Posted on 02/08/2007 6:52:10 PM PST by dascallie
Daily Mail UK 8th February 2007
As three men are convicted of planning 'another Soham', a blistering attack on the sexualising of the young
By BEL MOONEY
Object to sexualised images such as the photos of Girls Aloud posing as "sexy schoolgirls" and you'll be derided as a prude. But the truth is they're poisoning our culture ... and turning every child into a potential sexual target.
How fitting it was that he made terrifying masks for sick horror movies for a living. His head was full of even sicker horror as he plotted the torture, rape and murder of two innocent children - sisters aged 13 and 14 he had seen walking to school near his home. And unbelievably, Alan Hedgcock's co-conspirators had children of their own.
There can be few who read the vile details of the case against Hedgcock and his fellow paedophiles David Beaven and Robert Mayers who didn't wish the judge could have handed down longer sentences. Captured in discussions online, two of the men discussed modelling their crimes on the Soham murders and of "doing" the girls like "Holly and Jessica".
I'm not ashamed to confess that as a woman, as a mother, I find myself vengefully hoping they're not protected from the retribution of their fellow prisoners. Let them suffer, as they wanted those young girls to suffer.
That such men will always be a danger to children is obvious. But we can't just look at their case in isolation - shoving it into a compartment we prefer to forget about.
Two things are equally obvious to me. The first is that, as a liberal society, we have wilfully ignored the horrific growth of the international porn industry, both on and off the internet. Second, we have allowed it to corrupt us on every level - from clothes sold for little girls, through the language and imagery acceptable in magazines, to the pushing back of the boundaries in film.
But anybody who tries to point this out (as I have for some years) is accused of "moral panic" by the chattering classes.
Perverts like Hedgcock, Beaven and Mayers may be in a disgusting minority, but their evil minds have been fed by a culture unhealthily obsessed with sex.
They have been aided by the criminal carelessness of the supposedly informed majority which says you cannot do anything to stop it. And that is a cause of shame for all of us.
In a week when 72 more Britons have been caught after Austrian police smashed a child-porn ring, we should ask ourselves this question: are we simply going to sit back and allow this cancer to spread?
Four years ago, I gave a lecture on this subject at Bath University, for which I did a great deal of research - including seeing what material you could access on the net without paying any money. I was staggered by what I found - miserably haunted and sickened beyond all my expectations.
Believe me, I had seen pornography in my role as a lecturer on the subject and endured endless arguments with ignorant liberal friends who thought the word implied either Page 3 girls, or tanned, good-looking men and women in their 20s having consensual sex for lots of money in California, heart of the multi-billion dollar "mainstream" porn "industry".
They didn't know - or refused to know - that with a few clicks you can see almost every perversion imagined within the darkest recesses of the human mind. They refused to think about the helpless women and children from deprived communities who are routinely abused.
It seems Hedgcock, Beaven and Mayers used incest-themed sites to feed their fantasies - only, let us not forget, these were not mere fantasies (as they claimed in defence) but actual plans to brutally attack those girls.
Incest sites claim to use "models" over 18, but many of the girls look younger. I have seen a site where a young child of about ten (who looks Mexican) is being raped by a man described as her father.
There are thousands and thousands of them, all involving real people - and when the girls do look 18, they are inevitably dressed up as younger, wearing little "schoolgirl" kilts, with their hair in bunches and so on.
The language used is always abusive: they are "dirty teens" or "horny young sluts". Perverts always justify their unspeakable lusts to each other by claiming that the victims of the abuse are at fault, because they're "asking for it".
One of the problems with writing about this subject is that you cannot give examples in public - certainly not in a newspaper like this. The material is too revolting, and I don't want to expose people to it or give the sites free publicity.
Even when I gave the academic lecture, I felt obliged to hold back (a self-censorship not shown by some glossy fashion magazines who peddle soft porn in the name of "edgy" photography). Yet how can we act unless we know the truth?
The truth is, the sites are getting worse. Each year, the monster grows bigger and fatter, sprouting so many heads that as soon as one is cut off another grows in its place.
It's easy for paedophiles to feed their loathsome imaginations with easily accessible sites, while the number of harder-to-access child pornography websites reported to police rocketed by nearly 80 per cent in 2005.
Although now only 0.4 per cent of child abuse images are hosted on UK internet sites (down from 18 per cent in 1997), the international scene becomes cleverer all the time, changing Internet Service Providers every few days, for example.
Sarah Robertson, of the Internet Watch Foundation, says: "It's a multi-million pound industry urgently requiring a unified international police presence to start hitting these sites harder so that British paedophiles can't just think they're avoiding the law by using foreign sites."
A spokesperson for the Child Protection and Exploitation Agency explains: "Since we were launched in 2006 to help fight internet predators and child abusers, there has been a 1,000 per cent rise in the number of reports we receive of suspect activity on the internet."
Last year, the organisation started a campaign called Think U Know, aimed at informing and advising children aged 11-15 on the dangers of the internet and how to protect themselves.
The Association of Chief Police Officers underlines that this approach is one way forward. They point out that, ironically, the trio of paedophiles were caught by means of the web: "Once, they would have hatched their perverse intent over the telephone and we wouldn't have had a record of those conversations.
"Because they chatted online and probably more freely than they would on the phone, everything the police needed was recorded on the internet."
They add ominously: "Even if every single police officer were targeted at the internet, we still wouldn't be able to keep every child safe. The best way of increasing safety online is to educate and inform the children themselves."
