Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
I think it’s because British children are more attractive than their Continental peers.
Tempted though I am to flag that comment, I don't suppose the moderators would take any notice.
Pretty sure it was posted in jest. And he's the site administrator.
Whooshy McWhooshface
Who knows, they might have thought he was being serious.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Partly I wonder how much is down to the fact we tend to not want to see the evil in people we know and that we know how much a social services investigation can turn an innocent family upside down, especially as folk tend to be prone to "No smoke without fire" and that there will be whispers ever after even if found guilt free
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Shares holding up though. I bought them a few months ago and I'm seeing a decent gain.
I have been wondering if there was going to be a thread on this topic. My interest is two fold: in the 80s I was deputy editor of a small magazine about social services. I covered several child abuse cases in local authority homes. One thing I noticed then was that "independent" investigations into what went wrong were often carried out by directors or retired directors of other authorities, who often had had similar scandals in their own departments. There seemed to be an old boys network covering each others' backs.
I then had a child with special needs and from being a supposed pundit on social services, I became a consumer. I was shocked by the "them and us" culture I found; several of the social workers I had to deal with were patronising and told me I didn't understand if I complained. It was almost a form of "gaslighting"; the attitude was the problem isn't us, it is you.
These are important issues. I don't have any easy answers but like the Cressida Dick thread, I feel it should be debated sensibly and I am disappointed that people are indulging in cheap jokes about such a sensitive and important issue.
Friend of mine was a very good looking child at a Catholic boarding school in southwest England in the 70s
At the age of six-10 pretty boys like him would be invited to sit on the knee of a particular monk, clearly naked under his habit, then the monk would bounce the boy up and down while singing "Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross" again and again until the monk got "suddenly bored" and the boy was allowed to go
All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
My mother told me some stories about rural Ireland in the fifties that would turn your stomach.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
I agree. Nick Palmer is surely a nice chap but he has weird tunnel vision, and appears to miss huge areas of human behaviour/politcs/society blatantly apparent to everyone else
Child abuse is universal. Some deny it more than others, some cover it up better than others, some tolerate it more than others. But it is everywhere
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
I agree. Nick Palmer is surely a nice chap but he has weird tunnel vision, and appears to miss huge areas of human behaviour/politcs/society blatantly apparent to everyone else
Child abuse is universal. Some deny it more than others, some cover it up better than others, some tolerate it more than others. But it is everywhere
But it's an extra step to say it's equally prevalent everywhere. Maybe it is, I don't know, but I don't see that as being blindingly obvious.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
I agree. Nick Palmer is surely a nice chap but he has weird tunnel vision, and appears to miss huge areas of human behaviour/politcs/society blatantly apparent to everyone else
Child abuse is universal. Some deny it more than others, some cover it up better than others, some tolerate it more than others. But it is everywhere
But it's an extra step to say it's equally prevalent everywhere. Maybe it is, I don't know, but I don't see that as being blindingly obvious.
It is blinkingly obvious. Sexual desire is everywhere, the perversities of sexual desire will also be everywhere
To rattle off a few countries that have had child sex abuse scandals in recent years
Belgium Greenland Australia China India USA Britain Ireland Canada Holland South Africa Japan Egypt
And many many others
The idea that "Denmark" will be uniquely resistant is piffle
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
Given that child pornography was legal in Denmark until the 80s that seems remarkable.
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
When you drop the antiwokery (aka "hands off my privilege") crusade and all the "eating mussels in a pub" nonsense, I'd say we do agree on the occasional thing.
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
Given that child pornography was legal in Denmark until the 80s that seems remarkable.
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
When you drop the antiwokery (aka "hands off my privilege") crusade and all the "eating mussels in a pub" nonsense, I'd say we do agree on the occasional thing.
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
To be more cheerful, there is potentially a solution to this ancient human problem - the perverse sexual desire for children
Soon there will be pretty good sex bots. If we can get over our innate revulsion, we will be able to manufracture them for pedophiles, who can go away and do their business to a robot, and no human every gets hurt, and indeed a lot of real human children will be spared future pain
My worry - and this applies to a lot of sexbot tech - is that puritans will say "even manufacturing fake kid sexbots for these deviants is wrong, so we won't do that either". Some are already making that argument
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
I think its a little more specific and horrible than that. There are some children, sadly, who do not have caring parents or protective homes. They live in institutions or with parents with mental health or substance abuse problems which mean that the protective core that is around most of our children is not there. Evil predators find their way to such children and exploit them.
I am not saying that children from good homes are never sexually abused by someone in a position of trust but this is vanishingly less likely than the exploitation of these vulnerable kids which is almost inevitable. And when they are exploited and develop substance abuse problems of their own or a horribly distorted view of what a relationship should be far too many in our society think of them as perpetrators rather than victims. Attempts have been made to change this mindset but evidence of success is thin.
And when it comes to prosecution these vulnerable damaged children make the worst witnesses imaginable. They have been so abused that they struggle to identify the particular incident or the particular offender or the period when this particular thing happened. Their memories are damaged and they are neither coherent nor convincing. So how can a jury convict? Sometimes, as in Rotherham, sheer weights of evidence can do it but it's hard, really hard.
That is part of what I was alluding to in my point 3. You describe very eloquently the difficulties of prosecuting in such cases.
But, ironically enough, there have been more successful criminal prosecutions than there have been disciplinaries of staff not doing their jobs properly. Disciplinaries do not face anything like the same issues as criminal prosecutions and yet they do not happen. The reasons must lie elsewhere.
Take a recent case in Bradford where a social worker attended the marriage of a 15 year old child to her much older abuser. She is below the age of consent. What on earth was the social worker doing?
Or the police in Rotherham who simply ignored the law on the age of consent? It ought to be much easier to discipline officers over such failings. An officer who fails to investigate because he thinks a 13-year old consented to sex with men twice, three, four times her age should be disciplined - for not knowing the bloody law if nothing else.
In so many of these cases there were multiple failures by social workers and I find it hard to believe that, if the will was there, disciplinary action could not have been taken. The will is not there, unfortunately, and saying that it is just down to the problematic children themselves is a bit of a cop out by those who are meant to be the adults in the room.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
Given that child pornography was legal in Denmark until the 80s that seems remarkable.
