Johann Hari: Alan Bennett and the question of innocence
In his new play, [Bennett] takes his dark analysis of pederasty further
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Over the past few years, there has been a drip-drip of artists defending old men who abuse their power over young boys and girls for sexual pleasure. It ranges from Alan Bennett's claim that a teacher who gropes his pupils can be the real child or true innocent, to the widespread assertion in Hollywood that when a 44 year old man drugs and anally rapes a 13 year-old girl, it is not "rape-rape". Indeed, Gore Vidal says the victim is "a young hooker".
Yet there is, largely, silence in response – and I realise I too have held off from writing this column several times. Why? Talking about this requires me to criticise some artists whose work I love, and it forces me to remember a period of my life I've tried hard to forget. But when I saw Alan Bennett's new play The Habit of Art at the National Theatre, I felt somebody had to say this.
I have no problem with artists sympathetically depicting the inner lives of paedophiles and pederasts; indeed, it can be a good thing. Every human being should be understood, and to understand is not to excuse. We should, for example, know that 70 per cent of child abusers have themselves been abused as children: it tempers the paedophile-bashing lynch mob, and forces us to look for humane solutions. It also helps avoid bad legislation like Megan's Law, which – by driving released offenders away from their families and friends and sending them into isolation – actually increases the number of children who are abused.
What I object to is not the compassionate depiction of these men, but the claim that the victims are unharmed, or even enjoy it. This suggestion has featured in the work of several writers I normally admire. In Bennett's previous play The History Boys, a 50-something teacher called Hector routinely gropes his 17-year-old pupils' genitals – and they react either with flattered amusement, or by longing to be the next to be groped. The headmaster who objects is depicted as a prejudiced buffoon. The most sympathetic boy in the class – Posner – also grows up to be a pederast himself, who finds it hard to resist groping his pupils.
In interviews, Bennett makes it clear he is on Hector's side, saying: "I've been criticised for not taking this seriously enough. I'm afraid I don't take that very seriously if they're 17 or 18. I think they are actually much wiser than Hector. Hector is the child, not them." He added that good teaching is inherently "erotic".
In his new play, Bennett takes this analysis further. Benjamin Britten, the composer, is one of the main characters. He was sexually attracted to young boys – 13 was his perfect age – and throughout his life he picked out choirboys, gave them a special role in performing his music, and lavished adoration on them. According to the book Britten's Children, he appeared naked before them, snuggled with them in bed, although he didn't actually have sex with them. As with Michael Jackson, the parents seemed to know what was going on, and acquiesce.
Yet Bennett, in his introduction to the play, expresses only one problem with this. "A boy whose voice suddenly broke could find himself no longer invited ... which would seem potentially far more damaging to a child's psychology than too much attention." He also spares a thought for the "fat boys and ugly boys" who were never admitted to this sanctum.
This analysis also underpins Stephen Fry's play Latin!, which was published in 1992. It is set in a prep school where the central character, Dominic Clarke, is a teacher who "carnally violates" a 13-year-old orphan in ways one character says are "too vile, too diverse, for the sane mind to grasp."
Fry distills the tragic psychology of paedophiles with his usual brilliance. Dominic says: "When I was a boy, I thought, slept and played like a boy. Then nature began to drop hints about a change in status: a cracking voice, hairs about the buttocks, acne ... I never asked to be a man. I never wanted to be man. I want to be a boy. If when nature starts thrusting pimples and hairs through the skin, a boy could be kept from school and the world of men and just carry on behaving as a boy, then perhaps nature would give up and the pimples and hairs would recede. The permanent boy could be found."
This is precisely how the paedophiles I have interviewed in prison viewed themselves. And isn't it a description of what Michael Jackson tried to do? When seclusion didn't work, he turned to the surgeons to create the permanent boy.
But the play has a nasty sting. Dominic runs away with the 13 year old to live in Morocco. They write back to explain that there, young boys and men can live together as sexual partners. The school's pupils, en masse, demand to be allowed to live in Morocco. The plain implication is that these 13-year-olds were also longing to be abused by older men.
