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Paedophiles aren't evil - they're mad, not bad
I think the only ethical solution for such people as the murderer of Sarah Payne is a life sentence in a penal colony with similar convicts
NOBODY knows why some people do cruel and revolting things to children. Nobody knows why some of them do these things again and again, or which of them will. Their crimes are unspeakable not just in themselves, but in the impossibility of knowing what to say about them. What has struck me in the vociferous public outrage about the murder of Sarah Payne is that there is really nothing to be said. Tabloid newspapers have screamed for the murderer to be strung up or castrated; her grieving family have said that death is too good for him, and others have argued more soberly for the return of the death penalty.
But none of all this provides answers to the questions underlying such a terrible crime. Is someone who is capable of assaulting and killing a child actually responsible for his actions in any way? Is he just evil, as people so often want to say? Or is he in the grip of some intractable perversion, and, if so, can he be cured of it? What is perversion? What is evil? What is redemption? Above all, how can anybody be convinced that such a person will not strike again? The evidence is that he probably will - recidivism is very high. But I do not believe, despite all the words of psychologists and criminologists, that there is anybody who has the slightest idea.
Earlier this week, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, talked on Radio 4's Today programme about knowledge. He suggested that he had not known in 1985 - when he had allowed a known paedophile priest to undertake pastoral work again - what he and the Church know today. Had he had today's knowledge, he says, he would have acted differently. It wasn't clear precisely what he meant, but he seemed to be suggesting that paedophilia is better understood now than then. This seems to me complete nonsense.
Everybody knew then that paedophiles are predatory, and that churches and boarding schools, not to mention local authority care homes, were ideal hunting grounds for them. But nobody knew then - nor do they know now - why such people are driven to abuse their trust, and the children in their care, or which of them, when convicted, will eventually do it again. The obvious course then and now - as everybody knew, regardless of what they decided to do - was to exclude known paedophiles from the care of children and from authority, precisely because one could not give them the benefit of any doubt. Nobody understands these revolting impulses any better now than they did then.
Perhaps in time they will be better understood. As someone with tendencies towards scientific optimism, I have hopes that sooner or later it will be discovered whether or not there is some strong genetic predisposition to molest and kill children. If so, that might lead to some hope of a "cure" or at any rate some "treatment". I am inclined to think that people who do such disgusting things are not evil, or even responsible for their crimes, but simply profoundly deviant.
Maybe they have inherited some kind of syndrome, or some abnormality of the brain, and perhaps that will be identified, complex though it may be: it is already clear that there is a broad spectrum of what you might call a form of autism, in which relatively normal people have very little sense of the independent existence and feelings of other people, outside their own desires. Of course, there may well be important environmental factors; it is well known that sexual abusers have often been abused themselves, though no one has yet explained why the majority of the abused do not go on to re-enact their own suffering on others.
Meanwhile, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that he or she understands these mysteries. I very much resent Lord Longford's insistence, for instance, that he personally knows that Myra Hindley has repented of her terrible part in the Moors murders, and is now somehow redeemed. How can he possibly know? How can he presume to judge the mind and motives of someone so abnormal? My own view is that a woman who has done something so revolting could only show true repentance by accepting a lifetime in prison as a fit punishment; if she were really able to grieve for her crimes and her victims, she would never ask for release. Curiously enough, her partner, Ian Brady, supposedly more mad and bad, seems to understand that.
I am extremely glad that Lord Longford is not Home Secretary, or (for that matter) the Archbishop of Westminster; if he were in a position to impose his wishes, some very strange people would be let loose among us, without any way of knowing what they might do, however plausible years of Open University courses in jail and chats with eccentric intellectuals may have made them. There is a short story by Evelyn Waugh which I cannot forget about a model prisoner, a convicted rapist and murderer who has been in jail for decades. His behaviour is so mild and charming, and his youth so long past, that he is at long last let out, whereupon, with immense satisfaction and dispatch, he waylays the first lady bicyclist he meets, and methodically repeats his awful crime.