Japan reports 10,699 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase on record
I have a terrible foreboding fear, that the Olympics will turn out to be an enormous tragedy, which kills thousands of unvaccinated Japanese people. It was always horribly possible
They even allowed in 15% of athletes unvaxxed. Why?????
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
I agree. Nick Palmer is surely a nice chap but he has weird tunnel vision, and appears to miss huge areas of human behaviour/politcs/society blatantly apparent to everyone else
Child abuse is universal. Some deny it more than others, some cover it up better than others, some tolerate it more than others. But it is everywhere
I am highly skeptical of @NickPalmer’s theory but one thing I might posit is that countries where gender relations are more equal *might* see lower incidences of child abuse.
If so, Scandinavian countries might see less child abuse than Britain, which in turn could expect less child abuse than France, and so on.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
Given that child pornography was legal in Denmark until the 80s that seems remarkable.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It's fine if people or nations want to use alternatives, but getting worked up over it is very clearly performative outrage, particularly when using very little used alternatives. Nations have different names for things already, we don't need to change it even if others do.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
Well that didn't do much for my afternoon. What a deeply depressing thread header.
The scale of child abuse both physical and sexual in this country is frankly just bewildering as is the reluctance to do anything actually constructive about it. It is deeply shameful. The horrors from Belgium and other places suggest that we are not alone in this but it still makes me feel sick.
From talking to people, I think pretty much everyone has experienced some form of sexual abuse as a minor, even if at a low level. I can't think of anyone who hasn't had a teacher who didn't take liberties of various kinds. We had a really bizarre school rule that you couldn't wear pants under shorts for sports. Inevitably, we had a teacher who insisted on doing spot checks. Twenty years on, and at my step-daughter's girls' school, it was considered one of the perks of the job to ogle the girls in the showers.
The music teacher at my school was, eventually, caught masturbating in his car whilst watching a 13-year old girl play sport - he put it down to stress.
I had another physics teacher who used to enjoy putting boys (including me) on the ground by force, and then say, "why are you lying on the ground?".
Cyclefree's piece is sombre, scathing and seems entirely justified. Thank you for writing it and reminding us of these very fundamental facts.
For what it's worth, growing up in Denmark, I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. Denmark was even in those days very sexually open so adults generally had no trouble finding other consenting adults to play with - perhaps that helped? But it's pretty much true of Britain today, and doesn't seem to have solved the issue.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that Denmark is or was perfect - bullying in Danish schools was certainly an issue (though not at all in my international school or at university) and racism is a real issue there too, even today, But this particular abuse does seem to be more common in Britain. I wonder why.
" I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
I agree. Nick Palmer is surely a nice chap but he has weird tunnel vision, and appears to miss huge areas of human behaviour/politcs/society blatantly apparent to everyone else
Child abuse is universal. Some deny it more than others, some cover it up better than others, some tolerate it more than others. But it is everywhere
But it's an extra step to say it's equally prevalent everywhere. Maybe it is, I don't know, but I don't see that as being blindingly obvious.
It is blinkingly obvious. Sexual desire is everywhere, the perversities of sexual desire will also be everywhere
To rattle off a few countries that have had child sex abuse scandals in recent years
Belgium Greenland Australia China India USA Britain Ireland Canada Holland South Africa Japan Egypt
And many many others
The idea that "Denmark" will be uniquely resistant is piffle
While I agree with this, I do think there are pockets of society where it doesn't happen. I am fortunate that I was born into a very well adjusted extended family. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all maintained loving marriages into old age. As I got older and went to university, I found out about friends that had been raped, beaten by their parents, self harmed etc but I never knew of any of that as a kid. And looking back I don't believe it was me being blind to it. I don't think any of my cousins or siblings were abused in any way. And all of them are very emotionally stable, confident, successful people as adults. I now realise my "norm" is actually incredibly rare.
I have been wondering if there was going to be a thread on this topic. My interest is two fold: in the 80s I was deputy editor of a small magazine about social services. I covered several child abuse cases in local authority homes. One thing I noticed then was that "independent" investigations into what went wrong were often carried out by directors or retired directors of other authorities, who often had had similar scandals in their own departments. There seemed to be an old boys network covering each others' backs.
I then had a child with special needs and from being a supposed pundit on social services, I became a consumer. I was shocked by the "them and us" culture I found; several of the social workers I had to deal with were patronising and told me I didn't understand if I complained. It was almost a form of "gaslighting"; the attitude was the problem isn't us, it is you.
These are important issues. I don't have any easy answers but like the Cressida Dick thread, I feel it should be debated sensibly and I am disappointed that people are indulging in cheap jokes about such a sensitive and important issue.
One often think of child abuse in the abstract. But I was what you might call “slightly molested” in my youth. Twice.
I pretty much brushed it off, and only vaguely recall it when reminded by commentary like @Cyclefree’s.
One of the best thread headers I have read for a long time; thankyou @Cyclefree; although I can’t say I have any answers.
Paedophilia is obviously part of the human condition in some way and perhaps if we’re all more open about it, more people would seek treatment and it would be harder to cover up.
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
When you drop the antiwokery (aka "hands off my privilege") crusade and all the "eating mussels in a pub" nonsense, I'd say we do agree on the occasional thing.
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
To be more cheerful, there is potentially a solution to this ancient human problem - the perverse sexual desire for children
Soon there will be pretty good sex bots. If we can get over our innate revulsion, we will be able to manufracture them for pedophiles, who can go away and do their business to a robot, and no human every gets hurt, and indeed a lot of real human children will be spared future pain
My worry - and this applies to a lot of sexbot tech - is that puritans will say "even manufacturing fake kid sexbots for these deviants is wrong, so we won't do that either". Some are already making that argument
A rather more specific argument might be that it gives them ideas, and legitimises and encourages their desires? Which might then cross over into real flesh and blood.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
Perhaps the best catch-all is to refer to the language. Everyone on this archipelago speaks English, so from now on they are "The English Isles"?
Feelgood story of the day: I accidentally threw away my passport last July and applied for a replacement. I come home today from a week away and it has been delivered and it's BLUE! Praise the Lord.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
Perhaps the best catch-all is to refer to the language. Everyone on this archipelago speaks English, so from now on they are "The English Isles"?
