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A prisoner of sexual double standards
In some cultures to this day it is considered normal for a young boy to go to a much older woman for his first sexual experiences. The idea is that she will be kind to him, soothe his anxieties and teach him some useful skills, so that he in turn will be kind and sexually skilful with inexperienced young women in his future.
Until recently in some circles rich boys were, and perhaps still are, taken by their indulgent fathers to a good-natured mistress or a friend of hers. Poorer boys might find themselves in the local brothel. Others might be initiated by a nanny, a governess or an older girl in the village or on the block.
I am not recommending this custom. I would not like to be seen as someone who actively encourages young boys into the arms of prostitutes, no matter how refined, or of friendly amateurs either, no matter how kindly. It just seems absurd to me, when the world is full of so much truly terrible evil, to feel particularly morally outraged when something of the sort happens — especially in a country where you can see young people wriggling in the throes of reality TV sex, or read the confessions of the bonking-mad every day in the tabloids.
Yet in our hypersexualised culture there was shock, horror and disgust last week when 32-year-old Hannah Grice was found guilty of having had a six-month affair with an apparently very willing boy of 14; she pleaded guilty to two specimen charges of indecent assault, but what she was really in the dock for was having sex with an underage boy. Of course what she did was illegal. Of course most people would think it was morally wrong. But I do very much wonder whether she deserved the extreme condemnation and the extreme punishments visited on her.
The devil lies in the detail in such cases. The degree of wrong depends on the circumstances, which in this case I know only from court reports. This woman was a teacher and married, with two young children; many of her crimes were committed in the matrimonial bed and they were persistent. She was a friend of the boy’s parents but abused their trust, as well as her unhappy husband’s.
On the other hand, she was not this boy’s teacher herself; she did not breach that trust, which would surely have been very much worse. Nor, it seems, did she seduce him in the ordinary sense of the word. Perhaps legally speaking she did, but it seems that he developed a crush on her and, even if he may initially have been reluctant, he was willing.
As an underage person he could not legally have consented, but it seems that in everyday understanding he did. I don’t know — and it is an important detail — whether she was in some way predatory or had some powerful psychological hold over the boy, so that he was not as willing as it might have appeared. However, over a period of many months he regularly went to meet her, which suggests at least a degree of free will.
Boys of 14 vary; with puberty beginning earlier these days, many of them are sexually mature young men, suffering not from shyness but from sexual longing.
In any event, the wretched woman has been sentenced to 15 months in jail. This seems extreme, especially as she has also been put on the sexual offenders’ register for 10 years and has naturally been sacked from her teaching job. Her career is over, her name is mud, her family is in shock and, as a sex offender, she will find it very difficult to get other work. This alone is severe punishment, even without a jail sentence. And 15 months is a long time in a British prison.
There is something very odd about this case, given what’s happening to prison sentences. Generally speaking, the government and the judiciary seem determined to send fewer, not more, people to jail. In January this year the Home Office announced legislation under which judges and magistrates will have to take prison overcrowding into account when sentencing, because the jails are already full to bursting. Paul Goggins, the correctional services minister, said that offenders would receive effective punishments while ensuring that prison was reserved for the most dangerous and persistent offenders — not, one might think, a category that Grice falls into.
What is more, only last Wednesday Lord Woolf, the lord chief justice, called for changes to sentencing that would put fewer criminals in jail. He said prison should be reserved only for the worst crimes, such as murder, violent assault and white-collar offences, and also fine defaulters. “While I firmly believe,” he said, “that for serious and violent crimes there is no alternative to a custodial sentence, I also believe passionately on taking steps to turn people away from crime . . . One major challenge is to convince the public that non-custodial sentences do provide a satisfactory punishment to offenders.”
This must ring hollow to Grice. Although I am sceptical about community penalties it is quite absurd in the current climate of opinion in the Home Office and judiciary that a woman who is unlikely to reoffend, and who has already been severely punished in non-custodial ways, should be given a serious prison sentence as well.
Double standards seem to be at work here. Compare the sentence given in 2004 to Phillip Carman, the GP who indecently assaulted several women patients in his surgery in the most flagrant breach of trust and abuse of a doctor’s authority. He was sent down for a year, three months less than Grice. The judge said that Carman had been punished enough because he had lost his standing in the community. Admittedly, his sentence was later increased to 18 months by another court — but that is still only a bit more than Grice’s term.
Or compare the sentence for a drunk driver who knocked down and killed a young girl on Christmas Day; in 2004 his sentence was reduced to five years by appeal court judges. They said their decision followed a ruling by Woolf, who recommended four to five years where the offender pleaded guilty and showed remorse.