I know Bennett and Fry are wrong, because when I was a teenager, I was subjected to the persistent sexual advances of an older man in a position of authority over me. I managed to escape the situation without being abused, but I know other boys did not. There can indeed be an initial element of being flattered, or even excited – but it is also married to feelings of fear and revulsion that somebody who is supposed to have offered safety is offering danger. The adolescent is not in a position to make an informed choice. It is healthy for adolescents to explore their sexualities among themselves – but when an adult intrudes into this process, it can damage their sexual development with consequences for the rest of their lives.
I'm not interested in launching a hysterical attack on Bennett and Fry. I would like to appeal to their empathy – a quality they have demonstrated in so much of their work – and urge them to direct it not just towards Hector and Dominic, but also to their victims.
This can be a difficult topic to raise because the vilest slur against gay people has long been that we are closet paedophiles. The defence of Polanski showed there are plenty of straight people prepared to make excuses for abusing young girls, just as there are – alas – some gay people prepared to make excuses for abusing young boys. Yet this prejudice still crops up: recently, Richard Littlejohn accused Peter Mandelson of wanting to live on "the Rue Des Jeunes Garcons". It is, of course, nonsense: Mandelson is no more likely to want to have sex with a young boy than Littlejohn to have sex with a young girl.
But let's look back towards Britten. Or indeed to Oscar Wilde, who would (rightly) still be imprisoned today for having paying to have sex with very poor underage teenagers. Did the violent suppression of homosexuality perhaps have a deforming effect on their sexualities? When they were 12 or 13, they had a fleeting moment when they could explore their sexualities with other boys without shame – but it quickly slammed shut as they realised this behaviour was deemed immoral. Is this why they seemed to keep returning to 13 year olds in their fantasies as representing an idealised time of sexual freedom?
The taboos protecting young people from sexual abuse took a long time to build up. They have to be protected from erosion, because Alan Bennett is terribly wrong – the "real children" are never old men who want to cop a feel of adolescents.
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Comments
you are absolutely right. I have actually done research on this topic. I used to think this was a potential, but probably not very significant problem.
However, possibly one of the most significant conclusions I have been forced to draw is that the measures we put in place to try and protect children are not failing only in a few children who manage to "slip the net", but very likely are causing problems in a large proportion of cases. There is actually a pretty simple reason for this - the attitude to age of consent laws is fundamentally self contradictory. If you consider a distribution, you can see that in order to set the age of consent to protect the most children, you are necessarily forced to admit that most children are quite capable of consenting illegally. (If this doesn't make sense I would be quite happy to provide a more detailed explanation).
There is no debating this argument, it is a very significant mathematical fact. Yet we defiantly continue to treat this law in an absolute black and white sense. The official government guidelines on this topic state no less than four times that abused children who do not perceive themselves as abused should be put into counseling to have their mind changed, a process which may take "weeks or months". This turns out to be *far* from uncommon, and is IMHO evidence that the statistical argument I mentioned above is not only a theoretical possibility, but actually playing out in the real world. The consequences of this are devastating - it means that in trying to protect children we are only ending up needlessly convincing many of their own abuse! Even worse, upon the inevitable success of such procedures, we take this as a sign that they are effective, and are encouraged to reapply them ever more vehemently.
I would like to make clear that I am not arguing (a) that the gravity of real, abusive situations should be played down (b) there is no such thing as real abuse, with devastating consequences. However, I feel that in getting over hysterical about children and sex, society is only acting as its own downfall in this instance. We absolutely must remember that everything exists in distributions, and trying to approximate reality with a black and white picture is not only artificial, but as demonstrated above, also logically impossible. Some things are abusive because they represent an irreversible psychological effect on a person. Other things are perceived as abusive only because we as a society promote this viewpoint - things that in a different society need not have any negative effect. It is very important to distinguish between these two situations. If a child says they do not feel abused, (which, it is probably worth mentioning again is actually surprisingly common), why do we feel the duty to turn around and convince them for some philosophical reason that they actually were?
