BBC Radio 4 series this week about PIE: In Dark Corners

[ILikeDungs]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00272c6

Starts Wednesday 8th Jan. 9:30 a.m. R4

Journalist Alex Renton is shown a secret document, containing the names and addresses of people signed up to a pro-paedophile group called the Paedophile Information Exchange, or PIE, which was active in the 1970s and 80s.
That’s not all: weeks after getting the membership list Alex meets a contact who gives him bags full of documents, crammed with reports, contact details, letters.
As Alex starts following up on leads; detail of the criminal activities committed by some of PIE’s members, and those connected with them, begins to emerge.
It’s a lot to take in. Alex is not only a journalist, he’s a survivor of child sexual abuse. All of this information about PIE; it feels like a heavy weight to carry. Are children still at risk?

Yeah, I think this is a foundational, but often unacknowledged, belief of that generation and ideological system.

They have this idea that "natural man" is pure and free of the vices created by civilization.

Episode 3 starts in a couple of minutes.

Ahh. As PIE was getting more cosy with the Establishment, Mary Whitehouse made a public stand against PIE and scored a victory over the Establishment funding PIE. Then more Conservatives joined Whitehouse's campaign but was opposed by the NCCL and Harriet Harman.

Before I read Lolita, I thought it was all about how the "unreliable narrator" convincingly twists the truth to make you genuinely start to sympathise with his behaviour.

But it's not that at all. Humbert may be an unreliable narrator, but - despite the beautiful prose - he's not skilled enough to actually get you on his side. (At least in my case, though apparently others have somehow been fooled.) It's abundantly clear from the very start that he's an absolute monster and the child is very much innocent in everything.

It looks like when Police investigations identified senior members of the Establishment, those investigations would be suppressed. Although it would be good to find out more at this remove, the Home Office has lost or destroyed all of the relevant documents.

I think PIE benefitted from the unwillingness of the likes of HH and the NCCL to appear 'uncool' and illiberal. The #bekind of its day.

There was probably private disquiet - I bet none of them would have let a PIE member babysit their children, and I wouldn't be surprised if Harriet Harman & co believed deep down that men having sex with children was totally unacceptable - but nobody was brave enough to say out loud that PIE was dangerous and wrong. Because that would be aligning themselves with the likes of Mary Whitehouse and ugly man-hating radical lesbians🙄

It's such a good illustration of Burke's observation that 'All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'.

Agreed.

Just listened to Episode 3. The issue of why the people, virtually all men, on the PIE membership list weren't investigated and prosecuted was addressed. The various points I recall are:

Simply being a member of PIE was not a criminal offence.

The team investigating the list had a lot of other responsibilities as well and funding/time were limited.

The criminal justice system at the time was simply not treating these cases seriously enough, especially where the accused were important and influential people whose pathetic excuses for their behaviour (i.e. abuse of children) were taken at face value.

Thatcher, for example, intervened to try to prevent Sir Peter Hayman, a very senior diplomat and MI6 officer, from being named and prosecuted for possession of obscene material. (He was a PIE member.) It all came out in the end, in part thanks to Private Eye. He must have been a huge security risk, but maybe it was considered just too damaging to admit that yet again the British security services had assumed that a public school and Oxbridge-educated pillar of the Establishment must be a jolly good chap who could be treated as above suspicion by virtue of his birth. The Met officer who had been investigating him was quoted as saying that he was told Hayman was suicidal and this was why the investigation was to be halted. He pointed out that during the period when he was allegedly scarcely able to leave his house he had managed to appear on Mastermind twice. This would be funny in other circumstances, but it's enraging here.

I am stunned by the one menioned at the beginning where Richard Bigham, soon to be Viscount Mersey, was introduced to a woman who let him abuse her own young children in return for money. He got off with a suspended sentence, which did not prevent him from taking up his seat in the House of Lords a year later. The mother and the man who introduced the peer to her got custodial sentences. There's a lot more detail on that here (you will need a strong stomach): https://scepticpeg.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/pie-member-herman-jacob-spielman-dr-quack-the-trafficker-procurer-and-international-pornographer/

There was a suggestion too that the security services were finding it convenient to let PIE operate as I assume they were able to pressure some of the members into working for them as a result. This was considered more important than preventing abuse of children, I suppose.