Where is the logic in any of this? However badly Grice has behaved, she is simply not in the same league as a drink-driving killer, a sexually abusive doctor or men who abuse babies. The law is not always an ass, of course, but in this case it does appear to have been both a bit of an ass and a bit of a misogynist prig, as well.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 21, 2005 | Comments (1)
You can have babies but you can’t keep them
There can be no greater anguish for a woman than to have her children forcibly taken away from her, for ever. The feelings of a father could be equally painful, I imagine. That is what has happened, in a case reported last week, to a mother and father who are considered by Essex social services to be unable to bring up their children properly. The mother has a learning disability and an IQ of 60. The father has also been described by some as having a learning disability, though he has had expert assessment to the contrary.
Their four-year-old daughter and 14-month-old son were taken away from them for adoption last year, and last week a High Court judge upheld that decision. Mrs Justice Pauffley said that their refusal to give up their children was “unreasonable” and their desire to bring them up themselves was “wholly unrealistic”.
I have no idea where truth and justice lie in this case, and I am not going to venture an opinion. All that is clear is the cruel pain involved for the distraught parents. And it reminded me yet again of something that has angered me for years — the painful mess of confusion, contradiction, bullying and skewed priorities that informs the politics of intellectual disability.
On the same day as the hearing I received a letter from a reader that precisely makes my point. (I have permission to use it anonymously.) “I have a sister,” he writes, “now 41, who has a learning disability; she suffers from cerebral palsy and motor dyspraxia. Her mental age was once assessed at eight or nine. She has been a resident in a very small home run by a well-known charity for some years but recently its policy has changed and my parents and family have felt that they have been pushing my sister beyond her capabilities — some of the things my sister has been told she can do if she wants, eg drive a car, have a baby, etc, would be laughable if it were not for the seriousness of the issue.
“Today, our whole family has been shocked to learn that my sister has ‘chosen’ to leave her small group home and ‘live with her boyfriend’. This has been devastating news. Not only do we know that she will not be able to cope with her own disabilities, but this ‘boyfriend’ also has a learning disability, a history of erratic behaviour and suffers from epileptic fits. We feel that the charity and social services have finally achieved their goal; they can demonstrate to the world another ‘success’ and pat themselves on their backs and rid themselves of ‘interfering parents’.”
On the one hand social services and other professionals are encouraging a vulnerable person to move out of a safe situation into a very difficult one and, perhaps, to have a baby. Yet on the other hand social services are very quick to remove a baby from a mother with a learning disability. The contradiction is glaring. In today’s aggressive culture of disability rights, a woman with an intellectual impairment is pressed into taking up her right to independence (especially from her parents), and her right to sexual activity and to have a baby, but somehow, when it comes to her right to keep her baby — well, that’s a very different thing.
I have again and again come across versions of this painful and shocking contradiction, because of my lifelong interest in people with learning disabilities, through somebody close to me. Some years ago a woman with pronounced learning disabilities whom I knew became pregnant. Sure enough her baby was taken away from her at birth (with good reason). When I asked why she had not been protected from getting pregnant I was told the details were confidential, but that everyone had an equal right to sex and to giving birth — but not, it seems, to a baby.
Deeply shocked by this attitude, I began to research the politics of disability, and I soon discovered that this approach was part of a highly developed, rights-led view, which insists on normalisation — the idea that people with disabilities, no matter how grave, have exactly the same rights as anyone else and must be actively encouraged to exercise those rights. It’s easy to understand the good intentions behind this idea — though not the aggressive animosity of the more driven activists in this field.
It’s also easy to understand the idea when applied to people of normal intelligence who have disabilities. But when it comes to people whose disability is having very low intelligence, then encouraging, perhaps pressing, them to exercise their right to have babies is shameful irresponsibility.
Yet some people in social services and care professionals generally are proud of encouraging and enabling people in just this way. A senior social work academic told me, when I asked him why professionals were so obsessed with encouraging adults with learning disabilities to have sex, that it was “one of the best indicators of independence”, particularly independence from families.
A very senior care services manager told me recently that his proudest achievement was to enable a man and woman with moderate (not just mild) learning disabilities to marry and have a flat on their own and two babies; the husband was also blind.
This idealistic professional agreed with my suggestion that this achievement would involve 24-hour support, from a team of three full-time care workers, and that this might possibly be unaffordable. Besides, I asked, what about the children? It is hard to imagine the difficulties of normal children growing up with parents who are tragically ill-equipped to understand their needs.
It would be infinitely better, surely, not to encourage such vulnerable people to have children. It would be better, surely, to encourage them to use safe, long-term contraception. (I am completely opposed to sterilisation.) I don’t think any civilised person would feel able to say to someone with an intellectual impairment that he or she should not hope for love, or for sex, and I don’t think it would be right to put any obstacles in his or her way. But I do think it is wrong to encourage them to imagine that they can hope, realistically to have children and bring them up.
