Peter Tatchell Arrested - Outrageous

Nope this man should have zero public profile

He should take his pro trans protests to Palestine and see what happens there

To positively review one paedophile book, @Thegreyhound, may be regarded as a misfortune; to positively review two of them looks like carelessness

All the otherwise sane people got PIE's number by the mid-80s. Most of the stuff on Tatchell dates from the late 1990s.

I have looked at the facts and have posted them on this thread - are my images not showing up for you? I don't know whether Tatchell is himself a paedophile or whether he just supports paedophilia and likes to hang around with paedophiles and with abused, looked-after children. I've read enough of his views to conclude that either way he is dangerous. 'Nuance' is not an appropriate response here.

Speaking of child marriage, he's in favour of that too.

It’s not very much better. He was removed from a protest by police because of his message (specifically, because he opposed Hamas), which is bad enough, and then locked up for five hours.

Either the police officer thought protesting Hamas at a pro-Palestine protest was a crime, or he knew it wasn’t and abused his power.

Either way it’s worrying.

It’s true he’s a serial protester, but you don’t lose the right to protest by using it.

I see your point and again agree with most of what you say... but human rights to free speech don't come with a caveat of "but only if expressed in a approved spaces, and it does not apply if people want to use threats of violence to silence you." I can see why the police have to make decisions in the real world, but it is appalling if human rights are curtailed by threats of violence, and more so when the reason for the threat of violence is an expression of hatred for an illegal terrorist org.

Is it only Palestinians that bother you? Why are you not campaigning for the Sudanese?

The mass murder of innocent Palestinian civilians by bombs and starvation is what is outrageous. Where are your priorities? Yes the police are a worry on multiple fronts, is this seriously the first time you’ve been bothered about it?

Interesting Q&A on Tatchell's own website, especially this:

Q: Do you stand by your statement that “it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”, particularly given that the statement occurs at the end of a piece discussing adults having sex with children and not children having sex with others of their same age group?

A: Some adults say that when they were children they had sex with adults and that the sex was not unwanted, abusive or harmful. They say that, not me. I merely repeated their view. I accept that this is their sincerely held view as mature, responsible, ethical adults. But I do not agree with them. Their view is not my view. I disagree with it, which is why my letter said that paedophilia is “impossible” to condone. This means I do not condone it. I condemn it. Children cannot give valid consent to sex. It is abuse and is rightly illegal

The dishonesty is off the scale, because while he now claims "they said that not me" and that he doesn't agree with the view stated, the original statement wanted "society to accept the truth, etc, etc" which clearly indicates that he did support their stance

Hamas are responsible. Palestinians are not. Women and childremn are not. Hospitals are not. If this is a war, and Israel says it is, then there are rules to war and countries are expected to abide by those rules. Israel is not doing so. What Hamas did was appalling and I in no way support them or it. But a proportional response is not razing a nation to the ground and killing civilians in revenge. That is as barbarous as what Hamas did.

Hmm I've read his initial letter to the guardian and his reverse ferret on his website and other interviews he did. After the letter he got and rightly so quite a bit of flack from the gay community and general public before he went out onto his face saving exercise of they tricked me, honest. And I also mentioned government ties to pie in a previous post, it certainly wasn't just a handful either.

So while I agree research is the key, assuming that those of us posting what an abhorrent man he is haven't done any research is in fact, wrong. Some of us have and found him lacking.

In all consciousness I cannot and will not support him.

Yes, if this is all there was to his arrest I agree it is both wrong and worrying.

I think this particular individual holds some vomit-inducing views and would therfore suggest that it would be a sensible precaution to have a therapist on standby for anyone who was ever obliged to (lawfully) trawl through his harddrive.

However, the law should apply to everyone equally and in my view a very wide latitude should given to what people can say without fear of arrest.

I'd much rather know what people like this are thinking than not. Apart from anything else it gives me the opportunity avoid them.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for him as an individual and have to fight against a certain schadenfreude here, but I'd defend those principles to the death so that they apply to everyone, including the brilliant GC Mumsnetters.

It also doesn’t make you a paedophile to note that different cultures and different times have held different views on ages of consent. In the UK girls used to be married at extremely young for example- 12. Does noting these things make someone a paedophile or are they just anthropological or historical facts?

