One of my colleagues whose three-year-old is at kindergarten revealed yesterday that a policeman who came to warn the kindy children of the dangers of sexual abuse actually displayed a photo of a local man he claimed was a paedophile.
The police knew he was a paedophile, the officer said, and wanted to lock him away, but because he hadn’t actually attacked anyone, the courts would not agree.
My colleague who was recounting this, and all the other women sitting around the table at the time, expressed horror that a policeman had produced this photo and spoken like that, saying it was tantamount to inviting vigilante actions or even a lynch mob.
“He only showed the photo for a moment,” said my colleague, who was present when this incident happened. “It was stuck to the inside cover of a book he carried and he opened it to show everyone. It was a photo of an old, bald man with a beard. Now, every time I see an old, bald man with a beard, I will wonder if he is the paedophile. This was very, very wrong.”
My relieved thought was that at least we have courts, with judges who demand evidence before they send someone to jail, not just accept the belief of a police officer that someone is a paedophile and should be jailed because he is.
As a parent of three children, I am not going to leap to any defence of paedophiles, other than to say paedophilia is a sickness that is treatable. Convicted child abusers who undertake the Kia Marama course at Rolleston prison have a very low rate of reoffending on release, for example.
If this kind of modern-day witch-hunting was not bad enough, the officer also told the children and their parents who were there that one in four children will be abused, most of them by their father or some other family member.
I cannot believe that this monstrous piece of deliberate anti-father disinformation is still being trotted out, let alone by the police, 20 years after it was utterly discredited.
The “one in four girls will be abused by their father” lie was the theme of an appalling Telethon in 1988. The bogus statistic was fabricated by some political activists associated with the Telethon and had no basis in fact. A former journalist colleague of mine, Carol du Chateau, revealed its shonky background and took it to pieces in an article in Metro magazine, since when, though it is still regurgitated from time to time, it has not been taken seriously because its seedy origin is widely known. Except it seems by the policeman going round Wellington kindergartens telling terrified little children that they are not safe in their own homes.
4 Comments
September 6, 2008 at 4:43 pm
arrgh I thought that sort of nonsence happened in the states. It seems that almost all semblence of rational thought disappears from peoples’ brains when discussing paedophila.
September 6, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Ah yes. The old one in four. When confronted with it, the women responsible said it was all in a good cause (the Telethon). And few would remember the “grooming” that went on in Christchurch from the likes of Laurie Gabites that predisposed the city for the Creche case.
It’s this grooming of the population that continues to this day, long past when the rest of the world caught on to the industry that it’s become, that shows how tragic it ’s been that the Creche perpetrators have been protected by a shonky legal and political process.
This case you mention is a logical outcome of our so called guardians never being forced to say sorry for their sorry behaviour in years past, or the child “experts” never being disgraced as they should have been, and the legal and political processes getting the kick in the arse that they should have.
And not once do I recall any of the hundreds of our politicians of the last 20 years get up and do what Bourke said so long ago “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. .”
Would that we had a pollie who would speak his mind on this and give his judgment that nearly all men are basically decent and that the figures have to be wrong and produced only by the true perverts in our society.
JC
September 7, 2008 at 1:40 am
Surely it would be an easy matter to identify which particularly nasty Plod was responsible for this bit of vigilante-baiting and ask the PCA to investigate?
Having had a (now sadly deceased) business partner told “we know he probably didn’t do anything, but he’s got it coming” by Mr Plod in relation to myself, I’d be keen to see such exemplars of Police behaviour held to account.
I realise there’s any number of reasons to wish to avoid such a complaint – including the aforementioned victimisation – but it comes down to the old adage of evil flourishing when good people do nothing.
September 7, 2008 at 7:48 am
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Rex. This blog does not go un-noticed. It would not surprise me if a quiet investigation takes place within the police, and a quiet word had with the officer, who I have no doubt believes he is acting in good faith.