The odds are against it regardless of how much “support” is offered — and it is cruel to encourage them. Most social workers and social services departments are much too wise to do that. There are still too many, however, who remain in the grip of a destructive ideology.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 14, 2005 | Comments (0)
A shocking death on the No 43 bus
‘I have always depended,” said Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire, in one of her most famous and most ironic lines, “on the kindness of strangers.” That can be a mistake, as she discovered, and as Richard Whelan may have realised nine days ago as he lay bleeding to death on a streetcar, or rather on a No 43 bus in north London, ignored and left to his fate by almost everyone around him. In all the horror of recent weeks in London, I think Whelan’s story is one of the saddest and perhaps one of the strangest.
We have heard a great deal about the compassion and heroism of bystanders after the bomb blasts of July 7 and of the spirit of the Blitz. Yet at almost the same time, in the centre of the same city, the response of bystanders to the violent attack on Whelan was shocking for its absence of compassion or heroism or even the faintest hint of common humanity. In its way it is much more troubling than the threat of more terrorist attacks.
As is the way with sudden and shocking events, some of the details remain unclear. However, it is a fact that Whelan and his girlfriend were sitting on the top deck of a No 43 bus at around 10pm on July 29 when a young black man started shouting and throwing chips at people. At this, most or perhaps all of the passengers apart from Whelan, his girlfriend and the troublemaker moved downstairs. The man then started abusing Whelan’s girlfriend, and when Whelan told him to stop, he responded by stabbing him several times with a knife.
The girlfriend began screaming for help, loudly enough for the passengers below to hear her, but nobody moved. The murderer went slowly downstairs and got off the bus. After him, the girlfriend came down, white faced, apparently deeply shocked and perhaps very confused. At any rate, for some reason she, too, got off the bus. Richard Whelan came down too, but he collapsed bleeding on the bottom deck of the bus.
What happened next is in a way even worse. Almost nobody was prepared to help this young man as he lay dying. Even though it was quite obvious that his attacker had fled and there was no longer any danger, almost nobody came forward to do anything, not even to comfort him. There were plenty of people around — the bus was about half full — but they turned their eyes away and very soon got off. Yet the victim was not bleeding very heavily; the squeamish or those afraid of Aids had little excuse to turn away. It’s not as though he looked weird; he seemed, as he was, a nice young man. Admittedly there is a terrible risk in giving evidence about a violent crime; in this country the defence — ludicrously and inexcusably — has the right to know a witness’s private address. But one can comfort a wounded man without agreeing to give evidence.
There was only one woman who was prepared to do something for Whelan. Admittedly we only have her account of what happened, and she has chosen to speak out anonymously, which seems odd. It’s also true that it is easy, in extremities, to get things wrong. All the same, this Good Samaritan is certain that she was at first quite alone. Nobody would help her, though she asked again and again.
She tried to get the poor man to lie down, she tried to cover his wounds with her jumper, she called 999, she held his hand and tried to keep him awake until the ambulance arrived. Meanwhile two people refused to give their clothes to cover him. By now Whelan was lying very awkwardly, shaking and sweating, perhaps going into shock, and drowsily slurring his words. After a while two young women did try to help as well; but by then the only people left on the bus were Whelan, these two girls, the bus driver and the teller of this story. Everyone else, she said, had just melted away.
One can only wonder why. Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable for a busload of Londoners to ignore such a terrible thing. Ever since I heard this account I have been wondering how long ago that was, and when and why things have changed. Admittedly one should be wary of waxing too romantic about Britain’s traditions of civic society and community spirit. There were centuries when the British were hardened to suffering and ignored it daily all around them. In the early 18th century abandoned babies could be seen dead and dying in London gutters and most people endured the sight fairly philosophically. In being distressed by it and setting up his famous Foundling hospital, Captain Thomas Coram was sensitive for his time.
But, equally, it was in the 17th century that John Donne wrote that “no man is an island, entire of itself” — an idea so appealing as to have been turned into a cliché. For many generations this has been, until recently, a generous enough country for people to have at least some sense of fellow feeling, some sense of community.
Now, suddenly, it seems to be disappearing, in big cities at least. My belief is that this is one of the evil consequences of having a society (at least in cities) that is too diverse and — more importantly — that has become diverse much too quickly. Remember the heartless, hellish estate in south London where poor Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death in a kind of multicultural bedlam. You cannot impose massive social change without preparation, then leave wishful thinking to do the rest.
Some newspapers and columnists like me have been saying for some time that too much diversity risks stretching the bonds of community to breaking point. In order to feel responsible for others you need to identify with them in some way, and identity, by definition, means a notion of sameness — not ethnic sameness but some important sense of sameness that needs time to develop. “Any man’s death diminishes me,” Donne wrote in his Meditation “because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
That is true, but only if everyone is listening to and can hear the same bell. In a society that is too diverse there are too many different bells and they become jangled; the call to fellow feeling is lost in the cacophony. We become strangers, and the default mode for strangers, in a complex and changing society, is not kindness.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 07, 2005 | Comments (0)
