Welcome to another warm week, and another question which is sure to cause more fevered brows.
A deeply concerning revelation, but one which will not, sadly, be a surprise to Britain’s jaded citizens, has just hit the news stands: our politicians may have been involved in organised child sex abuse in the 1980’s.
Lord Tebbit’s comment that there may well have been a cover up, as more than 100 files relating to historical child abuse over a 20 year period appear to have mysteriously gone missing, makes the scandal all the more believable.
Home Secretary Theresa May is set to address the House of Commons later today on the issue and may call for a full-scale investigation into the matter.
Our question for you this week then, is this: what do you think should happen next?
Researching Reform 
It has now become a universal solution that when a mother supports a child complaining of sex abuse by the father the mother is disbelieved and accused of coaching the child who is therefore also not believed;Subsequently the child is given to the father and the mother is denied all face to face contact and sometimes indirect contact as well for several years.I have many many mothers deprived of contact in this way but not one case of a father losing out to the mother and losing contact himself purely through accusations of sex abuse by his child.
This disproportion leads me to think that the family courts favour any parent accused of sex abuse of their child and that paedophiles must have some organisation that pressurises the judges to make these decisions.Such a theory sounded too far fetched to me a few years ago but recent events have now lent it a certain plausibility;
LikeLike
Thanks for your thoughts, FA. This question though, is about what we should do next in relation to the revelation that politicians have been involved in child sexual abuse. What do you think?
LikeLike
Natacha, you certainly put the question that I usually put myself in bad situations:- “What can we do next to put things right?” Well for a start we should
1:- Enforce rigorously Article 6 Human Rights Act 3(d) that gives the right to call witnesses to those persons involved in a judicial hearing.In family courts (as opposed to criminal courts).The children complaining of sexual abuse have a right to be heard but rarely are in case they suffer “emotional harm”.What claptrap ! They suffer terrible harm by being prevented from testifying and often end up in the exclusive care of the perpetrator ! They write to judges and call childline in vain (take your concerns to your social worker my dear …etc).Children in family courts desperate to see a parent are silenced and represented in court by a guardian who as often as not will swear the kids do not want to see the parent in question;Paedophile cover up complete….
As to Leon Britain and the missing dossier ;one has to ask why Geoffrey Dickens did not pursue the question further when the contents were suppressed but alas Mr Dickens is no longer with us. We should therefore allow both those accused in family courts of sexual abuse of children and their accusers to go public with their testimony and not wait until the perpetrators or their accusers are dead !
The same solutions I always suggest :- Family courts govered by the same rules as criminal courts ! End of story………..
LikeLike
Thank you, FA. I do hope the inquiry manages to relocate those missing files, though I fear they have long been destroyed in one of Westminster’s many paper shredders. From poor training standards, to a general lethargy when it comes to doing the right thing, the entire system is on its knees. What a disaster.
LikeLike
People miss the point that what is being alleged here is a very different kettle of fish to the usual kind of sex abuse allegations. These allegations relate to, and go to, the very heart of government and the establishment. It is on record that Geoffrey Dickens received telephone calls threatening both his life and members of his family. As for victims ‘going public’ or going to the police, several have; and ended up dead (always suicide, drug overdose or similar, conveniently). Any victim of abuse has (as we have recently had more evidence in the Harris trial) a huge hurdle to get over to even speak about it. Let’s multiply that in a case like this when if you speak, you will probably (a) not be believed, because the alleged perpetrator/s are high profile, ‘respected’ pillars of the establishment and you are, or were, just some ‘kid in care’ with a chip on their shoulder, and (b) because they are almost inevitably going to be threatened or otherwise ‘dissuaded’. No legal system, or ‘human rights protection’ is worth a fig leaf in a situation like this, and until people realise that, we will never begin to get to the heart of it, let alone bring those involved to justice. The corruption and cover-up here goes all the way to the top of the food chain. Solutions here are going to involve letting go of our illusions, and I suspect very few will want to do that. We will have the ‘legal’ answers, and they will be a cul de sac. Guaranteed.The system has failed, but those in it will simply not want to admit it.
LikeLike
I find all of this remarkably interesting.
