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Ignoring victims, looking after predators
Positive discrimination exchanges one injustice for another
I have been reading Hard Times again on holiday, at the same time as the daily papers, and it suddenly occurred to me that the 19th century was not brutally absurd enough for Dickens. His Squeerses and Veneerings and McChoakumchilds seem very sedate in comparison with the astonishing characters and follies of the late 20th century. Last week, in an example of ludicrous insensitivity, without parallel in the entire works of Dickens, police in South Yorkshire put a black man (suspected of extorting money from a financial adviser actually called Baden-Powell) in an identity parade with eight white men; to make it "fair", they painted the white men's faces black. In the heat of the line-up lighting, their blackface make-up began to run. Explanations and extenuating circumstances can be of no interest; this was inexcusably stupid. I do not believe that even Dickens could have dreamt up such a farce. Fortunately this nonsense was abandoned when the black man's solicitor objected, and the case was thrown out of court. It is not entirely surprising, perhaps, that in the face of such grotesque obtuseness liberals should have become equally unhinged in their responses. How else can one explain the way they have gone to monstrous, irrational extremes in their support for persecuted groups? How else, for example, can one understand the way in which crude, unthinking homophobia has been met with crude, unthinking homophilia? The persecution of homosexuals has been atoned for, in guilt-ridden liberal circles, with an uncritical adulation of gays. Gays are not just OK, but good, or even possibly better. The loopiest extreme of this has been the sanctification of Aids victims, so that no film star or society hostess can afford to be without her Aids gala and her talented friends dying of Aids. But Aids is a misfortune, not some kind of virtuous apotheosis. People wear their red Aids ribbons with a mindless smugness that makes me want to rip them off their chests. I believe it was the same stupid perversion of good feeling that led to the scandal of child abuse in Hackney, east London, which the Evening Standard has painstakingly exposed - a series of abuses nastier than anything in Dickens. Last week it was reported that Hackney Council, despite repeated warnings from previous employers in Liverpool, employed for 12 years a suspected paedophile and known homosexual to look after children in council care, despite two subsequent complaints of abuse from children in Hackney, and one of violence from his gay lover, now dead of Aids. Keith Trotter himself died of Aids two years ago, but only now, after intense pressure from the Standard and two independent inquiries, is the truth beginning to emerge. Trotter died just two weeks before police arrived to arrest him for abusing five boys during his time as a care worker in Liverpool in 1980. Now, according to an NSPCC report, there is evidence that he abused six children in his care in Hackney. One cannot help wondering how many more than six victims there were, given the difficulty of tracing all the children - 337 former residents of Trowbridge House children's home, and a total of 415. Nor can one feel entirely confident, until all the reports and police investigations are finished, that no children were infected with HIV. Certainly many of them were at grave risk. Poor little Oliver Twist, at his most miserable, was only hungry and unloved; he did not live in fear of rape and fatal infection. The point is not that this wicked man was let loose among vulnerable children who were entirely at his mercy. There is always a risk of evil men preying on children. The point is that those whose job it was to protect these children from such risks appeared to be more interested in protecting the predator. It was the predator they perceived as victim, because he was gay. In 1989, after a police raid, the council accepted Trotter's defence that he was the victim of "homophobia". And in their self-righteous vigilance over one supposed victim, they were blind to the possibility of others. In 1992 the council would not investigate his lover's allegations. In 1995, after Trotter's death, the council was disgracefully slow to look into the case; in the end Hackney's ruling Labour group was split, with 16 rebels walking out among allegations of a cover-up. An independent inquiry will report later this year. The question remains, however: why is it that, for all its good intentions, positive discrimination too often borders on the pathological? In its exaggeration and unreason, positive discrimination simply exchanges one injustice for another and - which is worse - undermines the idea of justice itself.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 27, 1997