Pending any real understanding of these things, we ought to reconsider the current treatment of such offenders. I don't believe in capital punishment; but, equally, I do not think people capable of such atrocities can ever be set free; prison and psychotherapy are notoriously ineffective. At the same time, it seems to me wrong to subject them to a lifetime of the horrors they would meet in a supposedly normal jail - the terrible vengeance of the ordinary convict, in the form of razor blades, excrement and beatings. This seems all the worse because of the possibility that the worst sex offenders are not in control of their behaviour, not truly responsible.
I think the only ethical solution for people like the murderer of Sarah Payne is a life sentence in a penal colony, with similar convicts. This would protect them as well as the rest of society; life on the outside is very risky for notorious sex offenders. The life of Sarah Payne's murderer is effectively over. There are voluntary protected settlements in the United States for released sex offenders, who dare not live outside. Perhaps we could have compulsory, protected penal colonies, pending the explanations of science, or perhaps, in the end - as some suppose - of God: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." It is, however, too difficult for humanity.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, July 21, 2000 | Comments (2)
A past discarded with the minimum of fuss
When I think that I cannot bring anything home from my mother's house, my old, atavistic nest-building instincts rise in rebellion again
ONE sad, rainy day in the summer of 1998, I found to my astonishment that I had turned into the lady who opens the village fete. It was in the village where I grew up, where my mother had lived for more than 30 years, in the Blackmore Vale in Dorset. The rain drove proceedings off the village playing field, and the few people who turned up were packed into the village hall, along with the floral displays and cakes.
It was so different from the fetes of my childhood, and, though in the same place, in such a different world that I wrote at the time not of a sense of continuity but of a sense of an ending. It turned out to be much more of an ending than I imagined; that autumn my mother suddenly died.
Now, in another sad, rainy summer, my brothers and I are selling her house. Since her death it has remained as she left it, but now we must empty it. It is a hard thing to do, as everyone who has already passed this way will know. The house is full of memories, and not just the house itself, but every object in it; it seems like getting rid of one's past, and one's sense of one's self, and one's shared identity, to dispose of these things. To break up the house and the history that my formidable mother made, for better and for worse, seems almost unimaginable; it is like consigning her and it to oblivion. However, we must do it, starting today.
Lists will have to be made. Disputes will have to be endured. Reservoirs of affection and forbearance will have to be drawn upon, heavily. It will not help us to tell ourselves that these are only things. For objects are not only objects. They have almost magical powers from the meaning that time has given them. Everywhere there are photographs, and vases and boxes, old letters, collections of this and that, presents from our travels, or our forebears' travels, memorable things of little commercial value, or of none; my mother belonged to the war-time generation that could not throw anything away. There is the curious, trumpery sugar spoon, which was a wedding present to my mother, and has meant family breakfast and home for as long as I can remember. Or the ugly little china dish on her dressing table with a painted motto, misspelt but pertinent, which reads: "A coeur vaillant, rien d'impossible."
Then there are more precious things, curiosities of Empire, pieces of furniture with long family histories, a desk I love on which, supposedly, Andrew Lang wrote his great 19th-century collections of fairy tales. There are the watercolours by a military great-something-grandfather of Mauritius and Gibraltar and Hong Kong in the 1840s, and a few ugly Chinese objects acquired by his father in the second Opium War. There is the sampler in my old bedroom, worked by a 10-year-old forebear, which I have wondered about ever since I learnt to read: "The loss of time is great, the loss of friends more, but the loss of God is that great loss, which none can endure. Mary Minet 1819." Or the pencil drawing of another Huguenot Miss Minet who married into my mother's family. A relation of hers turned, very romantically I think, into our benefactress; the last of her line, the late Miss Susan Minet, paid for the education of all four of my widowed mother's children.