Next week he will be talking to the social worker who got hold of the PIE list and eventually passed it to the BBC.

There was a suggestion too that the security services were finding it convenient to let PIE operate as I assume they were able to pressure some of the members into working for them as a result. This was considered more important than preventing abuse of children, I suppose.

That was one of the reasons the Kincora Boys' Home was not investigated. Useful MI5 blackmail fodder (and reward for interested and co-operative members of the Establishment), so what about the children.

Yes, Private Eye was onto that too.

Just listened to last week's episode. More extraordinary stuff. Focused on Peter Righton, a known paedophile who was a very influential social worker specialising in child protection and an academic. One of his textbooks is still on the shelves of many university libraries, even though it's known he was a senior member of PIE and had publicly said that he thought 'consensual' sex between children and adults was fine. He is known to have been an active paedophile himself, as was his partner - both of them grooming boys in special schools - partner was a teacher there, and then headteacher, Righton was a governor - and then abusing them and their friends. Righton was a senior adviser to the Department of Health in the 1980s and never went to prison. His partner did, but far too late in life.

Children just don't matter, do they? Troubled children from dysfunctional families have just been written off and blamed for anything awful that happens to them. It makes me sick to my stomach.

I was looking for this thread to comment after this episode. The fact that he worked his way up through to the top of social work is disgusting.

JFC just listened through to Ep 3 and the parallels with gender identity stuff are uncanny, almost like there is a playbook Dentons. HH must have been incredibly naive, but we have seen her type over and over again.

""what she achieved" was to muddy the discussion around content and availability to provoke an almost knee-jerk "If Mary Whitehouse objects then it's worth seeing" response."

I remember that too and went along with it. Now I am more aware of the role of the "pro-permissive" aka "pro-progressive" propaganda of the time in shaping public opinion and provoking the "almost knee-jerk", ie. unthinking "virtuous", response to Whitehouse.

So I am not so sure that it was "what she achieved" but rather what anti-Whitehouse propaganda achieved.

It was stumbling across this interview by Jill Tweedie that made me start to have a rethink, as Whitehouse does not come across at all as the prudish, out of touch, curtain-twitching, bossy busy-body that I was led to believe she was.

What also struck me was the contrast between Whitehouse's extensive knowledge and experience in child sex education, expressed in a strong regional accent, and the condescending, insistent but ill-informed certainty of plummy-voiced interviewer Jill Tweedie.

Mary Whitehouse interview | Sex Education | Jill Tweedie | Good Afternoon | 1973 | Part 1

Mary Whitehouse interview | Sex Education | Jill Tweedie | Good Afternoon | 1973| Part 2

Class-based snobbery, sexism and misogyny were much bigger factors back then even than now. It makes me wonder how much the denigration of Whitehouse and failure to give due consideration or even air-time to her arguments was due to Establishment under-rating and disparagement of the opinions of an uppity "provincial" woman?

She said of Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969,

"He is the man I hold most responsible for the state of our country today . . For 11 years hardly a week went by without a sniping reference to me. And he gave access to anyone who was prepared to say anything morally subversive. They censored me, while accusing us of wanting to impose censorship on television."

"There was, indeed, something pathological in Sir Hugh's attitude towards Mrs Whitehouse. He purchased a naked portrait of her, adorned with six breasts, by Lawrence Isherwood and (it was said) would amuse himself by throwing darts at this picture, squealing with pleasure as he made a hit."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/6605110/Mary-Whitehouse.html

Given the long history of the BBC's harbouring and protection of paedophiles, that anecdote about Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC, is very telling for its sexualised, bestial and violent degradation of a woman who campaigned to protect children from exposure to violence and porn and who condemned the aims of PIE.