This issue, and the evidence for it, has been discussed and debated in what is disingenuously called the ‘alternative media’ for several years. It has been ridiculed and dismissed by most who prefer their information ‘a la carte’ by a media who play ‘speak no, see no, hear no’ for almost the same length of time, The story that is being ‘exposed’ now feels like old news to me. The difference is, those who are now ‘breaking’ it are not now regarding it as a story emerging from the paphian foam by so-called conspiracy theorists. I would find it mildly amusing, were it no so totally tragic, that once again the mainstream lags (for whatever reason) way behind a story; the same could be said of Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith and several other ‘crackpot conspiracy theories’.
What should we do next? Well, let me suggest what WILL happen next before addressing that question. On an issue that could no longer be ridiculed any longer the politicos will now seek to draw the sting out of it. We will see hand-wringing and faux concern from the present administration (and probably the shadow one too), promises of inquiries to look into it “so that mistakes like this can never happen again”. And, sadly, the general public will sigh and accept and ‘move on’, because that is how people have become. ‘It all happened thirty years ago, most of the suspects will be dead or infirm, and what on earth will be the point?” I guarantee that this will be the outcome here. Headline news today, (about something that should shake every single human being with compassion to the core, and make them demand answers and justice, whatever that may do the political elite who have been involved and the ‘reputation’ of the political system), will be chip paper tomorrow. People ‘care’; they just don’t care enough. If they did, this would be the biggest issue to hit politics since, well, forever. The truth is, people don’t want to tread where this particular path leads; Savile, his links to the elite, his ‘auld lang syne’s’ with Mrs Thatcher every year, and his ‘special friend’, the Prince of Wales, Peter Morrison, Righton, the list goes on. People don’t want it because it would expose every single aspect of what we know, in public terms, and shatter every illusion. You think people are sad because they trusted Rolf Harris as a ‘national treasure’? This would make that seem irrelevant.
What should happen? This should be priority number one. Every obvious lead, that even I can recognise, should be followed to get to the heart of this; and every human being should want that, however uncomfortable. Jimmy Savile and his links, Elm Guest House, D Notices issued during Blair’s administration: everything. This issue is an open secret, and particularly if you follow highly respected ‘alternative’ information. But it WILL be cauterized and a band aid applied. And shame on us all for that.
LikeLike
Thank you, Mark. I wonder whether the TV stations will also find themselves embroiled in this scandal, as they did with Savile’s.
LikeLike
Highly doubtful. I am willing to take a punt that some (probably long dead) civil servant will eventually be offered up as the hapless sacrificial lamb here. ‘We’ll learn the lessons, we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Move along, nothing to see.
Once the Savile revelations came to light, something of a David Copperfield illusion was utilised. Let’s all look one way while the evidence and common sense was demanding you look the other. So the BBC, Savile’s employer, was the Aunt Sally, and an easy knock-over at that. At the time Savile was prowling and abusing on an industrial scale (you think he was a ‘lone wolf’?), a culture of grope and fumble which was apparently the ‘culture of the 70s’ (and serious enough in itself) was just waiting to offer itself to a morally outraged public. Yes, we have seen serious abusers brought to justice; Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris, but for all the vileness of their crimes, they were not in the same sick league as Savile. We have also seen other hapless seventies fodder held up to the spotlight, put through agony and then acquitted; the Hairy Cornflake and seemingly the entire cast of Corrie. The illusionists had got us looking at the BBC, and not where the real smell was coming from.
And while we got the show trials of a few septuagenarian ‘celebrities’, what we didn’t get were serious questions and investigation, let alone answers, to other (arguably more serious) matters. Savile’s links to the political elite and royal family (‘People will never know what you have done for the country, Jimmy’. Oh really? What, precisely?), how he got keys, bed and board at Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville, and the mortuary at the LGI (the nights must have just flown by!), his links to Haute de la Garenne, Elm House, North Wales, Edwina Currie’s damaging admissions in her autobiography about Peter Morrison and, as we are now seeing, the matters Geoffrey Dickens was raising in the mid-1980s. You would need to be wilfully blind and stupid, or very guilty, to attempt to blow these off as anything other than demanding full enquiry. Do we care about children being abused or not? That is the heart of the matter.