Perhaps, however, these things should go not to me, though I love them, but to my American niece, who is not only christened Minet as her first name, but is also a Christian, whereas I am successfully enduring the loss of God, as far as I know, and Minet is only my third name. And, besides, a bossy editor added a feminine ending to it many years ago. So perhaps little Minet should have them. The real truth is that I cannot take or have any of these things, because, for all their meaning, I have nowhere to put them, for I live in a minimalist house. A 19th-century sampler would be quite wrong, even in the lavatory. Indifferent watercolours would be quite unacceptable. And there is no room left at all, in our empty minimal spaces, for any more objects of any kind, not even bookshelves, still less the usual, unstylish bric-a-brac of life, the sentimental detritus of family history. No.
A minimalist house is one that ruthlessly excludes personality, sentimentality and history. It excludes as much as possible. I admit the result is usually elegant, often beautiful. I admit that there is something contemplative about it, something extremely peaceful. I admit that a lot of clutter is nothing but that - ugly, unnecessary and in the way. I admit I love our house, which is organised according to my husband's ideas; in our domestic division of labour he has taken over the aesthetic side of life, though he does entrust me with minor matters such as flowers, and the arranging of food on plates. A couple of years ago, after decades of insistence, he entirely reorganised and redecorated our house in west London, in a style unkindly referred to by friends as Tate West. The result, when I get the better of my tendency to untidiness, and of my children, and of life in general, is good.
All the same, there is something rather irritating about excluding so much. There is no room for compromise in a minimal interior; you can't be partly minimal. When I think that I cannot bring anything home from my mother's house, my old, atavistic nest-building instincts rise in rebellion again. However beautiful they may be, the bare interiors of minimalism are truly iconoclastic. They are the work of high-minded vandals, like the churches of the Reformation, with their exuberant frescoes painted over; they are temples to the destruction of history and ceremony. They exclude whatever is quirky or eccentric or chosen by someone else or delivered by chance, in the name of a domineering, stylistic austerity.
What remains is strikingly impersonal. When our children come to dismantle our house, I suspect that they will find nothing much in it that is particular to us or to them, or to the past of our two families. Usually I am glad that I am not persecuted by objects, as my mother was, nor obsessed until death with sorting things out; we got rid of most of our objects, in the name of uncluttered space and uncluttered minds. Sometimes, though, I think we have thrown away more than we know: minimalism lies beyond a sense of an ending. Minimalism means never being able to say remember.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, July 14, 2000 | Comments (0)
You've got to feel sorry for him - haven't you?
The sins of the fathers should not be visited on the children, and Euan cannot be held responsible for the posturings of his dad
SCHADENFREUDE is a nasty, spiteful emotion, and I am truly very sorry that my first response, on hearing that the Prime Minister's 16-year-old son had been arrested late on Wednesday night in Leicester Square for being drunk and incapable, was to laugh. The temptation can hardly be denied; this very week, in an address to a bunch of off-beat theologians in Germany, Tony Blair put forward some absurdly unrealistic proposals for the punishment of the drunk and disorderly in our streets - something to do with the men in blue frogmarching young miscreants to cashpoints to pay instant fines, always assuming they aren't legless, actually have bank accounts and can remember their access numbers - which the police immediately denounced as unworkable.
Besides, I find the Blairs' sanctimonious Holy Family image intensely irritating. None the less, it was wrong of me; the sins of the fathers should not be visited on the children, and poor Euan Blair cannot be held responsible for the posturings of his dad.
The irony, however, is that Mr Blair and his government do believe that the sins of the children should be visited on the fathers, and, of course, the mothers. Readers may have forgotten, among the swathes of New Labour new initiatives, that the newly elected Labour government announced in 1997 a set of far-reaching measures to deal with youth crime; one of the central ideas was to compel parents of young offenders to accept state training on how to bring up their wayward children. One would have to have a heart of stone not to smile.
