Hattix

It’s a question I’ve asked (and answered) often on my blog. A knee-jerk over-reaction, what does it achieve?

In the case of threats to our freedom, we’re happily destroying that freedom to protect it. Better we sink our own ship it seems.

But it works elsewhere too. Civitas, a social think-tank, have run a comprehensive study showing that our headless chicken reaction to the supposed threat posed by paedophiles is achieving precisely the opposite of what we’d like it to.

Adults are now scared of interacting with children, paedophile has the same social stigma attached that rapist once did; A conviction isn’t necessary, just a suspicion, an accusation, and an innocent life is ruined. The innocent life isn’t that of the child’s, children are well versed at saying what needs to be said, true or otherwise, to get attention: It’s that of the man or woman accused of abuse.

According to Civitas, the spectre of suspicion and distrust has achieved exactly what it was meant to protect. It has poisoned and destroyed the generation relationship between child and adult. Children are now without adult friends, friends who would recognise signs of real abuse perhaps better than the child or his peers or his parents (parents who famously have a rather polar view of their own offspring) would, increasing the ease at which real paedophiles may take advantage of them. Isolated and ostracised the child has nobody external and impartial to turn to or confide in. In our rabid panic, we have spurned the children.

As we busy ourselves in crying wolf over our obsession that children are sexual in some way or that anyone with a camera is clearly a kiddy fiddler, we don’t tend to notice that we’re making paedophiles of normal people. In 2003 it became illegal, very much so, to document a perfectly legal act for the first time ever. If Jack is a normal 16 year old and his girlfriend Jill is a normal 17 year old, they can have a sexual relationship as much as they like. But if Jill sends Jack some naughty pictures of herself to brighten his day when he’s at work, Jack is then a paedophile and may be jailed or worse. His marriage plans to Jill are now off, his plan to work as a doctor won’t ever happen and Jill’s ambition to work as a care assistant is wrecked as neither would pass a CRB check.

Paedophiles wreck lives. In our blind panic, we wreck young lives just as badly. So what does over-reaction achieve? Is it not the precise damage that it was aimlessly attempting to prevent? Who’s worse?

It’s been a while so I have two stories for you.

The first needs no attribution, it’s all over the news. The Government somehow, with great concessions made (bribes), managed to get the controversial 42-day detention bill through Parliament. The Government are trying to spin it as powers needed by the police to combat the “terrorism threat”.

What “terrorism threat”?

We didn’t need to hold an innocent man for six weeks while the well-organized US-funded IRA were bombing the shit out of metropolitan areas nationwide. Yet we do when a rag tag bunch of rabid extremists post vague videos on the Internet?

The Government has proven time and again that it will abuse the Terrorism Act 2006, using its power to spy on citizens dropping litter, on babies crying at night, to monitor private areas…The list goes on.

‘Disappearing’ people for six weeks with neither evidence nor charge is unacceptable.

Our second is related to the exploding Nimrod in Afghanistan. The MoD yesterday flew a Nimrod over London to salute the Queen’s official birthday and, predictably, the relatives of the servicemen lost in Afghanistan are in uproar.

But wait, that’s not the whole story.

While the coroner of the investigation deemed the Nimrod “unairworthy”, he was not an aeronautical engineer, he was not familiar with the DeHaviland Comet or the Nimrod (the Nimrod is a militarised version of the Comet) and likely not familiar with the Nimrod’s essential role in supporting ground forces.

The experts, the aeronautical engineers, the Nimrod designers, the Nimrod ground crew, the people who know what they’re talking about all insist that the Nimrod is one of the safest and most reliable planes in the fleet. We employ experts for a reason.