But this brings me to my second point. How can we educate our children to be careful, when they are assailed on all sides by toxic images of sexuality peddled by an older generation which should know better?
How can we teach them to show restraint - for example by not posting provocative images of themselves on sites like Bebo and MySpace - when there is little or no restraint in the culture around them?
On the day newspapers reported the jailing of the three men who wanted to "do a Soham", three red-top tabloids printed a picture of the pop-group Girls Aloud dressed as schoolgirls. They were part of a campaign by Walkers Crisps to raise money for Red Nose Day.
A commendable cause - but in using lecherous language like "saucy snap" and "every man's St Trinian's fantasy" and "every fella will want to check their vitals in biology class", those papers are pandering to the seediest male impulses. Of course, Girls Aloud are just having fun for charity. But nothing can be seen in isolation. Not any more.
A great American author, Edith Wharton, wrote in 1915: "What a woman was criticised for doing yesterday, she is ridiculed for not doing today." Nothing better sums up my point.
Young people who, in their hearts, feel threatened by the ubiquitous sexualising of everything, can't risk the mockery of their peers by saying so. Everybody, it seems, feels they must agree that what is "sexy" is "cool".
Children are sexualised long before they are emotionally able to cope; peer pressure amounts to tyranny and parents are too weak to resist.
Thus porn culture corrupts even those who have never seen hardcore pornography. The boundaries have been pushed out so far that what is acceptable now in advertising and TV would certainly have been banned just a few years ago.
Remember that Gucci advertisement, shot by Mario Testino and featured in Vogue? It showed a young man on his knees peering into a model's knickers, pulled down to reveal a "G" shaved into her pubic hair.
When those who consider themselves classy and sophisticated knowingly mimic the look of hardcore porn, everyone else follows.
We all know how crude the socalled lads' magazines have become, but (as Carol Sarler so powerfully argued in Wednesday's Mail) women's magazines like Cosmopolitan can be almost as bad - giving explicit descriptions of sexual techniques people would once have discovered in private.
We live in an age of voracious mass media, which peddles images of raw sexuality as never before. From Channel 4 bosses to magazine editors, clever people are happy to collude in the transgressing of taboos.
The British Board of Film Classification (no longer "Film Censorship", notice) has given certificates to movies which show actual sexual acts and penetration, such as Nine Songs. Object, and you're called a prude.
British TV viewers now have access to more porn than any other nation in Europe. Does anybody care? Hardly. Not so very long ago two brilliant journalists, A.A. Gill and Victoria Coren, each scripted and directed a porn movie, in order to write about it.
Of course, their accounts were very amusing. But why did they want to do it? Because they thought it witty and fun. Because porn is chic among the liberal intelligentsia who never have to walk in those harsh, mean streets where desperate young women, sometimes showing bruises on their faces and arms, are made to do vile things for the cameras.
They do not have to hear the screams of children "groomed" by being shown adult porn and then raped - their abuse shown to millions on the World Wide Web.
In our town centres, you see preteen girls dressed as go-go dancers in mini skirts or navel- showing jeans, with skimpy crop tops over their flat chests.
Somebody has bought them those clothes - those same parents I saw at the recent Pussy Cat Dolls gig in London, taking their children (some as young as five) to see a raunchy performance with sexual lyrics and explicit dancing.
Do those parents mind their daughters singing along to lyrics like "See the way we ride" and "Doncha wish your girlfriend was hot like me"? Do they have to hammer the nails in the coffin of innocence themselves?
Last year, Tesco was forced to remove the Peekaboo Pole-Dancing Kit (complete with "sexy garter") from the toys and games section of its website, and just a couple of years ago Asda provoked a furore for selling inappropriately adult lingerie for children, including thongs and push-up black lace bras. Yes, there are still sensible people who are vigilant, but there are far, far more who go along with the trend - anxious not to be called prudes.
If words and images did not have the power to alter human attitudes and behaviour, there would be no multi-million pound advertising industry.
You cannot say there is no connection at all between three paedophiles feeding their perversions by viewing incest sites on the internet and the widespread sexualisation of children in our culture.
In 1999, a Canadian court acquitted a man of possession of horrific child pornography on the grounds that "in a free and democratic society" criminalisation would "bear the hallmarks of tyranny".
That liberal consensus - which pleaded the rights of porn merchants on grounds of "freedom of speech" - has colluded in the fatal poisoning of our culture.
And if those of us who call for stricter standards are derided, if our real concerns are mocked as "moral panic", then tell me this - who will listen to the voices of the abused?
One of the entries in this year's Sundance Jerkfest was a treatise on beastiality. The critics loved it.
Need I say more?
1985 by Burgess
Sex and meaninglessness in western society, unions, and muslims destroy England.
More like a prophecy than a book.
Whenever you post a published article or editorial, only use the published title, and provide a source and a working link to the article.
Thanks.
I tried to post the title, I had to shorten it, it would not take it, too long!
Where is my posting now? Did youtake it down? This is an important issue and needs exposure.
Either that, or the Bolshevik hedonism being encouraged will abruptly end at the hands of an authoritarian government installed either as a response or as a consequence to this entire mess.
Exactly!!!
The Mohametans and Bolsheviks are eachother's userful idiots.
The winner gets to line up the losers in front of a trench.
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One of the problems with writing about this subject is that you cannot give examples in public -
Very true.........
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