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
When you drop the antiwokery (aka "hands off my privilege") crusade and all the "eating mussels in a pub" nonsense, I'd say we do agree on the occasional thing.
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
To be more cheerful, there is potentially a solution to this ancient human problem - the perverse sexual desire for children
Soon there will be pretty good sex bots. If we can get over our innate revulsion, we will be able to manufracture them for pedophiles, who can go away and do their business to a robot, and no human every gets hurt, and indeed a lot of real human children will be spared future pain
My worry - and this applies to a lot of sexbot tech - is that puritans will say "even manufacturing fake kid sexbots for these deviants is wrong, so we won't do that either". Some are already making that argument
A rather more specific argument might be that it gives them ideas, and legitimises and encourages their desires? Which might then cross over into real flesh and blood.
Yes I've seen that argument too, but if these sex bots completely satisfy the pedophiles, then surely this is a trivial concern in comparison to the real life children who will be saved from future horrific abuse?
At the same time we could raise the sentence for real life abuse to instant death.
"You have an alternative. A robot. If you continue to prey on real kids we electrocute you."
I might sound facetious but I'm not. if we can overcome our instinctive repulsion, there is a solution here
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
Not everyone agrees on it, but whatever, France doesn't call it the English Channel either. I like people in Northern Ireland trying to get around it by just saying 'These Islands'.
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
When you drop the antiwokery (aka "hands off my privilege") crusade and all the "eating mussels in a pub" nonsense, I'd say we do agree on the occasional thing.
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
To be more cheerful, there is potentially a solution to this ancient human problem - the perverse sexual desire for children
Soon there will be pretty good sex bots. If we can get over our innate revulsion, we will be able to manufracture them for pedophiles, who can go away and do their business to a robot, and no human every gets hurt, and indeed a lot of real human children will be spared future pain
My worry - and this applies to a lot of sexbot tech - is that puritans will say "even manufacturing fake kid sexbots for these deviants is wrong, so we won't do that either". Some are already making that argument
A rather more specific argument might be that it gives them ideas, and legitimises and encourages their desires? Which might then cross over into real flesh and blood.
Yes I've seen that argument too, but if these sex bots completely satisfy the pedophiles, then surely this is a trivial concern in comparison to the real life children who will be saved from future horrific abuse?
At the same time we could raise the sentence for real life abuse to instant death.
"You have an alternative. A robot. If you continue to prey on real kids we electrocute you."
I might sound facetious but I'm not. if we can overcome our instinctive repulsion, there is a solution here
I can see both arguments here. However I come down on the side of if it could be proved that it would reduce child abuse then we should do it. But it would need more than theories. At the moment both sides of "It legitimizes it"/"It gives and outlet so they don't need to do it" are both just thought experiments
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Its a perversion. A seemingly common one.
But one which we are rightly nauseated by individually and as a society, and which is hugely detrimental to those children who suffer it.
However, to avoid cover ups, isn’t it better if we acknowledge that it is - like other abominations (rape etc) - a sad part of the overall human condition?
In fact, we have to rationalise it. There must be some reason that some people feel this way.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
What on earth are you referring to????
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
So even if it showed the idea would reduce abuse of actual children by 50% you would be against it. Frankly I find that repulsive. I would not be comfortable with it but if it actually reduced real harm then those not comfortable with it can frankly keep their mouths shut
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
I don't think you need to be too careful in this case. There have been many publicised examples now
I have a couple of friends who were at a CB school in southern England. Their complain was not so much sexual abuse but brutal violence (probably linked, psychologically, of course)
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
What on earth are you referring to????
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
What on earth are you referring to????
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
Downside, I presume?
I won't name names but you're not a trillion miles away
Lizzie Dearden @lizziedearden · 4h Breaking: The RNLI has recorded a 2,000% increase in donations in a single day amid a surge in support over rescues of migrant boats
Criticism by Nigel Farage and others sparked an unprecedented flood of donations, including over £200,000 yesterday alone
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
They were notorious in the Ireland of my father's time - and probably later - for being sadists.
John McGahern, the Irish novelist, wrote some very good novels in the 1960's about the violence and abuse which was not very far from the surface in Ireland. For his pains he got sacked from his teaching post and had to leave Ireland. He spoke uncomfortable truths, even if he did his whistleblowing as a novelist.
Societies know they need whistleblowers but they do not like those who speak uncomfortable truths. That is the whistleblowing dilemma in a nutshell.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
What on earth are you referring to????
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
Downside, I presume?
I won't name names but you're not a trillion miles away
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says she should have done more to crack down on sexual abuse within her Social Democrats as a wave of MeToo accusations inundates her party.
The prime minister was speaking as her foreign minister, Jeppe Kofod, faced growing pressure to step down for having sex in 2008 with a 15-year-old member of the youth party.
Feelgood story of the day: I accidentally threw away my passport last July and applied for a replacement. I come home today from a week away and it has been delivered and it's BLUE! Praise the Lord.
Does it have a separate page for your booster jab?
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
I don't think you need to be too careful in this case. There have been many publicised examples now
I have a couple of friends who were at a CB school in southern England. Their complain was not so much sexual abuse but brutal violence (probably linked, psychologically, of course)
Yes, there was brutal violence, but also sexual abuse,beware during gym lessons if a brother called you out to the changing rooms, to discuss your exam results. The brutal stuff was just them getting off, it stopped when you reached about 15 as we were big enough to plant them.
I am always a bit sceptical when we hear x charity got 1000% more donations than their usual daily donation or a tunnocks teacakes sales through the roof or people are boycotting some shop because of some outrage....if in 6-12 months time, if the difference over the entire period is actually any different.
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
I don't think you need to be too careful in this case. There have been many publicised examples now
I have a couple of friends who were at a CB school in southern England. Their complain was not so much sexual abuse but brutal violence (probably linked, psychologically, of course)
Yes, there was brutal violence, but also sexual abuse,beware during gym lessons if a brother called you out to the changing rooms, to discuss your exam results. The brutal stuff was just them getting off, it stopped when you reached about 15 as we were big enough to plant them.
Blimey sorry to hear that and glad you eventually could stop it.
