Hello, hello, he’s back again. Although not necessarily — as the words of his 1972 hit had it — ‘on the right track’. Nobody, these past few weeks, has accused Gary Glitter of being on the right track. The lady in my local post office wants him strung up by his gonads and, from the various websites I’ve been trawling through, this a fairly popular denouement. Glitter was convicted of downloading pornographic images of children in Britain and, after he completed his briefish sentence, of sexually abusing two young girls in Vietnam, to which country he had fled. He served a longer sentence there and is now back in the UK somewhere, having failed to be admitted to China or Thailand. I can’t imagine why they didn’t want him.
Anyway, the worry now is that he will start on your kiddies, if you have any. Hell, he might already have started. He will be placed on the sexual offenders register and the Old Bill will know where he is; also, he will have to tell the police if he’s leaving the country for more than three days. But still — he’s loose and free and currently deliberating over where he might settle down. Rumour has it that it might be Hampshire, where he is currently staying with a friend, or it might be 50 or so miles away from where my children go to school. What shall I do? Give them knives? No child is safe. Luckily, however he disguises himself, he looks exactly like a paedophile is supposed to look, so we should be able to spot him as he leaps out from behind a bush bearing a bag of lemon bon bons and a drooled promise of puppies. But still — the rope around the gonads would make us all feel a lot safer, wouldn’t it?
Young men who stab people in the throat do not have to tell the police they are going abroad after they are released from prison. Nor, as it happens, do murderers. Just your kiddie fiddlers and other sex offenders. The campaigning organisations think paedophiles, no matter how minor their crimes (looking at stuff, rather than doing stuff, for example), should not be allowed to go abroad at all. When murderers, armed robbers and other assorted sociopaths and psychopaths are let loose after serving their sentences there is no campaign of hysteria whipped up in the newspapers, or websites teeming with demands to kill them by stringing them up by their gonads. There is a general consensus that, in the case of such criminals, we should let them be, despite the fact that they are no less likely to re-offend than paedophiles (more likely, in most cases). Gary Glitter is, obviously, foul. But the fear and paranoia which has been engendered by his return to the UK seems weird and disproportionate, rather like the obsessive manner in which we all agonised over the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann; it seems to be rooted in something well beyond the principal characters of the cases in question. The commonsense answer is to say that we most abhor crimes against the vulnerable — such as children — and that it is this which piques our interest. Well, sure; but there is some hidden component which drives us still further in our wish for revenge.
A couple of years ago a disability pressure group, in an attempt to press its case with greater vigour, asserted that one in three people living in Britain were ‘disabled’. This was a perfect example of what happens when palpably decent causes outreach themselves and become both ludicrous and dangerous. Of course, one in three British people are not disabled at all as you or I might conceive the term. But in order for such campaigning groups to impress upon us the need for redress it is crucial for them first to insist that the people whom they are salaried to represent are the victims of an organised conspiracy to do them down. And then secondly, almost paradoxically, that this beleaguered minority consists of almost everybody in the country — or at least a good third. As big a number as possible, anyway. You can see the same process at work in those forms you are asked to fill in by your local council or hospital, asking which race you class yourself as. Not, mark you, which race you actually are (by birth or parentage), but what you consider yourself to be.
Three years ago a top copper working for the Metropolitan Police’s paedophile unit announced that as many as one in six children in Britain had been the subject of sexual abuse. One in six. Do you believe that figure? It is absolute rubbish, of course. But it cannot be gainsaid, because the man who said it was an ‘expert’: he knew. And so, from this statement and previous statements like it, we whip ourselves into a frenzy of protectiveness and all the quangos and statutory bodies reach a state of unrelieved priapism and suddenly we are in a surreal world where almost every male or female over the age of 20 can be suspected of being a paedophile — because, with one in six kids being abused, well they probably are. And so you have the pensioner Betty Robinson accosted by a security guard and accused of paedophilia in her home town of Southampton because she took a photograph of an entirely empty open air swimming pool. Or a bloke in Dudley who was refused permission to watch his own son take part in a swimming lesson until he had cleared the necessary checks with the Criminal Records Bureau. It is why school sports days can no longer be photographed by proud parents, still less videoed: these are sensible measures designed to stop the abuse of children, remember? And so the National Association of Parent Teacher Associations is able to fulminate against parents who wish to video their kids in the sack race because ‘pictures of children can be sent anywhere in the world’.
Of course they can. By the same token, these days, anything might happen to anyone at any time. Our obsession with paedophilia, driven ever further by self-important single-issue pressure groups and acceded to by the statutory authorities, is far more dangerous to our kids than the return to these shores of Mr Paul Gadd, aka Gary Glitter. But it will not stop, because there is no mechanism in place to stop it.
