Related . . . no mention of previous US Presidents . . . but so many echoes right through the last 50 years to today.
Forgotten Children – the background to the children’s homes scandals
Christian Wolmar - 8 Oct 2000
Extracts: (my bolding)
In the 1970s and 1980s, an epidemic of abuse swept through Britain’s children’s homes. . . .
The scandals cover the breadth of the UK, from Aberdeen to North Wales, East Belfast to Plymouth; and while cases occur from the early 1960s into the 1990s, they predominate in the 1970s and 1980s. . . .
The reasons for this epidemic are many and debatable. But one possible cause that has received little attention – and that seems particularly relevant to the question of why the epidemic occurred when it did – is the general tenor of the period in question, especially where sexual politics was concerned.
THE ROLE and function of children’s homes changed dramatically between the mid 1960s and the early 1970s. As late as 1967, the service was very female dominated and most of the staff lived in the homes. The Williams committee, reporting on the staffing of residential homes that year, noted: “Two-thirds of people at present employed in residential homes are single women and one-third of all staff are over 50 years of age.” All but 7 per cent of workers in the survey lived on the premises, which provided an important but barely noticed safeguard for the children.
Many of these women had worked all their lives in the system. They were part of the cohort of war widows or those left unmarried by the shortage of men following the Second World War, who had found both employment and a home by taking up jobs in children’s homes. As they left, they were replaced largely by men – since the jobs were now full-time and, increasingly, non-resident.
“The 1970s saw… a deliberate move away from the traditional arrangement whereby children’s homes were in the hands of a husband and wife team as superintendent and matron, or officer in charge and deputy,” noted the Kirkwood report, which followed the gaoling of the notorious Leicestershire abuser, Frank Beck, in 1991. . . .
It was no coincidence that the few scandals that did emerge in the immediate post-war period were in approved schools, which were run by male-dominated authoritarian regimes. When, in the early 1970s, the approved schools were merged into the social services system and became community homes with education, this again increased the proportion of men in the homes. . . .
Women were excluded from this controlling inner circle. . . .
Among the incoming cohort of men, there is a very clear trend which leads to suspicions that many deliberately obtained these jobs in order to exploit children sexually. And, in contrast to the figures for society generally (where there are six times more cases of abuse against girls than against boys), the vast majority of these scandals relate to homosexual abuse of boys. . . .
The events in Islington represented a systemic failure of the whole social services department, which had had a good reputation until around 1982, when the newly elected Labour council decided to set up a revolutionary new structure of devolved management, with 24 neighbourhood offices. . . .
There was also experimentation with equal opportunities policies on a grand scale. . . .
With the normal checks no longer available to those making appointments, Islington became wide open for sexual predators to move in, and the lax procedures were systematically exploited by determined men seeking to use the children for their own ends. . .
Much of the abuse resulted from the fact that there was an overemphasis on recruiting people who called themselves gay but were in fact paedophiles. White concludes that positive discrimination allowed staff to exploit the children in their care for their own purposes. . .
THERE WAS ALSO a more insidious influence at work. The social work profession was forced to work out a way to respond to the new liberal mores of the 1960s and 1970s. The sexual revolution came in stages, each wave being initiated in the United States and quickly travelling over the Atlantic. These were heady and exciting times, and they undoubtedly changed society fundamentally for the better. But it was also a period of experimentation, and no one quite knew what the new boundaries were. Challenges were being made by a wide range of alternative groups to virtually every tenet of the post-war consensus: anti-war protesters, anti-apartheid campaigners, ban-the-bomb activists, gays, feminists and so on formed a huge rainbow coalition whose aims, beyond the negative of disliking the established capitalist order, were hazy and diffuse.
Encouraged by all these liberation movements, in October 1974 a group of paedophiles, who defined themselves as child lovers not necessarily interested in sex with children, formed the Paedophile Information Exchange to “provide the means for paedophiles to feel less isolated and gain a sense of community”. Their aim was also to “alleviate suffering of many adults and children” by campaigning against the laws on the age of consent, to allow adults to have sex with children. . . .
PIE suggested that, as homosexuals had become “gays”, paedophiles should be called “kind persons”. They realised that supporting the right of men to bugger children was unpalatable; but giving young people the right to express themselves sexually was a message that might have resonance in the newly liberated sexual climate.
Despite the preposterous nature of its ideas, PIE was for a while accepted among the rainbow coalition – the range of groups on the left which grew out of the 1960s liberation movements . . .
The National Council for Civil Liberties was targeted, and a fierce debate within the organisation ensued after PIE applied to become a member. Eventually, it was rejected at the organisation’s annual general meeting. PIE also attempted, for a while, to use the same mailing address as Release, the drugs charity. (I know this because I worked at Release at the time.) And the National Association of Probation Officers was approached as well.
A social worker who has worked for many years on cases involving paedophiles reckons that the attempt to merge gay and paedophile issues was a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters: “They did it to prepare their defence, so that when they were arrested or there was a complaint, they could cry homophobia. . . .”
PIE was backed by the nebulous Campaign Against Public Morals, which used the language of the left in an attempt to bring PIE into the fold of the rainbow coalition, attempting to portray them – at a time when Mary Whitehouse was at her peak – as an oppressed group. In 1981 it produced a pamphlet, Paedophilia and Public Morals, couched in Socialist Worker-speak with graphics to match; it was published just before the Old Bailey appearance of Tom O’Carroll, PIE’s chairman, . . .