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
I don't think you need to be too careful in this case. There have been many publicised examples now
I have a couple of friends who were at a CB school in southern England. Their complain was not so much sexual abuse but brutal violence (probably linked, psychologically, of course)
Yes, there was brutal violence, but also sexual abuse,beware during gym lessons if a brother called you out to the changing rooms, to discuss your exam results. The brutal stuff was just them getting off, it stopped when you reached about 15 as we were big enough to plant them.
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to cloister loads of "CELIBATE" monks, religiously obsessed with sex, with a lot of adolescent boys, changing for sports, bedding down in dorms, etc etc
I mean, what could go wrong?
My sympathies for your experience. As I say, I have friends who endured similar, they are generally wry and laconic, but they talk of other boys who were really badly damaged
Lizzie Dearden @lizziedearden · 4h Breaking: The RNLI has recorded a 2,000% increase in donations in a single day amid a surge in support over rescues of migrant boats
Criticism by Nigel Farage and others sparked an unprecedented flood of donations, including over £200,000 yesterday alone
Up yours Farage!!!
That's lovely, although while they didn't pick the fight, it does show how less worthy people and causes on all sides of a culture war could benefit from keeping it going and picking fights.
I am always a bit sceptical when we hear x charity got 1000% more donations than their usual daily donation or a tunnocks teacakes sales through the roof or people are boycotting some shop because of some outrage....if in 6-12 months time, if the difference over the entire period is actually any different.
If you spread last year's donations equally over the year, I think it corresponds to a 40% increase. Of course it will be more lumpy than that.
A thread about child abuse and within a few comments people are discussing porn for teenagers.......
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
Yep, who can forget that. A stone cold classic. Like having a header passionately decrying casual racism in all its guises and within a half dozen posts the thread morphs into a celebration of great British standup comics of the 70s. Anyway, great piece here, and since it's not a topic to find disagreement on - utter scandal, end of - I'm more wondering what you think the fundamental reason is for why we keep messing up on this. There must be one. Do we not respect children very much maybe? 'Seen but not heard' etc.
I think there are 3 main reasons:-
1. Sexual attraction to children is probably more widespread than we care to admit. The abuse is done not just by a few horrible perverts but by lots of apparently respectable people. This is hard to admit.
2. Power - where people have it they will abuse it unless they are kept in check. By their own conscience/moral code / by rules / by challenge and by social taboos. We rely IMO too much on rules and procedures and too little on conscience / social taboos and challenge.
3. We don't value children in the right way - there is a tendency to sentimentalise and treat as mini-adults/spoil even rather than guide and teach and protect and care for. Also the sorts of children who end up in care are often horrible - because brutalised and uncared for - and difficult and so it takes immense patience and love and kindness to help them. There is probably also a class issue here. We don't value this work or these children and so it is easy to see why they become prey for abusers.
As to those who are complicit, challenge and speaking up and blowing the whistle are hard. What is the reward? The downsides can be considerable. We value loyalty - to the family, group, friends, team institution etc - over individual courage and conscience. So it is easy to see why people choose the quiet life. A few metaphorical executions of senior staff pour encourager les autres would not go amiss (what the hell was Blair thinking making Hodge Minister for Children?!). But even there we get it wrong - see Sharon Shoosmith.
Our children are our offering to the future. We need to cherish them. All of them.
Cheers. 1. Yes. Very tricky area. Youth is alluring. It doesn't suddenly become so at the age of consent. 2. Totally agree. Culture and role models are more important than structures, systems and procedures. 3. That's what I was getting at. Respecting kids is different to liking/loving them.
Being attracted to pre-pubescent children is decidedly weird. Being attracted to adolescents is not. Most of us can remember when we were attracted to other adolescents.
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
Yes, sexual attraction to young children is a terrible affliction. Somebody who has it, but manages to keep it wholly inside, and thus harms nobody, I've always thought worthy of great admiration. Of course by definition one never gets to know who such people are.
A rare case where we agree.
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
When you drop the antiwokery (aka "hands off my privilege") crusade and all the "eating mussels in a pub" nonsense, I'd say we do agree on the occasional thing.
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
To be more cheerful, there is potentially a solution to this ancient human problem - the perverse sexual desire for children
Soon there will be pretty good sex bots. If we can get over our innate revulsion, we will be able to manufracture them for pedophiles, who can go away and do their business to a robot, and no human every gets hurt, and indeed a lot of real human children will be spared future pain
My worry - and this applies to a lot of sexbot tech - is that puritans will say "even manufacturing fake kid sexbots for these deviants is wrong, so we won't do that either". Some are already making that argument
A rather more specific argument might be that it gives them ideas, and legitimises and encourages their desires? Which might then cross over into real flesh and blood.
Yes I've seen that argument too, but if these sex bots completely satisfy the pedophiles, then surely this is a trivial concern in comparison to the real life children who will be saved from future horrific abuse?
At the same time we could raise the sentence for real life abuse to instant death.
"You have an alternative. A robot. If you continue to prey on real kids we electrocute you."
I might sound facetious but I'm not. if we can overcome our instinctive repulsion, there is a solution here
Potatoes peeled, back now.
I still worry that this is even legitimising things - an entry level to worse. It's one thing to deal with the existing ones but quite another to encourage others to explore their desires.
It's not as if being in an isolation block in a nasty prison isn't already a serious prospect for the average working paedophile today.
And capital punishment and irreversbile corporal punishment such as castration are ruled out because (a) the legal system screws up too often and (b) who do we ask to do the hanging, cutting, injecting, etc.?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
I am always a bit sceptical when we hear x charity got 1000% more donations than their usual daily donation or a tunnocks teacakes sales through the roof or people are boycotting some shop because of some outrage....if in 6-12 months time, if the difference over the entire period is actually any different.
If you spread last year's donations equally over the year, I think it corresponds to a 40% increase. Of course it will be more lumpy than that.
Someone should investigate the so called "Christian Brothers". They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully. I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
I don't think you need to be too careful in this case. There have been many publicised examples now
I have a couple of friends who were at a CB school in southern England. Their complain was not so much sexual abuse but brutal violence (probably linked, psychologically, of course)
Yes, there was brutal violence, but also sexual abuse,beware during gym lessons if a brother called you out to the changing rooms, to discuss your exam results. The brutal stuff was just them getting off, it stopped when you reached about 15 as we were big enough to plant them.