Of course, this does not mean it is desirable for children to have sex with adults or even with each other. For this reason I still support the existence of an age of consent, although essentially this comes with the necessary stipulation that we do not use the black-and-white model of abuse, and instead modify legislation to include the lesser charge of "irresponsible" sexual behavior. I put a lot of faith into human ability to reliably distinguish the good from the bad, just like we do for adults.
Shame, guilt and state enforced ignorance, means children can be easily manipulated by psychopathic individuals - and even well meaning folks too. All sexual feelings a child has is deemed bad - even hugging that causes butterflies in the stomach. Boys are taught this, the minute they get a hard-on with their parents for the first time. Children therefore just feel bad about themselves at some deep level. This can disempower the child/adult to know when abuse is really taking place, and therefore knowing/believing they are entitled to sovereignty of their own thoughts and feelings. It is a confusing mess what we currently teach children, no wonder people get away with it. Children are property, just like woman use to be. Their sexuality is not their own.
I was six years old, when I had a consensual erotic experience with my best mate, also six years old. Was that bad - evil ? If my parents had told me it was OK, would that be child abuse? currently, I believe, it would be legally. As a child I was left with a profound dis-trust of adults because of these strange attitudes.
Just because a damaged adult emotionally remains a child does not mean they won't do similar emotional damage to the children they exploit.
We are meant to care for our children, not use them as sexual outlets. Come on. Are the children meant to take responsibility for the emotional and sexual confusion of the adults responsible fort them?
Men on average are 1/3 stronger than woman, do we ban all heterosexual sex? Should thick men, be banned from having sex with intelligent woman?
Common sense tells us no, not in all cases - perhaps in some cases with other relevant factors. Why do we not apply the same logic to all people. I am not absolutely sure why, but I am sure I would want scientists, ethics commitees, AND parents to look at this area without the censorship of a powerful minority of people. Thought experiments harm know one.
"I know Bennett and Fry are wrong, because when I was a teenager, I was subjected to the persistent sexual advances of an older man in a position of authority over me. I managed to escape the situation without being abused, but I know other boys did not."
This is actually a false inference. Just because you were unreceptive to the advances of an adult man, does not mean others would be the same. You may simply not have been gay, or attracted to those older than yourself. Other children may be either of these things, and in fact there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many are.
As I point out in a comment below, we must remember that everything exists in distributions. Some children are attracted only to those around their own age, others are also attracted to people older than themselves. Some paedophiles are 50+ year old men, others are 12 years old, and may be either male or female. Some paedophiles step well over the boundaries of acceptability by making unwanted advances on children. Others desire nothing less than a mutually desired, consensual and beneficial relationship, and if that doesn't exist then they simply don't have sex. (Of course, this could go either way, but without further details, it is not implausible that you were not merely lucky to escape such advances - it may have simply been realised that there was no interest.) It is no good dealing in stereotypes. Paedophiles are distributed like any other group in society, including morals.
(For more on this, I would recommend the recent book "Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction to Children" by Dr. Sarah Goode.)
For those who think that the evidence with which they are presented is more than enough reason to doubt the validity of the above, I would encourage you to consider the following. I think many people would be shocked as to the degree with which they are taken in by the selectivity, exaggeration and spin of media reporting and police public relations. Also I think many people would be shocked by the amount of horribly bad science there is out there - science that they presumably take on trust is done to professional standards. Scientists who try to provide unbiased reports are often prevented from doing so by the law, by ethics comittees, by the inability to find funding, and also because they are simply scared of the media backlash others have been met with, which in certain cases have spelled the ends of careers. All of these things significantly skew reporting strongly in favour of those with a point to prove.
It is also significant to note that the way society currently operates allows for those with extreme opinions to rise straight to the top of the legal profession, and abuse the powers they are granted, a phenomenon I like to refer to as "legal vigilantism". I believe that much legislation represents the views of these people, rather than those of the general population. Even worse, I also believe that most people would also be shocked by the degree to which trivial convictions are spun, exaggerated, reported as the victorious defeat of a dangerous predator and generally used to demonstrate the effectiveness of police tactics in the first against child abuse. It is exactly this exaggeration that promotes stereotyping and hysteria, and is leveraged by these individuals to gain increasingly intrusive powers.