The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, said at the time that the new measures were intended to break what he called "the excuse culture", and to change "the culture in which children are brought up you have got to get parents to accept their responsibilities. They have got to stop walking away." Parent training was to include requirements to ensure that children were properly supervised, and were at home between certain hours; a breach of a parenting order would be punishable by a fine of up to pounds 1,000. Mr Straw added that he felt most parents of young offenders would welcome the opportunity of guidance on how to deal with their unruly children. No doubt Mr Blair will, as he admitted yesterday in Brighton that it's terribly tough being a parent and that sometimes you don't succeed. Well, Jack Straw to the rescue and No Excuses Tony and Cherie.
These were the same initiatives which gave councils the power to impose curfew orders on children under the age of 10. As far as I know, all that came to nothing, and maybe, as with so many grandiose New Labour initiatives, all the rest came to nothing as well, just as this week's instant fine nonsense has been ignominiously dumped. But, if New Labour has for once delivered on this ground-breaking set of new initiatives, when can we expect Mr and Mrs Blair to be attending their parenting classes? Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, and tough on the parents, too?
Somehow I don't think we will be treated to such a delightful spectacle. The image is ludicrous, and it's ludicrous because the thinking behind the proposals is ludicrous. Juvenile crime and delinquency is much more complex and intractable, as the Blairs must now be reflecting, if they haven't thought about it sensibly before, and as Mr Straw discovered when his own son was arrested for selling drugs. If the Blairs cannot keep their much-loved son out of trouble, who can? What happened to Euan Blair could have happened to any child from a careful and responsible family. It certainly could have happened to either of my children, who also live in central London, though I would like to think that they are both much more streetwise. I would also like to think that they wouldn't lie to the police if they were arrested, but I can't be absolutely certain. Something is going on that is beyond the wisdom of good parents, let alone bad ones.
My children are now 13 and 18. Ever since the elder child reached her 11th birthday, and wanted to travel alone on public transport, I have worried about them, and with good reason. They can see that London is in some ways a seriously alarming place. Two months ago, a young girl was dragged from our local Tube station and raped in a quiet garden nearby; that is the station my daughter uses regularly late in the evening. Ever since she was 13 all her friends have been going to parties which would worry any parent; drink and drugs are in abundance, and all kinds of things happen among children from the best regulated of households. Daughters of loving, careful parents are often sexually experienced by the age of 14.
The first day I let my son go out on his own, when he was 11, he was mugged and robbed in broad daylight on a busy pavement outside McDonald's in Notting Hill by three young men; no one helped him. He's been mugged there again since, and elsewhere. Not long after that, when I gave him a £10 note, he automatically folded it up and put it in his shoe; he had learnt from his friends to keep only a little loose change in his pockets for muggers. When he was eight, he saw a stabbing at his local skateboard park. It has emerged that as he skateboards round the neighbourhood he quite often sees people dealing drugs, or shooting up. There have been several murders over recent years in our neighbourhood, including two stabbings near our other local Tube station, and our house has been burgled several times.
I think the real risks that children sense around them, and the crimes that they see, and their parents' anxiety, make them feel less concerned about minor misdemeanours. They know that the police aren't usually interested, any way; after all, they seem unable to deal with the serious crime around. And after all, what is a little underage drinking or an occasional puff of dope, compared with brutal violence on the street? They see adults they know drinking, smoking and taking drugs; the educated parents of educated children come from a generation which grew up on recreational drugs, including, I feel sure, some of Mr Blair's friends; how can they credibly warn their children against them?
What's more, the unrealistic, often ignorant way that adults talk makes children cynical about what they say; they are tempted to give in to the greater street experience, and the much greater pressure of their peers. The final straw is that, precisely because of all these dangers, children of good families are often overprotected; hence their terrible longing, and their need, to escape into a little light delinquency, if not something worse. These are the parts of life that bossy initiatives cannot reach; perhaps Mr Blair has been taught something of a lesson after all.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, July 07, 2000 | Comments (0)