The pamphlet characterised the prosecution as a “show trial” which the Thatcher government was going to exploit to its advantage: “The government and all other levels of state apparatus are likely to adapt to the press-created climate by launching an offensive against the gay community, against women and, most important, against children.” But it was all couched in “kids’ lib” terms: “We can be certain of a clamp-down on the autonomous activities of children inside the family in all spheres of life, and specifically of an attempt to smash any gay youth groups. And we can be certain of a concentrated effort to split the women’s movement on the question on which they have been historically the weakest: paedophilia and child sexuality.” . . .
Combined with earlier setbacks, this spelt the end of PIE, which ceased functioning – whereupon its members (around 450 people had joined at one time or other) went back into the closet.
The importance of the PIE story is not that its members went out deliberately infiltrating children’s homes but that its lobbying, both overt and covert, helped to create a climate in which sex between adults and children became more acceptable. . . .
PIE had a fifth column. Right at the core of social work education, there was an influential apologist for paedophilia. . . .
PETER RIGHTON WORKED variously as a probation officer and as a teacher before becoming a lecturer in social work. In the mid-1970s, he became director of education at the National Institute of Social Work, and a consultant for the National Children’s Bureau. He also taught social services managers at the Open University, and he was widely regarded as an expert on residential care. . . .
As with PIE, it is not Righton’s direct role that is important to this story but the influence he was able to wield over the social work profession and society at large. . .
The fact that Righton could blatantly tout his opinions and retain his senior position demonstrates the confusion over matters sexual which existed in the world of social work. Concern over the rights of oppressed minorities unbalanced the whole profession. There is no other explanation for the failure to tackle Righton.
ULTIMATELY, PIE and the paedophiles were rejected and lost the debate. A review in Gay Times in August 1997 charted the history well: “Gay attitudes to paedophilia have undergone a transformation. In the early days of gay liberation, ‘intergenerational’ sex seemed to occupy a legitimate place on the homosexual continuum. Homosexuals were vilified and persecuted, and so were paedophiles. Denying child sexuality seemed part of the ideology of repression. But genuine anxiety about child sex abuse has hardened attitudes. Gay law reform is a serious business nowadays. We have spent decades trying to shrug off the charge that we just want to molest children. We can do without real perverts hitching a ride on the bandwagon, thank you.”
But the fact remains that the 1970s and early 1980s were confusing times for those who had been brought up in a world of certainties. One abuser, “Jim Clark”, describes with great feeling the way that these changes affected him: “Before the 1960s, life was easier to handle, everyone knew where they stood. You didn’t have to struggle with a conscience torn apart by free expression or grey areas; men and boys had short hair cuts, played men’s games, girls had dolls, sex was a taboo subject, at least in the circles I ever moved in. Then it seemed all of a sudden all the rules and guidelines were dismantled and lonely insecure people like me couldn’t handle this freedom. We may not have liked the austere 1940s and 1950s, but we knew where we stood. Decisions were made for us by unwritten cultures. In the 1960s, I didn’t know what to believe, even with religion, having been brought up as a strict Roman Catholic. Our elders were too shy to enlighten us or answer our questions. Temptations opened up to us with many people who surrounded us behaving as if this was acceptable. Behaviour previously considered unmanly was now OK. I remember listening to a discussion on masturbation – previously it was a great sin, you went blind. I believed this and then, all of a sudden, it was normal, natural, healthy even, as a doctor told me to do it when I had to see him over a painful groin. Hence my confusion and inability to cope mentally with changes.” . . .
Some people realised immediately that PIE was different from other liberation groups and not to be given any leeway. But all too many humble, demoralised care workers – in Islington, and in other places where the door was shut when sexual activity was discovered – were unable to make that distinction in an institutional ethos that left them unsure about the boundaries they were supposed to patrol. . . .
The fact that so many like-minded abusers did manage to infiltrate so many homes in such a systemic, if not systematic, way must therefore remain, in part, a mystery. But in large part it can be explained by the reasons given above: by failures of management and ideology that prevented those whose responsibility it was to protect their charges from abusers from doing so effectively.
Paedophile rings do exist, but the abuse epidemic in Britain’s children’s homes in the 1970s and 1980s is not about rings. Rather it is about the pre -conditions of abuse letting in scores of men who were able to take advantage of them.
https://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2000/10/forgotten-children-the-background-to-the-childrens-homes-scandals/
I highly recommend reading the whole article. I have just picked out passages that either emphasise the fact that it is MEN who are responsible for abusing children or that highlight patterns that seem to resonate strongly with current circumstances 50 years on.
Bringing us right up to date but including one of those horrors from the past, the case of Frank Beck:
Grooming Gangs, Child Sexual Abuse & Exploitation - WDI FQT Sat 16th Feb 3pm: Zoom
3:00pm - 4:30pm (approx end time). Join anytime.
Host: Amparo Domingo
Anna Fisher (NMN), UK, British Culture, the British Establishment, and the ‘Grooming Gangs’ scandal
Susan Harrison, UK, The Frank Beck Case - a look back to the Leicestershire/Beck case and some common factors of Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Maureen O'Hara, UK, Child sexual abuse: Denial, minimisation and victim-blaming
Jill Raymond, UK, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
FQT is a women-only space for women who have signed the Declaration on Women's Sex-based Rights. Men are invited to watch the recorded webinars when they are uploaded to YouTube.
To Sign the WDI Declaration: www.womensdeclaration.com/en/
Register for the Webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Mq9EMIAbTkyNz5gAx4l2DQ
If you miss it, the recording should be up on the WDI YouTube Channel by Wednesday:
https://www.youtube.com/@WomensDeclaration
ps. Sheila Jeffreys is one of the founding members of WDI.