And, if you don’t want to do it for abused children, how about doing it for political integrity? Because we all, given half a second’s thought, know the potential issues here. Once you have a senior political figure compromised because of paedophilia (did anyone seriously think Peter Morrison was not a prime target for blackmail?) you have a political elite who will either jump when told or have all of this tumble out when it suits those who hold the power (in this case, the knowledge of the crime) over them. And it certainly isn’t about the BBC offering up a few more senile DJs.
For all of that, I expect…………nothing. Zero. Dickens’ file was ‘lost’. The political elite, for whatever reason (and you can speculate until the rooster crows), do not want this issue investigated, and there is no will to do it. We’ll get a Cameron makeover, and hopefully a British sportsmen winning a meaningless trophy to take our mind off it. If any issue should finally convince people that too many politicians are toxic, this is it.
LikeLike
Hi Mark. Yes, I think it will be all talk,no action. Theresa May is addressing the Commons now as we type…
LikeLike
Only a full Hillsborough-style inquiry will do. This issue has been like a pressure-cooker for years, and the lid is set to blow. I do think (perhaps naively) that there will be overwhelming pressure now to blow the lid on this. People are fed up to the teeth with being ordered what to do, even how they speak and think, with people who take and misuse our money, lie, cheat, and manipulate whilst posing as ‘servants of the people’. Now this. It’s not ‘just something that happened in the eighties’ I am quite sure it still goes on.
Tom Watson MP has started a national petition to get a full inquiry. I would urge everyone to sign it.
Power to the people!
Roger
LikeLike
Thank you Richard. I hope that some good will come of it.
LikeLike
Let me get this straight – there is to be an enquiry into how the child abuse investigations were handled? Dave and his “no stone will be left unturned” comments make me want to spit.
I fear another useless enquiry, pages of fluff in the hope of appeasing an angry public.
LikeLike
I know, it just reeks of faux concern. God knows what kind of wrongdoing we’ll have to investigate during his tenancy at Westminster. I’m not suggesting Cameron is guilty of the same sort of crimes of course, just that we’re really asking another generation of insincere hypocrite to deal with the appalling behaviour of the insincere hypocrites that came before him.
LikeLike
Hi Natasha, Of course there was and is still a cover up! The establishment don’t want their dirty laundry aired in public! Historically or now! TM had to be pressured into an inquiry but even the type of inquiry is unclear. They may even throw one or two to the wolves but you will never know the whole truth! In 30 years there will be another inquiry asking what could have been done.
LikeLike
Yes, can you imagine D if those files were found? Something like this at best would undermine the public’s already crumbling faith in government and at worst cause a revolution, albeit a silent one (we’re not great at noisy revolution in the UK anymore :).
LikeLike
There would be no revolution quiet or otherwise if the dossier were to be found.There would simply be a gagging order restricting all public comment pending a very long public enquiry that would in turn finish with a whitewash of all prominent politicians except maybe a couple of junior figures to be the “fall guys”;As long as secret courts and gagging orders exist in UK, those with power will cover up their misdeeds with ease and with success ! So much for Article 10 (Human rights Act) guaranteeing the right of free expression and for the UN declaration of human rights offering similar guarantees….
LikeLike
I like to think that the public would force those particular doors open, and the press, too.
LikeLike
In any children’s’ proceedings we are constantly reminded of the opening lines to the 1989 Act i.e.
Welfare of the Child
(1) When a court determines any question with respect to-
(a) the upbringing of a child; or
(b) the administration of a child’s property or the application of any income arising from it,
the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.
Whilst these words set the tone for the proceedings and give everyone a warm feeling the harsh reality of how children are actually considered away from (and sometimes in) the courts could not be more different. These noble sentiments amount to no more than rose coloured spectacles for large sections of our establishment to look at the innocent little faces around them whilst they hurt, conspire to hurt and avoid legislating to protect those vulnerable children whose trust they hypocritically betray. Instead they abuse them and scar them for life. And, many of the non-active participants simply avert their gazes, wring their hands and shuffle awkwardly.