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to cloister loads of "CELIBATE" monks, religiously obsessed with sex, with a lot of adolescent boys, changing for sports, bedding down in dorms, etc etc
I mean, what could go wrong?
My sympathies for your experience. As I say, I have friends who endured similar, they are generally wry and laconic, but they talk of other boys who were really badly damaged
Thanks,yes, it was a recipe for all that could go wrong. I am fine and just look back on those days, and think what lot of sad old wankers, literally.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
And they wanted to take on the US, UK and Australia, by setting up mechanisms to block vaccines, which would have resulted in blowing their own feet off, as no incoming crucial raw materials....let alone the damage to diplomacy and business confidence.
We are happy to kill grannies in the UK immediately and grannies in the EU in the near future, because they totally lost their marbles.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
The situation in Sydney is catastrophic. It looks increasingly as if what is a very harsh lockdown (reportedly featuring, in the worst affected areas, no moving more than 5km from your home for most purposes, severe restrictions on who is still allowed to go to work, masks even outdoors with steep fines for non-compliance, and police enforcement backed up by the army) still isn't enough to stamp out Delta.
Australia's vaccine drive, which is the only possible means out of the trap given that lockdown doesn't achieve the Zero Covid that politicians expect, yet nobody dare let it go for fear of a massacre, is hopeless. Supplies of mRNA vaccines are extremely limited, and AZ is almost useless because the media and the Australian equivalent of the JCVI have, between them, so thoroughly destroyed its reputation that almost nobody will accept it.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were still stuck in lockdown at the end of the year.
How many have died and will die because of EU politicians and journalist posturing?
Notably the most recent study into AZ vs Pfizer on blood clots was done by the EMA - who have played a straight bat and held their heads while many around them were losing theirs.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Not going into bat for perverts but -
A fantasy not acted upon is completely different to one that is. The border between internal and external is fundamental. For me this applies across the board. I don't see why sexual attraction to children should be an exception. It's the act and ONLY the act which is a problem for society.
How many have died and will die because of EU politicians and journalist posturing?
Notably the most recent study into AZ vs Pfizer on blood clots was done by the EMA - who have played a straight bat and held their heads while many around them were losing theirs.
It reminds me of the EU arguing.over the pricing of AZN deal..... couldn't understand why there wasn't any movement on price.
I don't know how many people remember Cynthia Payne. She ran a brothel which achieved notoriety some years ago. She ran for Parliament as a candidate for the Payne and Pleasure Party in the Kensington by-election in July 1988, but failed to win.
She served a prison sentence which seems harsh as her crimes were minor compared to Lambeth Council. She was a realist and claimed that men were fine as long as they were regularly de-spunked. Not a lot to disagree with there. Perhaps they should have voted her in?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
Its also quite clear that their demand for AZ vaccine from the UK production was more to do with slowing down the UK than speeding up the EU - it would have made a huge difference to our roll out and a trivial difference to theirs.
Incoming media panic that cases up again today vs yesterday (when still down vs same day last week).
The rate of decrease is still around 36-37%, so no real change in the trajectory, but I bet Sky News will be along with a breaking news tweet that iSage will jump on.
I am a little perturbed by Tim Spector's comments yesterday that the ZOE app isn't seeing the same reduction and he had a number of hypothesis why official case numbers have dropped and that doesn't mean that actual cases in the wild have dropped. Especially as in the past he has normally been one of the more optimistic to call a wave over.
However, at the same time, due to the now total mismatch been the survey group of ZOE i.e. dominated by people who are vaccinated / partially vaccinated, because Piers Corbyn isn't going to sign up to an app that collects your self reported health data, ZOE algorithm has had to have a massive tweak, so it could be for the first time that now ZOE data isn't anywhere near as useful as before widespread vaccination.
I have to say that, if the worst thing we have to worry about two serial intervals after the removal of (practically) all COVID-19 restrictions is whether the 37% week-on-week decline in positive tests is an entirely accurate reflection of reality, then we are doing a lot better than anyone could reasonably have expected.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
At that point I don't think they even realised that most of the UK's initial supplies were from Pfizer and they became fixated on the idea that they had somehow been screwed over by the UK on AstraZeneca.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Not going into bat for perverts but -
A fantasy not acted upon is completely different to one that is. The border between internal and external is fundamental. For me this applies across the board. I don't see why sexual attraction to children should be an exception. It's the act and ONLY the act which is a problem for society.
Indeed to put in a less loaded way....I doubt any of us have gone through life without running across someone they really want to punch....wanting to isnt a problem....doing it most definitely is
"It reminds me of the EU arguing over the pricing of AZN deal..... couldn't understand why they couldn't get any movement on price."
They tried to reduce the price to prove a point. To make them lose money on every vaccine produced. Had the French vaccine stood up, it would have been the EU's choice of supplier. I wonder how many lives the delay cost?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
AstraZeneca had two strategic reasons for taking on the Oxford vaccine on the terms set by Oxford. The first was to move into the new to them and lucrative market of vaccines, with a ready made product and at a perceived low risk. Secondly the project was a keystone of Pascal Soriot's new strategy of moving away from primary research in its own labs to links with universities.
One billion doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine have now been supplied to 170 countries. This British vaccine, distributed at cost, is saving lives across the globe.
Together we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year and build back better from coronavirus.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
At that point I don't think they even realised that most of the UK's initial supplies were from Pfizer and they became fixated on the idea that they had somehow been screwed over by the UK on AstraZeneca.
One of the things that we were reminded of in this, is that world leaders don't really get folders with The Real Answers handed to them in their security briefings etc.
So when they read a stupid column in the paper saying that the UK was hiding all the vaccines in the basement of the Dean Street Pizza Express, that became their belief.....
They get warmed over bullshit that someone saw in the paper/read on Twitter etc. Probably we would be better off if they read PB.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
AstraZeneca had two strategic reasons for taking on the Oxford vaccine on the terms set by Oxford. The first was to move into the new to them and lucrative market of vaccines, with a ready made product and at a perceived low risk. Secondly the project was a keystone of Pascal Soriot's new strategy of moving away from primary research in its own labs to links with universities.