Level 1 indecent images include: non eroitc images of partially clothed children in legitimate situations (for example in swimming trunks, or without a top on), cartoons, erotic images of people over 18 who nevertheless appear to be under 18 and legitimate images which have been digitally edited to appear illegal. Level 1 images may also include images of fuly clothed children in legitimate situation, if a police officer deems it to be sexually suggestive. Although this does potentially cover abusive images, what is deemed 'sexually suggestive' can be dubious and obviously does not have to represent abuse. Level 1 images also include legitimate images of naked children, for example images from a nudist camp. Many level 1 images would be deemed acceptable in the hands of a non-suspected paedophile, yet would be used to pursue a conviction against a suspected paedophile.
While the eradication of child sex offenses is obviously commendable, we must remember two things. Firstly, we will never eradicate sex offenses against children. Our entire system of justice relies on crimes being committed before we can remove damaged individual from society. The necessarily perpetual existence of child abuse will always be leveraged by law enforcement to pull on heart strings. Secondly, most paedophiles are not dangerous predators and many are quite capable of living within the law. Children are not the only people the law is designed to protect, and they are already very well protected. We are IMHO long past the point at which increasing severity of legislation is in increasing the protection of children, and certainly long past the point at which the increasing severity of legislation brings benefit without significant negative side effects to thousands of harmless paedophiles, and even adults in general.
The police may get results, but they are only getting results due to a 'brute force' approach, not because they are doing their job in an effective, clever way. Yet the reporting tells a different story entirely. To me, this is entirely unacceptable.
1. It can be used as evidence.
2. Let the Victum/Parents/Police/Jury, etc decide if harm was caused
3. The victim has nothing to be ashamed of - sex and nudity are not bad. Rape is bad
4. Censoring is like confirming that the victim should some how be ashamed of being harmed. Or perhaps ashamed of enjoying parts of the overall experience.
5. It stops the abuser from being seen how they really are. It just protects the abuser really. Post the stuff on YouTube like we do war criminals and other sadists - what is so special about sexual abuse?
6. Some people might get off on it, but quite frankly their imagination and real life is far more dirty and perverve
7. If it is is free why pay for it, and abuse victims for money?
8. Seeing horror motivates society to act...eventually! But far quicker if evil is censored. Knowing the nature of horror and ugliness helps us recognize, attain and move closer to beauty.
I am about to read:
Reclaiming Eros: sacred whores & healers, by Suzanne Blackburn & Margaret Wade
Male Intergenerational Intimacy. Dr Theo Sandfort et al
I don't really understand why people think that because someone was abused as a child makes it mroe likely they will abuse as an adult, and even if so, why we should feel more sympathy. As I understand it most paedophiles are so because that is what they like, not a reaction to previous abuse. Regardless, paedos can't be cured and should be locked away perpetually.
I remember the The Sun newspaper doing a countdown to unveiling a topless Sam Fox at age 16, at the time few negative comments were past in the general population. Clearly this was disturbing behaviour by The Sun. Many men (like the Catholic Church) are sex obsessed, and in my opinion need to just have some intimate, loving, hot sex to cool their perversion!
Sam Fox was a sexy 15 year old girl, and few men I know would disagree.
Sexually feeling not wrong, what we do with them, may be wrong
Rape can be very damaging, particularly if the person believes that some how they are to blame, and that the rape is OK, e.g. wifes historically did not have the right, not to give consent. In Islam I believe the woman is expected to satisfy her husband's needs. Her needs come second to his. Ideally it should be mutual, but that is an aim, not a right.
You are talking about rape, not consentual sex. If a child can consent to a hug, a massage or a kiss then perhaps they can consent to different types of sex. In Mexican culture children historically are soothed to sleep by genital stroking, is that abuse? Where is the harm? Rape is rape. Sex is not bad in itself. Religion can causes harm to woman and children - where is the real out cry?