Reminded me of Lisa Muggeridge's video:

Social work training: Ever present risk of predatory behaviour

Two minute search turned up this - there might be more:

Paedophilia

Paedophilia presents a paradigm case of how a sexual perversion can be normalised. A campaign to decriminalise men’s sexual use of children emerged from the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the gay liberation movement. By the 1970s a campaign to reduce or eliminate the age of consent, which prevented men from sexually using children, was well underway in many countries including the US, the UK, the Netherlands and France. It was led by gay men. The campaign was widely supported by the Left who saw it as progressive. There were many paedophile groups, but the main one in the UK was the Paedophile Information Exchange, called PIE for short, which advertised trips to South East Asia to use boys to its members. It was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties, which is now Liberty, the main rights organisation in the UK, for several years without any objections. Feminists in the UK and the US fought back. We formed groups to fight the abolition or reduction of the age of consent and I was in one of these in Leeds in the UK in 1978. We were successful in defeating their aims and showing that paedophilia was violence against children. In the early 1980s a number of members of PIE were prosecuted for sexual acts with children and the group was disbanded in 1983. The paedophile movement was as acceptable in the late 1970s and early 1980s as another men’s sexual rights movement, the transgender rights movement, is today. Then, as now, feminists opposed the men’s demands whilst the Left supported them. There are fascinating similarities.

There was a lull in the promotion of paedophilia, but by the 1990s it was underway again. The normalisation of child sexual abuse was supercharged through the development of the Internet which allowed the creation of support networks and a community of interest, and of an online child pornography industry. The campaign is presently achieving some significant successes in increasing social tolerance. Though not generally successful in achieving law change, paedophile activists have achieved a change in nomenclature, to minority attracted persons, and established a category now fully recognised in the field of criminology, of ‘good’ paedophiles. The ‘good’ paedophiles are defined as non-contact paedophiles i.e. they fantasise about sex with children and may even buy child sex dolls to engage with, but do not, supposedly, use real life children. They represent themselves as having a sexual orientation like homosexuals, argue that they are born pedophiles and cannot help themselves, and demand sympathy as an oppressed sexual minority. These good pedophiles have support groups on the Internet where they can meet and discuss their experience. There are no women in them.

Extract from:
Men’s sexual rights versus women’s sex-based rights Sheila Jeffreys
Talk for: Thinking Feminism: a global view
15 May 2021

https://sheila-jeffreys.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Mens-sexual-rights-vs-womens-sex-based-rights.pdf

Episode 5: Alex Renton looking at Tom O'Carroll's blog - "The most recent update is posted just two days ago and he seems to be writing about gender identity and different sexualities. There is worse in here."

Colour me surprised

Bosky's quotation from Sheila Jeffreys is typical of what Genevieve Gluck meant in her interview with Glinner.

When Genevieve Gluck was discussing her [WPATH] investigations with Glinner, she had some interesting speculations as to why there is a concerted effort to disdain and attack the viewpoint of lesbians and feminists. Gluck argues that previous attempts (1970s to 1990s) to normalise various paraphilia and to remove the age of consent by forced teaming these campaigns with gay rights etc. were successfully halted by actions from women, feminists, and particularly lesbians who spoke up about their concerns, especially around safeguarding.
There seems to be a recrudescence of concerted action to normalise these ambitions again. Gluck comments on the strategy of the pre-emptive attack on feminists and lesbian by ostracising them and "slandering them as TERFs from the start": the segment lasts for about 2 mins from this point.

Can't you find anything earlier than 2021? It seems like I was right when I said that she had nothing to say about PIE. It seems that she has climbed on this bandwagon 40 years after she was influential. She's certainly against a lot of things, which is interesting because she is a Radical Feminist Lesbian. A lot of people would want to dismiss her as a pervert.

Can't you find anything earlier than 2021? It seems like I was right when I said that she had nothing to say about PIE. It seems that she has climbed on this bandwagon 40 years after she was influential. She's certainly against a lot of things, which is interesting because she is a Radical Feminist Lesbian. A lot of people would want to dismiss her as a pervert.

I am clearly being influenced by my kids these days, because my main response, reading this, is, "Really, bro? That's where you're going with this?"

I don't believe that lesbianism is a paraphilia but there will be many who do. Chief among them will be the evangelical christians who so often are allies of radical feminists in their various campaigns. Lesbians against paraphilias is not something they will understand.

According to Sheila Jeffreys, it was people like her who stopped a reduction or abolition of the age of consent. There was never any chance of the age of consent being abolished in the 1980s.

As for reducing the age of consent, the gay men that she refers to wanted to reduce the age of consent for gay men so that it was the same as for straight people. There was never any chance of the age of consent being reduced to below 16.