I thought it was because HMG insisted Oxford partner with a British company?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
The situation in Sydney is catastrophic. It looks increasingly as if what is a very harsh lockdown (reportedly featuring, in the worst affected areas, no moving more than 5km from your home for most purposes, severe restrictions on who is still allowed to go to work, masks even outdoors with steep fines for non-compliance, and police enforcement backed up by the army) still isn't enough to stamp out Delta.
Australia's vaccine drive, which is the only possible means out of the trap given that lockdown doesn't achieve the Zero Covid that politicians expect, yet nobody dare let it go for fear of a massacre, is hopeless. Supplies of mRNA vaccines are extremely limited, and AZ is almost useless because the media and the Australian equivalent of the JCVI have, between them, so thoroughly destroyed its reputation that almost nobody will accept it.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were still stuck in lockdown at the end of the year.
If R is a as high for Delta as some have claimed, then it is worth remembering that we had a long, slow clawback from the previous variant in the first lockdown. Effective R never got much below 0.8 in the UK.
While these things aren't linear, that looks horribly like lockdowns aren't powerful enough to pull R below 1 for Delta....
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
While that’s true, they were also woefully poor at running the trial and submitting the data. That speaks to their inexperience.
They shouldn’t have taken this task on. They should have left it to another firm who was more experienced at trialing vaccines.
Let us not forget that they’ve been rejected twice by the Swiss regulator and the FDA rebuked then on their submission (and also still hasn’t approved their vaccine).
AZ took this on because they (rightly) thought it would be a good vaccine, and because they (wrongly) thought it would be a stepping stone to being a major player in the vaccine space. It wasn’t entirely altruistic.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
At that point I don't think they even realised that most of the UK's initial supplies were from Pfizer and they became fixated on the idea that they had somehow been screwed over by the UK on AstraZeneca.
One of the things that we were reminded of in this, is that world leaders don't really get folders with The Real Answers handed to them in their security briefings etc.
So when they read a stupid column in the paper saying that the UK was hiding all the vaccines in the basement of the Dean Street Pizza Express, that became their belief.....
They get warmed over bullshit that someone saw in the paper/read on Twitter etc. Probably we would be better off if they read PB.
They could make a new Pink Panther film about Inspector Clouseau's mission to track down illicit stocks of the British vaccine.
@NickPalmer : I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
I don't make this comment to make out that Denmark is hideous, or unusual: just that these abuse of all sorts happen everywhere, and it is all too easy to close our eyes to them. And if it's happening now, it sure as heck happened historically - as the last link shows.
How many have died and will die because of EU politicians and journalist posturing?
Notably the most recent study into AZ vs Pfizer on blood clots was done by the EMA - who have played a straight bat and held their heads while many around them were losing theirs.
Yes, it just shows how political it became. The actual regulatory body recommended it and still does. It was the politicians that decided to go after AZ.
"On the day the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on 29 January for use for all age groups in the EU, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed that it was "quasi-ineffective" for people over 65."
Who to believe between a group of world experts, and the French President without even an ology in wiping his own bum. An easy choice for a political grouping with a grudge.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
The situation in Sydney is catastrophic. It looks increasingly as if what is a very harsh lockdown (reportedly featuring, in the worst affected areas, no moving more than 5km from your home for most purposes, severe restrictions on who is still allowed to go to work, masks even outdoors with steep fines for non-compliance, and police enforcement backed up by the army) still isn't enough to stamp out Delta.
Australia's vaccine drive, which is the only possible means out of the trap given that lockdown doesn't achieve the Zero Covid that politicians expect, yet nobody dare let it go for fear of a massacre, is hopeless. Supplies of mRNA vaccines are extremely limited, and AZ is almost useless because the media and the Australian equivalent of the JCVI have, between them, so thoroughly destroyed its reputation that almost nobody will accept it.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were still stuck in lockdown at the end of the year.
If R is a as high for Delta as some have claimed, then it is worth remembering that we had a long, slow clawback from the previous variant in the first lockdown. Effective R never got much below 0.8 in the UK.
While these things aren't linear, that looks horribly like lockdowns aren't powerful enough to pull R below 1 for Delta....
Indeed. If you get a handful of isolated cases and can stamp on them really quickly then you've got a chance, but once community transmission passes a certain point - New South Wales reportedly recorded 239 known/confirmed cases yesterday - then the game's up.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
While that’s true, they were also woefully poor at running the trial and submitting the data. That speaks to their inexperience.
They shouldn’t have taken this task on. They should have left it to another firm who was more experienced at trialing vaccines.
Let us not forget that they’ve been rejected twice by the Swiss regulator and the FDA rebuked then on their submission (and also still hasn’t approved their vaccine).
AZ took this on because they (rightly) thought it would be a good vaccine, and because they (wrongly) thought it would be a stepping stone to being a major player in the vaccine space. It wasn’t entirely altruistic.
I guess they also felt that they could do it, and that it'd be a great thing if it worked. Of course AZN are a commercial operation and of course they want to make money along the way, but in part they're a company of scientists and doing science can be pretty cool.
Japan reports 10,699 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase on record
I have a terrible foreboding fear, that the Olympics will turn out to be an enormous tragedy, which kills thousands of unvaccinated Japanese people. It was always horribly possible
They even allowed in 15% of athletes unvaxxed. Why?????
There will quite probably be a lot of cases in Japan over the next few weeks and months and a lot of people we die, however I don't think that hosting or not hosting the Olympics will make much difference.
The delta variant has made its way to Japan, and was growing rapidly before the Olympics started, japan is behind most 'western' nations with its vaccine role out, and because of how well the had kept out the earlier strains of the virus, they have less infection born immunity.
in a few people arriving with the virus add to the number in the nation already that's not good, but with 5,000 cases a day when this started, even if 10 or 20 extra cases have arrived its not a big increase.
if you are saying that 15% of the athletes have not been vaccinated, ok that sounds bad but it still means that the athletes on average have been vaccinated much more than the general population in Japan.
There are no big crowds, and I'm sure lots of Japanese people are siting at home allown watching it on TV, just as they would if it was some were else.
That does not mean that in the public opinion it will not get the blame, and probably blame of the government.