It does if you do not criticise them and try claim they are justified because ‘other cultures’.

I would say it’s a sign of the times.
Anyone can report anyone they disagree with as committing a hate crime.
The law in the UK is an ass

You don't agree that isreal isnt commiting genocide - you aren't helping your case here for being a reasonable person who respects the rights of other here OP...

Neither do I, OP, but don't discount the fact that the police act on intelligence as well as what's actually in front of them at the time, and this being a deeply toxic attention seeker there's every chance he may have planned some further stunt or speech during or immediately after the event

If the police got wind of that, and especially if they'd come to know what it may have contained, getting him out of the way until things were over might have made a lot of sense

I think you are missing my point. If I want to exercise my legally held view that immigrants are welcome here, I would not do so, for example, in the middle of a crowd of people suggesting that hotels should be burned down. That would be a bloody stupid thing to do, wouldn't it? I would certainly be at the counter protest, and I would expect the police to manage and protect both sides of the event provided that they all remained within the law, no matter how much I might despise "the other side". Nobody was telling him that he didn't have a right to express his views or that they weren't legal. They were telling him where to express them (i.e. not in the pro-Palestine group because they objected to him being there) and he refused. I don't know hat the pro-Palestine group think or believe, and there is no evidence they supported violence or Hamas. But they did not want his opinions in the space that it had been agreed they could use, and he was welcome to join the other protest (if they wanted him, I guess) or stand on a corner on his own (my personal preference). He was going out of his way to be goady, and he wanted to be arrested. It isn't the first time. It won't be the last.

It is frustrating to see people wilfully refusing to notice the fact that Tatchell completely (and rightly) disavowed PIE and has stated many times the obvious point that sex with children is ‘abhorrent’ and ‘impossible to defend’. By all means criticise him but preferably not on a spurious basis.

Unfortunately a lot of otherwise sane people came into contact with Dunn and his ilk. PIE as an organisation managed to hitch itself to the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s partly on the back of the fact that the NCCL wanted to reduce the age of consent to 14- people like Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt were involved with the NCCL at this time. PIE was a nasty and devious group that should never have got a toehold in anywhere- it was revolting and the fact that so many people involved in it were youth workers or teachers is horrifying. However, if you’re going to smear Tatchell as some kind of paedophile then at least look at the facts as to what he did and said which are freely available with a quick use of Google.

Personally I wouldn’t support a lowering of the age of consent to 14 which the NCCL did and I believe Tatchell still does. (The idea being that since it happens anyway it is wrong to criminalise the young people involved) However, it’s worth bearing in mind that any talk of lowering the age of consent for gay men in the 1980s took place at a time when the age of consent for gay men was 21 which now we all (hopefully) agree was unequal and too high.

It also doesn’t make you a paedophile to note that different cultures and different times have held different views on ages of consent. In the UK girls used to be married at extremely young for example- 12. Does noting these things make someone a paedophile or are they just anthropological or historical facts?

But anyway don’t let any kind of nuance (or even research) get in the way of the Tatchell
hate!

I like that he called out Hamas; I don’t like that he used ‘outing’ as a method in the 90s. I think his activism is important, I also think he can come across as a twat at times. Should he have been arrested this time around? Surely not. And is it better to have people in public life who ask questions and raise debate, surely it is?

I hadn’t heard about Peter Tatchell’s associations with paedophilia before this and went to do a bit of research- the following is from his own foundation where he tries to refute the claims but honestly the questions asked are so damning and his excuses are so weak (“they tricked me!”) it pretty much does the opposite

https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/what-peter-tatchell-really-said-about-child-sex-abuse/

Haven’t women been placed in a cell ‘for just stating a fact?’ Sounds like he got some just desserts to me.

Yeah obviously he shouldn’t have been arrested for that, that’s a righteous cause but the pedo apologist gets no sympathy from me.

Obviously PT and KJK are rather different, but there is a massive irony that KJK got arrested for being untoward towards paedophiles, whilst a paedophile apologist gets arrested for (effectively, not literally) being untoward towards a proscribed and repellent islamic terrorist organisation.

I am concerned about recent restrictions on our right to protest. Deeply worrying.

Not at all concerned about the murky world of Peter Tatchell's protests. A man who aspires to be provocative.

Completely agree.