I don't doubt that if someone asked Sheila Jeffreys in the 1980s what she thought of PIE she would have said she was against it. She was against a lot of things, including marriage. She had a lot to say about marriage in the 1980s and it was recorded in books and pamphlets. I still haven't seen evidence that she had anything to say about PIE in the 1980s, despite what she wrote in 2021.

Interesting that activists have picked Sheila Jeffreys to scapegoat in this issue.

Lesbianism is a sexual orientation that in no way fits the definition of a paraphilia, and trying to make Sheila Jeffreys responsible for anything related to PIE is a straw man argument.

"Can't you find anything earlier than 2021?"

Yes. In that very quote: 1978.

"There were many paedophile groups, but the main one in the UK was the Paedophile Information Exchange, called PIE for short, which advertised trips to South East Asia to use boys to its members. It was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties, which is now Liberty, the main rights organisation in the UK, for several years without any objections. Feminists in the UK and the US fought back. We formed groups to fight the abolition or reduction of the age of consent and I was in one of these in Leeds in the UK in 1978. We were successful in defeating their aims and showing that paedophilia was violence against children."

"I still haven't seen evidence that she had anything to say about PIE in the 1980s,"

If you are genuinely interested in researching what Sheila Jeffreys wrote 40-50 years ago, there is an archive at the London School of Economics where you can ask to go and rummage through over 40 boxes worth:

Papers of Sheila Jeffreys, 1970-c.1980
https://archives.lse.ac.uk/records/7SHJ

I have to say that this is one of the most bizarre, incoherent sidetracks I have come across on Mumsnet.

Topic: "BBC Radio 4 series this week about PIE: In Dark Corners"

Paedophiles: almost all male. Men.

SuePine69: "I hate radical feminists. Radical feminists, like Sheila Jeffreys, are against marriage. Evangelical christians think lesbians are perverts. However, also, strangely, evangelical christians, who are pro-marriage, are allies of radical feminists, like Sheila Jeffreys, who is a lesbian and who is against marriage. Lesbian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys, who never said anything about PIE 40-50 years ago, even though I have just been shown evidence that she did. Sheila Jeffreys, Sheila Jeffreys, let's talk about Sheila Jeffreys - not PIE, not paedophiles, not men!- Sheila Jeffreys, Sheila Jeffreys, marriage, lesbians, perverts, evangelical christians, radical feminists, Sheila Jeffreys - not PIE, not paedophiles, not men!!!"

Reminder.

Paedophiles: almost all male. Men.
Perverts: almost all male. Men.
Men - not lesbians.
Men - not radical feminists.
Men - not Sheila Jeffreys.

SuePine69 Why do you keep mentioning that "some people" think lesbians, like Sheila Jeffreys, who is against marriage, are "perverts"?

Why do you want to distract us from talking about PIE and men who are perverts, SuePine69?

You are quoting her from 2021. She said at a conference in 2021 that she was fighting paedophiles in 1978. Well, paedophilia can't have been a high priority for her because nobody can seem to find any text about that issue from that time. Lots of other issues, such as marriage, but nothing on paedophilia.

The only reason that I mentioned Sheila Jeffreys was because someone on this thread was saying that feminists who objected to PIE were dismissed as anti-men and anti-sex and on the same side as Mary Whitehouse.

My response was to say I don't accept this because some feminists were anti-sex and anti-men. Their priorities were persuading women to give up sex with men. Not paedophilia.

Are you telling me that radical feminists are not allies of evangelical christians? I can give you numerous examples of this. When George Bush junior became president he got faith groups and feminist groups together to fight trafficking. Radical feminists like Laura Lederer joined the crusade. One of the things they did was to put pressure on the Japanese government to deny visas to thousands of Filipino women working in the entertainment industry. They decided they must be prostitutes.

They ruined the lives of these women though because they were not prostitutes. Now you may think that this isn't relevant to a thread about PIE but you wrote that you don't believe radical feminists are allies of evangelicals. So I am only responding to your attack. Not only are they allies, they do enormous damage to women around the world.

Yes, I agree that it is strange that this alliance exists, considering their ideological differences. That doesn't mean they won't reject them as perverts.

Do feel free to start a new thread and bring as many red herrings as you like.

This thread is about PIE.