Comments
It’s plain that lots of people find children attractive. Think of those ghastly US child beauty pageants, or twerking, or the way thousands of readers have completely misunderstood Lolita, or the way we’re meant to sympathise with Hector in The History Boys.
If I was to be nasty, I'd say you were blind to it, in the same way you were blind to the evils of Communism at the same age.
But to be serious: a couple of dear friends of mine have committed suicide after abuse. One was abused by a family member, one by a religious figure. One was abused in the UK, another in Oz. The earliest of these occurred when I was a mid-teenager, and I was ill-equipped to talk about it or get help for her. When I talked to the lovely reverend at school, he was very wishy-washy about it. When I needed help, he let me down. She died a few months later.
I am still angry about that.
Even then, I thought it was unusual. What opened my eyes to it was three conversations I had whilst at uni. A female friend of long acquaintance, the same age as me, told me that she had been abused by a member of her family. Various details fitted. A few weeks later I talked to another female friend in another part of the country, and when I mentioned this she said she had also been abused. I started carefully chatting to friends about it, and a third admitted she had been raped as an early teen.
I am slightly cynical, but even then, but their stories *seemed* real. In one of those cases, when I queried it with her dad, her family knew about it and had covered it up "to keep the peace" or somesuch. This was in a part of the country where abuse by a different group of abusers has made headlines.
That is what we are dealing with. Abuse of all sorts are icebergs: there is a heck of a lot more of it hidden than is visible above the surface. I see no reason why Denmark would be unusual.
I then had a child with special needs and from being a supposed pundit on social services, I became a consumer. I was shocked by the "them and us" culture I found; several of the social workers I had to deal with were patronising and told me I didn't understand if I complained. It was almost a form of "gaslighting"; the attitude was the problem isn't us, it is you.
These are important issues. I don't have any easy answers but like the Cressida Dick thread, I feel it should be debated sensibly and I am disappointed that people are indulging in cheap jokes about such a sensitive and important issue.
At the age of six-10 pretty boys like him would be invited to sit on the knee of a particular monk, clearly naked under his habit, then the monk would bounce the boy up and down while singing "Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross" again and again until the monk got "suddenly bored" and the boy was allowed to go
All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone.
Child abuse is universal. Some deny it more than others, some cover it up better than others, some tolerate it more than others. But it is everywhere
The paradox is that some of these people USED to be scoutmasters, teachers, youth workers - and they GEUINELY sublimated their desires into just working with kids, that was enough, they repressed any sexuality. Perhaps the worst that happened was an over-affectionate hug once in a while - no harm done
Now we are so hyper-vigilant these well-meaning people would never go near such a job - unless they are criminally and evilly deviant (beyond sex) so in some ways the problem is worse
To rattle off a few countries that have had child sex abuse scandals in recent years
Belgium
Greenland
Australia
China
India
USA
Britain
Ireland
Canada
Holland
South Africa
Japan
Egypt
And many many others
The idea that "Denmark" will be uniquely resistant is piffle
Although perhaps not here, since I'm not sure we have become too vigilant on this matter. But I get your point.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-32411241
implies there is a fair amount of what most people would call divergent sexual behaviour in denmark
Japan reports 10,699 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase on record
Soon there will be pretty good sex bots. If we can get over our innate revulsion, we will be able to manufracture them for pedophiles, who can go away and do their business to a robot, and no human every gets hurt, and indeed a lot of real human children will be spared future pain
My worry - and this applies to a lot of sexbot tech - is that puritans will say "even manufacturing fake kid sexbots for these deviants is wrong, so we won't do that either". Some are already making that argument
But, ironically enough, there have been more successful criminal prosecutions than there have been disciplinaries of staff not doing their jobs properly. Disciplinaries do not face anything like the same issues as criminal prosecutions and yet they do not happen. The reasons must lie elsewhere.
Take a recent case in Bradford where a social worker attended the marriage of a 15 year old child to her much older abuser. She is below the age of consent. What on earth was the social worker doing?
Or the police in Rotherham who simply ignored the law on the age of consent? It ought to be much easier to discipline officers over such failings. An officer who fails to investigate because he thinks a 13-year old consented to sex with men twice, three, four times her age should be disciplined - for not knowing the bloody law if nothing else.
In so many of these cases there were multiple failures by social workers and I find it hard to believe that, if the will was there, disciplinary action could not have been taken. The will is not there, unfortunately, and saying that it is just down to the problematic children themselves is a bit of a cop out by those who are meant to be the adults in the room.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49320260
They even allowed in 15% of athletes unvaxxed. Why?????
If so, Scandinavian countries might see less child abuse than Britain, which in turn could expect less child abuse than France, and so on.
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkney_child_abuse_scandal
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
But I was what you might call “slightly molested” in my youth. Twice.
I pretty much brushed it off, and only vaguely recall it when reminded by commentary like @Cyclefree’s.
One of the best thread headers I have read for a long time; thankyou @Cyclefree; although I can’t say I have any answers.
Paedophilia is obviously part of the human condition in some way and perhaps if we’re all more open about it, more people would seek treatment and it would be harder to cover up.
Everyone happy. Job done. THE ENGLISH ISLES
It has a certain ring
Have a nice night. Potatoes to peel.
At the same time we could raise the sentence for real life abuse to instant death.
"You have an alternative. A robot. If you continue to prey on real kids we electrocute you."
I might sound facetious but I'm not. if we can overcome our instinctive repulsion, there is a solution here
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
A seemingly common one.
But one which we are rightly nauseated by individually and as a society, and which is hugely detrimental to those children who suffer it.
However, to avoid cover ups, isn’t it better if we acknowledge that it is - like other abominations (rape etc) - a sad part of the overall human condition?
In fact, we have to rationalise it.
There must be some reason that some people feel this way.
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
They were not very Christian, and ran a few schools around Liverpool, maybe elsewhere, but now they have gone, thankfully.
I do not want to be specific, to avoid problems with OGH.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/dear-brother-o-neill-a-former-christian-brothers-pupil-writes-1.2879416
I have a couple of friends who were at a CB school in southern England. Their complain was not so much sexual abuse but brutal violence (probably linked, psychologically, of course)
@lizziedearden
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4h
Breaking: The RNLI has recorded a 2,000% increase in donations in a single day amid a surge in support over rescues of migrant boats
Criticism by Nigel Farage and others sparked an unprecedented flood of donations, including over £200,000 yesterday alone
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/07/29/eu-destroyed-astrazenecas-covid-vaccine-dream/
Normal number of people off work sick on an average day in the UK is around 750k.