The UK became signatories to the United Nation’s Charter for the Rights of the Child in 1991. The signing of the UNCRC should shortly be getting its silver jubilee celebrated. But, how have we been preparing? Whilst other countries have legislated to enshrine the protection of children’s rights in law, in the UK, those that could have followed this example have conformed to type and done NOTHING. That is correct: absolutely ZERO. In 23 years they have not even made any reluctant concessions to human decency whilst exhibiting a preference, it would seem, to preserve their lifestyle choices, sexual preferences and the enjoyment they get from hurting, abusing and ruining the lives of our children.
From this angle, given the quarter of a century that has elapsed since the UNCRC was signed, it looks like preserving a status quo, for the gratification of a few at the expense and pain of many, has been the most important consideration. It should have only taken a few months to legislate in order to give children protection and compel others to ensure that children are protected. Yet 23 years on we are instead preoccupied with the loss of some files and the details of an inquiry where much of the evidence will have gone up in flames long ago.
In recent months we’ve had scandals and festering rot exposed at the core of virtually every single pillar of our establishment. Are Dave and co really so far divorced from the reality that they think that we will be assuaged and mollified by yet another seized opportunity to massage the evidence? I hope my eyes are firmly on the ball here, but, no doubt someone will tell me if they are not.
Please stop defecating on the front door step to parliament. It’s really starting to whiff a little.
LikeLike
The announcement of the NSPCC becoming the “lead” agency with Wanless as the chief investigator is very disturbing and I would hope that people will pillory Tom Watson with these concerns that what we are seeing is a gatekeeper operation designed to protect rather than investigate.
Wanless was visited many times by Savile at his Sevenoaks home, the NSPCC were implicated in not protecting the children victims of Savile, its like putting the wolf in charge of the investigation of who ate the sheep.
But are we surprised? I expected no less, Britain’s state attitude to its children has always been that the children are more of a stock in trade, a commodity and a resource to be exploited rather than growing and vulnerable human beings betrayed by the very people who should protect them.
We can look back at history, see how children were enslaved by the church, enslaved by the government for feeding atrocious casaulty losses in the army, its kind of done with a tear in the eye sort of thing by Barnados etc when foundlings homes sold their charges to the army with a survival rate of 1 in 10, we can move on to the workhouses, the match factories, the coal mines, where these children had no rights except to die slowly, move forward where the UK government were selling Irish children to American plantation owners because black slavery had been abolished and these were forcibly bred with black slaves secretly kept in the US to create a new “breed” of acceptable slave worth about £5.
In the 20th century organisations like Coram gained new powers and suddenly children were being sold to the colonies, hundreds of thousands were sold to farmers, mine owners, factory owners, a great proportion of these were killed, abused, tortured, they had absolutely no rights, no one cared and Coram and other groups were making an absolute fortune from this, it was a continuation of state sanctioned slavery that ended only in recent memory but little reperation or justice done for the dead and abused.
With the collapse of empire, a new way of exploiting children had to be found and so the lessons learned profiting from the Coram and Irish episodes saw that fabricating cases meant that children could be taken into state custody and used as a commodity to service a Freemasonic organised paedophile network and that at every level the people operating earned a large sum of money direct and with applause from the government via the taxpayer, child protection is costing the taxpayer something like £15 Billion a year and it grows by a third every financial year and yet every SSD complains of starved for cash, not enough workers, imagine how many workers £15,000,000,000 would employ but no one is serious about changing this status quo because this has become one enormous pork barrel.
Council estates have now become the crop field, the law process and accusation has become systematic, it is almost as efficient as Hitler’s own policy of awarding officer class couples lower class children where a social worker attached to the State Court would identify children, approach the court with a statement of a bogus crime, to defy the edict would be a capital punishment and so the parents would be stripped of their children in a sinister closed court that so much resembles the family courts of today.
Isn’t it strangely coincidental that the Germans placed the unadoptable or children of sexual maturity in what they called “Children Homes” but were used as brothels for the SS and upper echelons, I believe now that Rotherham and Rochdales where the children stated time and again that they were taken by social workers to their abusers that these childrens homes had become literally council operated brothels on the same priniciple and the total refusal by the police to investigate officials and workers, even their financial records says to me that very powerful freemasonic protection was used to stop this happening.
Prof Jean Robinson and Beverly Beech identified and even caught social workers trawling the poor for targets, raiding school records and driving around council estates looking for fairly healthy children to steal, this still goes on today but they have become very circumspect.
LikeLike