Tag: tabloids
Britain Arrests Hundreds Of Suspected Pedophiles

Britain Arrests Hundreds Of Suspected Pedophiles

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

LONDON — In a massive national dragnet, British police have arrested more than 600 suspected pedophiles who allegedly accessed pornographic images of children on the Internet, authorities said Wednesday.

The sweep comes at a time of heightened sensitivity over pedophilia in a country where sensational stories of the sexual abuse of minors regularly headline the tabloids, which some critics accuse of whipping up public hysteria over the issue.

Those arrested include doctors, lawyers, caregivers, and former police officers, according to Britain’s National Crime Agency. Of the 660 suspects, 39 were known sex offenders.

The arrests culminated a six-month investigation involving 45 different law-enforcement agencies across Britain. The National Crime Agency, which normally combats organized crime, declined to elaborate how detectives traced the suspects from their online activities but said that all the suspects had used the Internet to look at indecent images of children.

The sting operation comes against a backdrop of several high-profile figures accused of molesting minors in cases that often occurred decades ago.

One extremely popular children’s entertainer on the BBC, the late Jimmy Savile, is now believed to have abused more than 1,000 people, many of them minors, by using his celebrity and his charity work in hospitals to get access to victims. Revelations of the extent of Savile’s misdeeds helped force the resignation in 2012 of the head of the BBC after he was on the job for just a few weeks.

Last month, Rolf Harris, for years a beloved figure on British television, was convicted of sexually assaulting four girls in attacks dating as far back as the 1960s.

Other accused child molesters in recent years have included various TV stars, a member of Parliament, a well-known disc jockey, a pop singer, and a celebrity publicist who is almost as famous as some of his clients. Some have been convicted in court, others exonerated.

All have been caught up in a public furor over pedophilia that at times borders on hysteria.

Spurred by constant coverage of abuse in the tabloids, Britons reserve a special level of odium for pedophiles, with some people calling for the death penalty for offenders, even though the country has not practiced capital punishment for decades. In 2000, a doctor was driven from her home in Wales by vandals who sprayed graffiti on her house after confusing her job title, “pediatrician,” with “pedophile.”

The latest scandal over suspected child molesters reaches into the highest levels of government. Britain’s Home Office has come under fire for having apparently destroyed part or all of a dossier in the 1980s that purportedly detailed a ring of pedophiles in government positions.

The wave of arrests announced Wednesday has already resulted in some charges being brought, ranging from possession of child pornography to sexual assault.

“Some of the people who start by accessing indecent images online go on to abuse children directly,” Phil Gormley, the deputy director of the National Crime Agency, said in a statement. “So the operation is not only about catching people who have already offended. It is about influencing potential offenders before they cross that line.”

Some of the suspects had “unsupervised access” to minors as part of their jobs, the agency said. The sting operation had helped protect 400 children across the country, the agency said.

Photo via WikiCommons

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We’re All Making The Woody Allen Scandal Worse

We’re All Making The Woody Allen Scandal Worse

My absolute favorite tabloid newspaper headline ever appeared in something called the Weekly World News: “3-Breasted Gal Joins Clinton as His New Intern.” I still have a copy somewhere. Supposedly, the former president hired the “three-bosomed bombshell” after Hillary got caught cuddling with a space alien.

Alas, the more colorful supermarket tabloids are on the way out, victims of the Internet age, along with theoretically more serious publications like Vanity Fair and TheNew York Times. Titillating gossip about the sexual sins of movie stars, TV celebrities, athletes and politicians has been replaced by impassioned brawls about their moral fitness on social media.

Woody Allen, genius or pervert? Mia Farrow, mother of the century or virago? Dylan Farrow, victim then or victim now? And by whom? Almost everybody’s got an opinion, and it says here that nobody knows what they’re talking about. Sometimes it appears that the hardest words in the English language must be “I don’t know.”

Slate’s legal affairs correspondent Dahlia Lithwick put it best: “in the Court of Public Opinion there are no rules of evidence, no burdens of proof, no cross-examinations, and no standards of admissibility. There are no questions and also no answers….[it’s] what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies.”

Journalism 101: Anybody can say anything about anybody else. That doesn’t mean it belongs in TheNew York Times. I question the professional ethics of Nicholas Kristof’s using his column to intervene in a friend’s brutal family dispute where he admittedly has no idea what happened. It’s a 20-year-old charge that was investigated and dropped. There’s no new evidence. The statute of limitations has run out. Other than revenge, what’s the point?

It’s an online rite of Dionysian celebrity sacrifice; a 21st-century pagan ritual, although not without its entertainment value. Previous to the Internet, who’d have known how many seers, augurs, necromancers and mind-readers live among us? Innocent or guilty? Let’s get out the Ouija board, throw the I-Ching, and fetch the dunking stool from the barn. Bind the witch and throw him in the pond. If he floats, we’ll hang him.

Comment lines can be amazing. Show me an entry beginning “As a board certified child psychiatrist,” and it’s 20 to 1 what’s coming: a few hundred words of factually-challenged speculation followed by an online diagnosis and a guilty verdict. Have Woody Allen’s films featured “a steady theme of a male protagonists finding love with a younger woman?” (Unlike, of course, Clint Eastwood’s.)

Very well then, he must be a pedophile.

News flash, frigid gentlewomen of the jury: ALL straight men find 19 year-old women desirable. They just don’t want to make fools of themselves.

I once knew a business tycoon in his fifties who dated a teenager. What on earth did they talk about, asked an incredulous friend?

“High school football,” he said.

None of which makes it OK to run off with your lover’s adopted daughter at any age. Out in the boondocks where I live, people get shot for that stuff.

In the abstract, there’s undeniable truth on both sides. The sexual victimization of children is far more common than many wish to believe, and victims are too often silenced. However, purely false or imaginary abuse charges have become the tactical nuclear weapons of divorce and custody fights everywhere. If Mia Farrow expected to win new converts, she should have left out the bit about Frank Sinatra fathering Woody Allen’s legal son—the one he’s been paying child support to all along.

Floated in Vanity Fair, the story generated headlines, but not credibility. And no, that’s not “mansplaining,” “slut-shaming,” or any of the other cant terms used to silence skeptics. Even in the Court of Public Opinion, it’s inadvisable to admit falsifying something so elemental. Could Farrow really imagine that would lend support to her allegations against the creep?

Or would it merely strengthen the conclusions of the investigators at the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital? “Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family,” or “that [she] was coached or influenced by her mother.”

“Disturbed family” is putting it gently. I wouldn’t let those two adopt a kitten. To me, the most affecting part of the whole thing was Kristof’s description of the now 28-year-old woman “curled up in a ball on her bed, crying hysterically” when she heard of Woody Allen being given a Golden Globe award. Somebody should give her Elizabeth Smart’s terrific book on healing from sexual trauma. Whatever happened to Dylan at age 7, obsessive dwelling on it has done her incalculable harm.

Meanwhile, regardless of good intentions, we feuding voyeurs and sadists are only making everything worse.

Photo: edavidove via Flickr