John McGahern, the Irish novelist, wrote some very good novels in the 1960's about the violence and abuse which was not very far from the surface in Ireland. For his pains he got sacked from his teaching post and had to leave Ireland. He spoke uncomfortable truths, even if he did his whistleblowing as a novelist.
Societies know they need whistleblowers but they do not like those who speak uncomfortable truths. That is the whistleblowing dilemma in a nutshell.
https://www.iicsa.org.uk/publications/investigation/ampleforth-downside
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/danish-pm-acknowledges-missteps-as-sex-abuse-scandal-escalates
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says she should have done more to crack down on sexual abuse within her Social Democrats as a wave of MeToo accusations inundates her party.
The prime minister was speaking as her foreign minister, Jeppe Kofod, faced growing pressure to step down for having sex in 2008 with a 15-year-old member of the youth party.
The brutal stuff was just them getting off, it stopped when you reached about 15 as we were big enough to plant them.
I mean, what could go wrong?
My sympathies for your experience. As I say, I have friends who endured similar, they are generally wry and laconic, but they talk of other boys who were really badly damaged
I still worry that this is even legitimising things - an entry level to worse. It's one thing to deal with the existing ones but quite another to encourage others to explore their desires.
It's not as if being in an isolation block in a nasty prison isn't already a serious prospect for the average working paedophile today.
And capital punishment and irreversbile corporal punishment such as castration are ruled out because (a) the legal system screws up too often and (b) who do we ask to do the hanging, cutting, injecting, etc.?
Anyway, trout cooking soon. Night all.
Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
I am fine and just look back on those days, and think what lot of sad old wankers, literally.
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
We are happy to kill grannies in the UK immediately and grannies in the EU in the near future, because they totally lost their marbles.
Australia's vaccine drive, which is the only possible means out of the trap given that lockdown doesn't achieve the Zero Covid that politicians expect, yet nobody dare let it go for fear of a massacre, is hopeless. Supplies of mRNA vaccines are extremely limited, and AZ is almost useless because the media and the Australian equivalent of the JCVI have, between them, so thoroughly destroyed its reputation that almost nobody will accept it.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were still stuck in lockdown at the end of the year.
You think?
How many have died and will die because of EU politicians and journalist posturing?
Notably the most recent study into AZ vs Pfizer on blood clots was done by the EMA - who have played a straight bat and held their heads while many around them were losing theirs.
A fantasy not acted upon is completely different to one that is. The border between internal and external is fundamental. For me this applies across the board. I don't see why sexual attraction to children should be an exception. It's the act and ONLY the act which is a problem for society.
She served a prison sentence which seems harsh as her crimes were minor compared to Lambeth Council. She was a realist and claimed that men were fine as long as they were regularly de-spunked. Not a lot to disagree with there. Perhaps they should have voted her in?
https://www.skysports.com/f1/news/12433/12367433/red-bulls-review-challenge-against-lewis-hamiltons-british-gp-penalty-for-max-verstappen-collision-rejected
"It reminds me of the EU arguing over the pricing of AZN deal..... couldn't understand why they couldn't get any movement on price."
They tried to reduce the price to prove a point. To make them lose money on every vaccine produced. Had the French vaccine stood up, it would have been the EU's choice of supplier. I wonder how many lives the delay cost?
One billion doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine have now been supplied to 170 countries. This British vaccine, distributed at cost, is saving lives across the globe.
Together we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year and build back better from coronavirus.
https://twitter.com/borisjohnson/status/1420786924567072770
So when they read a stupid column in the paper saying that the UK was hiding all the vaccines in the basement of the Dean Street Pizza Express, that became their belief.....
They get warmed over bullshit that someone saw in the paper/read on Twitter etc. Probably we would be better off if they read PB.
While these things aren't linear, that looks horribly like lockdowns aren't powerful enough to pull R below 1 for Delta....
They shouldn’t have taken this task on. They should have left it to another firm who was more experienced at trialing vaccines.
Let us not forget that they’ve been rejected twice by the Swiss regulator and the FDA rebuked then on their submission (and also still hasn’t approved their vaccine).
AZ took this on because they (rightly) thought it would be a good vaccine, and because they (wrongly) thought it would be a stepping stone to being a major player in the vaccine space. It wasn’t entirely altruistic.
I never encountered or heard of any kind of sexual abuse. I'm sure it happened, as everywhere else, but not on the general scale that SeanF suggests was (is?) common in Britain. "
A quick Google:
The tonder Case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tønder_case
Amnesty's report on sexual abuse and rape in Denmark:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47470353
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/03/denmark-demand-for-change-in-rape-law-boosted-as-justice-minister-backs-survivors-calls/
"Danish man charged with ordering the sexual abuse of 346 children"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/danish-man-ordering-sexual-abuse-charged-copenhagen-brondy-a7587606.html
Historic (non-sexual) abuse on a large scale in Denmark:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49320260
I don't make this comment to make out that Denmark is hideous, or unusual: just that these abuse of all sorts happen everywhere, and it is all too easy to close our eyes to them. And if it's happening now, it sure as heck happened historically - as the last link shows.
Who to believe between a group of world experts, and the French President without even an ology in wiping his own bum. An easy choice for a political grouping with a grudge.
Definite feather in their corporate cap.
The delta variant has made its way to Japan, and was growing rapidly before the Olympics started, japan is behind most 'western' nations with its vaccine role out, and because of how well the had kept out the earlier strains of the virus, they have less infection born immunity.
in a few people arriving with the virus add to the number in the nation already that's not good, but with 5,000 cases a day when this started, even if 10 or 20 extra cases have arrived its not a big increase.
if you are saying that 15% of the athletes have not been vaccinated, ok that sounds bad but it still means that the athletes on average have been vaccinated much more than the general population in Japan.
There are no big crowds, and I'm sure lots of Japanese people are siting at home allown watching it on TV, just as they would if it was some were else.
That does not mean that in the public opinion it will not get the blame, and probably blame of the government.