ‘the tension between children’s need for nurturing contact and the fear that such contact may be interpreted as abuse’. Among the ideas at which this study looked were, ‘minimizing cuddling young children, even requiring particular ways of doing this, such as the sideways cuddle (to avoid any full-frontal contact)’. The thrust of Licensed to Hug, which many older professionals working with children thought to be a long-overdue exposé of Health and Safety madness, is that worrying about physical contact with small children is largely a lot of fuss about nothing. Ideas such as the ‘sideways cuddle’ are mentioned in such a way as to suggest that only somebody looking for risks where there were none to be found would even consider something so bizarre. In fact of course, the whole aim of the sideways cuddle is to minimize opportunities for what Arthur Marshall called ‘amorous mauling’. Pressing their bodies, especially for obvious reasons the groin area, against children’s bodies has always been a mainstay of paedophiles who are unable to get a child alone, this manoeuvre being quite possible to undertake in public in the context of a music or sports lesson. Anything which discourages adults working with children from rubbing their groins against children in this way is surely to be welcomed, rather than ridiculed.
What is interesting and perhaps significant is that children and young people themselves see very well why such rules are in place. The younger a person, the less likely they are to object to policies of this sort which are designed to protect children from covert abuse. By and large, the only people who grow impatient about or mock such initiatives are baby boomers, many of whom have in the years since their childhood managed to forget how common sexual abuse of this kind once was.
We have looked in detail at one of the less appetising aspects of childhood during the baby boomer years. In the next chapter, the idea will be examined that crime, including murder, and anti-social behaviour, by children is a relatively new phenomenon and one which indicates that something is wrong with modern society.
Chapter 3
Of Moral Panics and ASBOs:
Juvenile Crime and Disorder in the 1950s and 1960s
It is one thing to listen tolerantly to the reminiscences of older people, while treating their anecdotes with a certain amount of reserve; it is quite another when those same flawed memories are used as the basis for legislation which will affect every one of us! This, unfortunately, is what has been happening in Britain in recent years. Baby boomers and their admirers in the government and legislature are looking with jaundiced eyes upon the modern world and when they find that it seems to differ too radically from the past, as they believe it to have been, they put together guidance or try and pass laws which will, they hope, rectify the situation; in other words, to turn back the clock. In case anybody should think this a fanciful assertion, it might be pointed out that Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, more commonly known as ASBOs, are a direct consequence of this bizarre process.
There is in this country a widespread view that children and young people are less respectful of authority, more badly behaved, wilder and more prone to disorderly and anti-social conduct than was once the case. Instead of playing Cowboys and Indians in the park, they now spend their days hanging round shopping centres, wearing hoodies and menacing respectable citizens. Some of them are even being arrested for firearmsrelated offences, something which would have been unheard of a few years ago. This at least is the perception of many middle-aged and elderly people. From time to time, acts of savagery are committed by these modern children which appear, on the face of it, to be quite unprecedented. This has resulted in the expression ‘feral youths’ being coined, to describe children and teenagers who apparently behave more like wild animals than young human beings. All of which leads a lot of people to conclude that there has for years been something disordered and injurious about British society; that it in some way causes children to go wrong and carry on like savage beasts. Take, for example, the murder of toddler James Bulger.
In 1993, two 10-year-old boys abducted little James Bulger from a Liverpool shopping centre. Once they were alone with him, the youngsters killed the child by inflicting forty-two wounds on him and leaving his body on a railway line. So shocking was the murder of this defenceless child that a number of politicians used the case to draw conclusions about the state of a society which could produce such dysfunctional children. The then Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, referred to this crime by talking of, ‘the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name’. The overall impression was that here was a uniquely awful incident which told us something about the shortcomings of modern Britain; at least as far as the way children were growing up was concerned.
More recently, a 10-year-old boy called Damilola Taylor died in London after being assaulted by two brothers, one 12 and the other 13 years of age. Damilola bled to death after an artery was severed. This too was treated as a dreadful example of how vicious and depraved some children have become in recent years. How very different from the way things used to be in the 1950s, when the worst crimes that a child might be accused of were likely to be trespassing or perhaps setting off a firework in the street. This at least was the popular view of such crimes. The idea of a 10- or 12-year-old boy killing another child in those days was beyond all belief! The reality, as experienced by the baby boomers themselves, was somewhat different.
The notion of ‘Broken Britain’ or our ‘broken society’ has become a popular one since David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010 and the Sun, which backed his premiership, has used these expressions repeatedly. Following the 2011 riots in English cities, Cameron talked of the ‘moral collapse’ of British society, singling out such causes as children without fathers and schools without discipline. It was plain that he was contrasting modern society with that of his youth, where children did have fathers and there was discipline in the schools.
This whole idea, that youngsters today are out of control and in danger of becoming ‘feral’, is a classic example of a moral panic and the creation of a folk devil. Both expressions might need a little explanation. Moral panics occur when a large number of people start to believe that there is some threat to the stability or well-being of the society in which they live. Sometimes the anxiety is about muggers or paedophiles; at others it centres around violent computer games or the use of drugs. Such panics are whipped up by the mass media and frequently exploited by politicians. This is why both the Sun and successive Prime Ministers have been keen on promoting the idea of Britain’s ‘broken society’. An integral part of most moral panics is the creation of folk devils, people who can be identified as posing a danger to ordinary citizens. These can be drug ‘pushers’, satanic abusers, illegal immigrants, human traffickers or a variety of other bogeymen. For some while, the most popular folk devil has been the feral youths or hoodies who frequent our streets with a view to stealing, taking drugs, fighting or even committing murder. The moral panic which centres around wild and undisciplined children and youths was created by explicitly comparing the supposed behaviour of many children today with how, it was claimed, things used to be when the baby boomers were young and there were no feral youths around.
As a matter of fact, ghastly murders of children, by other children, were just as much a feature of life during the formative years of the baby boomers as they are now. It is just that such horrors have been conveniently forgotten, airbrushed from history if you like, to avoid spoiling the attractive, Swallows and Amazons-style world that many older people claim to have inhabited as children. Let us look now at a concrete example, one which also shows the folly of letting young children play outdoors without adult supervision, something which we are assured by some baby boomers is a wise and good thing to allow children to engage in. We shall see how games of Cowboys and Indians in a park sometimes ended in the period at which we are looking, by examining a real incident, which began with a bunch of nine- and ten-year-olds going to their local park to play.
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p; In 1960 it was, as we are frequently reminded, very common for children to be sent out to play by themselves, with no adult accompanying them. This helped them to develop independence and also ensured that they got plenty of fresh air and exercise and did not become overweight. What could possibly be bad about that? On the afternoon of Saturday, 20 February 1960, a number of children were playing Cowboys and Indians in Mayfield Park in the southern English city of Southampton. One of them was nine-year-old Iris Dawkins. There were no adults with them. At about three that afternoon, Iris fell off a plank bridge and became covered in mud. She decided to go home and change her soaked clothes. A woman living in a house next to the park saw a child whom she believed to be Iris, walking away from the stream, accompanied by a boy of about the same age. This was the last time that she was seen alive.
When Iris Dawkins was found dead, later that day, it was at once seen that she had been the victim of a frenzied attack by somebody armed with a knife; the little girl had been stabbed no fewer than thirty-eight times. Although about 150 people were watching a game of football in one part of Mayfield Park that afternoon, no adults had been seen in the area where the children had been playing and the child had last been seen in the company of a boy of 9 or 10. The police therefore focused their attentions on other children who had been in the park that afternoon. They found a 10-year-old boy who not only admitted having been with Iris on the afternoon that she died, but also made a statement in which he said that: