But the Epstein horror show has more in common with Britain’s rape gang scandal than just Starmer’s apparent wish to avoid grasping any awkward nettles. Both involved the grooming and trafficking of vulnerable girls. Both convened a close-knit network of depraved insiders, some bonded by sexual degeneracy and linked through a host of further personal and economic ties. Both have a way of bubbling to the surface at intervals, triggering horror and disgust, then disappearing off the front pages again.

Both scandals also implicate the entire political regime in which they occurred. By rights, both Rotherham and Epstein ought to be extinction-level events for these respective (in fact, interlocking) regimes. But somehow, public life staggers on. After all, how would we go about purging an entire national ruling class, let alone a transnational billionaire one with a combined net worth greater than many nation states?

It’s a bit like that joke about a rickety house, only standing because the termites in the woodwork are holding hands. If you booted everyone touched by this corruption from public life, would there even be anyone left? The list of luminaries connected to Epstein reads like a Who’s Who of the overclass. Epstein claimed Bill Gates caught an STD from Russian girls, and tried surreptitiously to slip his then-wife Melinda antibiotics. Prince Andrew pulled strings at RAF bases for Epstein’s private jet, and pumped him for investment in a warzone where British soldiers were still being killed. Bill Clinton; Woody Allen; Mick Jagger; Kevin Spacey. Bankers, plutocrats, lawyers, politicians, stars of music and film. Those exposed insist that — in Clinton’s famous words about being handed a joint at college — they didn’t inhale. They were just at the parties, and somehow didn’t register all the little girls being served up like Ferrero Rocher.

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On Jeffrey Epstein and the Marquis de Sade

By Mary Harrington

In the public reaction, it’s generally been the sexual depravity that has elicited the most visceral disgust. This is understandable, especially when this comes with a backbeat of still-darker rumors, that shade from sex trafficking into Gothic horror. Buried amid the files, for example, is one in which a man alleges he was raped by “George Bush 1” and that he witnessed babies dismembered and feces eaten. Another alleges that Donald Trump witnessed the killing of her newborn baby, whom she birthed aged just 13. Then there’s the video footage of a hysterical Mexican model in Monterrey in 2009, screaming in the street after attending an “elite” party about how “they ate a person”, only to vanish off the face of the Earth that very night. No one knows much about the context, or if it’s even related to Epstein, but especially in the light of the latest revelations it’s doing the conspiracy rounds again.

The Epstein files contain many documents that are unverified, and could be hearsay or libel. High-profile abuse cases sometimes attract fantasists. It is eminently possible that many of the more baroque papers in these millions of documents may be untrue. But conspiracy theories can both be factually false, sometimes with grossly exaggerated or fantastical details, while still speaking poetically to something that is true. It can both be pure fantasy that anyone was literally killing babies on yachts — and also accurate that real children had their lives destroyed by Epstein. Horror and disgust is the right response.

But what is harder to parse, and yet is arguably more consequential, is the social picture that emerges from these files. Epstein’s emails convey the sense of a world that operates on terms completely alien to those by which normal people live. This is, I think, the real source of the swirling conspiracy theories about occult cabals and the like: the correct intuition that something doesn’t have to be “occult” in the sense of pentagrams, to be occult in the sense of being hidden.

Epstein was a node in a world that is precisely occult in this sense, available only to those with table-stakes high enough to participate. He emerges as a consummate flatterer, adept at brokering links between cultural and financial capital. One novelist reported, after attending a dinner arranged by Epstein for Les Wexner, his first billionaire client, that “Les seemed like this rumpled, sweaty schlub. He was so ill at ease. And there was Jeffrey facilitating the conversation.” Later, as Epstein’s power increased, he’s revealed as bartering favors, introductions, and insider access in every direction, majordomo for an intricate interpersonal economy of perks and privileges.

Everyone is now trying to make the revelations a scandal for their enemies in particular. But it’s clear that at the level on which Epstein operated, political “sides” simply don’t exist. To take one illustrative example, the Financial Times reports that Epstein pulled strings in 2019 to obtain an exclusive golf-club membership for Brad Karp, chair of the prestigious Wall Street law firm Paul, Weiss — and that he did so with the help of Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon. Yet the same report also shows that Epstein set out to arrange meetings with himself, Karp, and Kathy Ruemmler, now at Goldman Sachs and former general counsel under Barack Obama.

Money, though, was real, in Epstein’s network; money and influence. In Mandelson’s case, for instance, emails between him and Epstein show him putting pressure on the British government to water down proposed curbs on bankers’ bonuses, in the wake of the financial crash. Geopolitics is real, but can be transcended if you know how: Sergey Belyakov, a Russian FSB officer, wanted Epstein’s advice on evading sanctions. Clout is real too: for Wexner, Epstein provided glittery guests. Karp wanted an exclusive golf-club membership. Elon Musk wanted “the wildest party”. Richard Branson wanted the “harem”. Sarah Ferguson wanted a lifestyle she couldn’t afford. The mind recoils from what Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor wanted.

For everyone, their heart’s desire; the thing they will do almost anything to get. Identifying and trading in such desires seems to have been Epstein’s superpower. But surely this miasma of upscale corruption didn’t touch everyone, or did not taint everyone to the same degree? The insurance mogul Robert Meister, who introduced Epstein to his first billionaire client, told Vanity Fair that the last straw in his mounting dislike of the financier came when Epstein turned up at his house with a bevy of young models, apparently for his sexual entertainment. Meister was, he said, not tempted: he told Epstein to leave and never come back. Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Bill Clinton, recently claimed that this was also the case with Clinton, and that he cut ties in 2005, before Epstein’s 2008 conviction on a charge of procuring a minor for prostitution.

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How Trump lost the Epstein truthers

By Mary Harrington

Who knows. Mandy Rice-Davies, another teenage girl molested long ago by a powerful man, famously said when told that Lord Astor denied it: “Well he would, wouldn’t he?” Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor also would, wouldn’t he, claiming to have cut ties with Epstein long before he actually did. Trump likewise claims the latest document drop “absolves” him, though his enemies retort that millions of files remain under wraps. Mandelson claimed he’d cut ties with Epstein some years back, only for the latest document drop to show that far from doing so, he was asking Epstein for advice on property buying and may well have leaked confidential government documents to him, well after his conviction.

Now, whether it’s the influence-peddling or the snapshot in his scanties, the game seems to be up. There is no suggestion that Mandelson was implicated in sexual abuse. But the girls were never the main action anyway. Now, the once apparently unassailable “Prince of Darkness”, already fired as Keir Starmer’s man in Washington due to Epstein ties, has resigned from the Labour Party and declared that he won’t be returning to the House of Lords. Starmer, ever on the communications front foot, responded to this statement by indicating he does not think Mandelson should sit in the House of Lords.

So that’s all fine then. Except it isn’t. For what’s also clear is that Mandelson was just one actor in a sprawling, incestuous web, that will outlive Epstein, and in which I suspect the household-name celebrities and public figures currently making headlines (and headaches for the Prime Minister) often counted for less in power-broking terms than those less high-profile but seriously influential in politics, finance, or law. For some in this group, raping trafficked children may have been a fun diversion. But the real frisson — and Epstein’s real work — lay in the subtler and more varied trade, in things that money can’t buy.

The nihilistic overclass of transnational kleptocrats and their hangers-on Epstein catered to in this occult marketplace operated, and still operates, at a level where political principle simply does not feature, let alone the moral or spiritual kind. There’s only whatever you want, and whatever strings you are willing or able to pull for someone else, in exchange for it. This was the real feast; those poor violated girls were just the amuse-bouche.

Is the anonymous internet really just a breeding-ground for nutters, extremists and people whose hobby is harassing MPs? That’s the fear behind a recent petition, signed by nearly 700,000 people, calling for the Online Safety Bill currently making its way through Parliament to require anyone creating a social media account to provide verifiable ID.

The petition will be debated later this month. Defenders of anonymity will doubtless point to its importance as a free-speech outlet for whistleblowers, or for those who don’t have much public clout and wish to speak their minds in the “cancel culture” age without repercussion. But how much longer will it last? For free speech no longer commands wide institutional or even public support.

That doesn’t mean I’m against online anonymity. Far from it: last week I cracked and created an anonymous “alt”, out of nostalgia for that feeling of wandering the internet’s weird byways without a comet-tail of public selfhood trailing after me. But our growing unease over the accelerating weirdness and perverse incentives of our digitised public conversation needs to move on from a simple focus on “free speech”.

It’s not a coincidence that for some time now, public support for online censorship has grown steadily more overt on both sides of the Atlantic. And how could it be otherwise, when the entire medium of digital debate encourages ideas to adopt the most extreme and lurid form possible in order to cut through?

Digital culture embraces an increasingly voyeuristic online dynamic, a “pornography of the self” — a perverse set of incentives, that encourages already fragile personalities to offer themselves up as an ongoing psychiatric spectacle, in exchange for money and attention. The results may not be sexual, but have a tendency to grow steadily more grotesque. This can converge with actual pornography, and culminate in outright atrocity, as when seven people were arrested this week following discovery of a bizarre cult that live-streamed human castration for paying viewers.

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Why the Left eat junk

By Mary Harrington

The ratchet toward this kind of monstrous spectacle is captured by a TV trope named after Simpsons character Ned Flanders. In the early series, Flanders is an amiable and slightly cringe Christian neighbour. But over the programme’s history, Flanders’s character becomes ever more exaggeratedly focused on his faith. The trajectory is so pronounced it’s given rise to a TV trope: “Flanderisation”: whereby a comic character becomes ever more grotesquely defined by a single trait.

Over the last couple of years, pandemic restrictions have virtualised ever more of our personal, social, romantic and professional lives. And with it, something like “flanderisation” has spread. It’s not as though “real life” has disappeared, exactly; but the relation between “real” — that is, non-digital — life and the public discourse has grown steadily more lurid and strange.

It’s not as though Technicolour tabloid headlines are a new phenomenon: the immortal Sun splash FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER ran in 1986. And the term “attention economy” was coined even earlier, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, in a 1971 article. Here, Simon explored how to build organisations in a world saturated by information, arguing that attention is a key bottleneck in human culture. That is, the more abundant information is, the scarcer attention becomes as a resource.

Simon believed that people could learn to allocate their attention “efficiently”, among “the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. But if information felt over-abundant to Simon in the Seventies, that flood became a tsunami with the arrival of the internet. And with that escalation, we’ve been forced to abandon the idea that there’s anything very efficient, rational or wise about how we allocate our attention.

In the brutal competition for clicks, attention is allocated not by reason or efficiency but flanderisation. You can reach a relatively small audience of serious-minded fellow-travellers by weighing an issue thoughtfully and talking reasonably. But for widespread engagement, you need red meat. Scandal; fights; larger-than-life characters; absurd propositions, bad-faith arguments defended to the death. The more grotesque, simplified and caricatured, the more likely it is to cut through.

In this landscape, topics that have serious ongoing repercussions but resist flanderisation will sink without trace. For example, the mere words “agricultural subsidies” will be enough to send many fingers clicking instantly away — and yet the nuts and bolts of post-Brexit farming policy impact millions.

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But it’s an issue where the devil is all in the detail. Outside specialist publications, the only way to make people notice would be to flanderise — a difficult task in a complex subject. A spate of farm fire-sales or farmer suicides might attract brief attention. You might get a whole ten minutes of discourse out of a proposal to improve biodiversity by reintroducing wolves in Britain. In the meantime, though, complex issues with major long-term ramifications for the whole country, such as topsoil erosion or upland subsidy regimes, remain of little interest to the general public. Our long-term food security, biodiversity and rural economy are poorer for it.

This fundamental failure of seriousness in public conversation extends even to the question of how we conduct that public conversation. Even as the Online Safety Bill has continued its lurch through Parliament, with the contours of our entire digital discourse at stake, the press focused its investigative energy on whether or not Boris Johnson had a birthday party during lockdown.

The Bill contains provisions to tackle a range of negative aspects of digital discourse, including trafficking, online abuse, and child pornography. But like all regulatory issues with systemic impacts, it’s difficult to persuade people to think about the fine detail — even MPs — and the Bill itself has been under fire from all fronts, including the parliamentary committee set up to scrutinise it.

And when it does manage to consider the issues, they are flanderised. And perhaps the central such over-simplification concerns freedom of speech — for in truth the “free speech” ship sailed a while ago. And if widespread public and institutional support for the idea is waning, this has a simple cause: the digital era has turned what was once a generous ocean of ideas into a grotesque Marvel Studios cartoon sea-battle, between flanderised caricature concepts.

In the resulting bare-knuckle war for attention, it’s not reason that wins. Nor is everyone saying that the best, sanest, or most constructive ideas will prevail. Rather, it’s the most lurid (or aggressively state-sponsored) ideas that make it to the surface, a dynamic which does much to account for absurdist identity politics, hyper-polarised Covid discourse and the roiling underbelly of online extremisms alike. In that noisome soup, anons may be nutters or extremists — but sometimes they’re really just people who prefer to wander the weird byways and be left alone.

Because it’s also not just politics that gets flanderised. Having an online presence, as an individual, creates a similar incentive to flanderise ourselves: that is, to turn your online “self” into a caricature, based on compulsively oversharing whichever features of your personality are the most attention-grabbing. And while this pressure affects everyone, it’s still greater — as I’ve discovered — if you post under a “real” identity.

For young women, that might mean incentives to garner online attention by posting sexualised selfies. For those not blessed with looks or opinions, but willing to invite voyeurism, another option is a warped version of the common human bonding mechanism of sharing personal information: pornography of the self. Those who embrace this online are often women. But the result is less bonding or intimacy than flanderisation: a kind of ritual self-humiliation for clicks.

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If you have the stomach for it, a glance at how “e-girls’ are discussed on the lolcow website gives a sense of how such compulsive over-sharing often results less in friendliness or bonding than in cruelty and objectification.

In turn, this toxic dynamic (rightly) fuels concerns about online abuse — as well as calls for online anonymity to be banned. The petition to include provisions outlawing anons will be debated later this month; will it rehash the same old free speech ground again? If it does, we can expect it to be even more reductive and polarised than last time: because the real danger we face isn’t restrictions on speech.

How else are we to explain the two most disturbing causes trumpeted by modern progressives: of paedophilia and of polygamy? To some extent, they can’t be compared. Polygamy remains legal in a number of countries — from South Africa and Malaysia to Iran and Morocco. Paedophilia, on the other hand, has long been considered beyond the pale, and is effectively banned across the world. Most countries have an age of consent — and those that don’t, such as Sudan and Afghanistan, require a couple to be married before sex is legally allowed.

And yet, in America of all places, activists are now campaigning for the destigmatisation of paedophilic desires. To remain horrified is bigoted; we need to feel empathy for the “suffering” that paedophiles face. What makes this movement even more disturbing is that its advocates are not confined to some progressive fringe: even those whose jobs it is to end child sexual abuse now support it.

Only last week, Elizabeth Letourneau, Director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at John Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, tweeted: “Many adults with sexual attraction to children want help to control it, hate the feeling, don’t want to act on it. Helping them prevents #childsexualabuse. Stigmatizing the conversation puts kids at risk. #prevention.”

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American education needs a revolution

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She was responding to the debate sparked at Old Dominion University earlier this month, after word spread around campus that one of its professors, Allyn Walker, had released a book over the summer titled A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. The book, according to its blurb, “offers a crucial account of the lived experiences of this hidden population”. In reality, all it offers is a disconcerting defence of paedophilia.

Walker, whose preferred pronouns are they/them, is concerned for the well-being of ‘minor-attracted people’ or MAPs, the new preferred term for individuals attracted to children. When asked about the use of MAPs in a recent interview, Walker responded: “I think it is important to use terminology for groups that members of that group want others to use for them. It is less stigmatising than other words like paedophile.” In other words: let’s not hurt the paedophiles’ feelings.

Throughout the interview, Walker deploys terms taken straight from the social justice playbook — as if paedophilia were just another sexual preference in need of its own Pride. Activists talk of “lowering stigma”; of a minority that is “at-risk” and “universally maligned”. As far back as 2017, in a PhD thesis titled Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals, Walker notes how “child pornography as a harm reduction technique has previously been theorised to be a potential strategy for MAPs to maintain abstinence from sexual contact with children”.

Although A Long, Dark Shadow was published in June, Old Dominion did not place Walker on leave until November 16^th, after students began to protest. A petition was launched, making clear that paedophilia “should not be considered a sexual preference” and Walker should be fired. It has received more than 14,000 signatures.

Yet despite such overwhelming condemnation from the student body, the university’s statement regarding the situation was short, vague, and inadequately critical of Walker’s views. For Walker, however, the university’s action reflected the “gravity of the threats to me and other people on campus”. Walker’s critics’ disapproval was part of a “coordinated effort” against the LGBTQ community and academic freedom.

I am a firm defender of academic freedom. And I believe the problem of paedophilia needs to be studied. But that does not mean that we can ignore the danger destigmatising paedophilia poses to children. We should not be normalising the idea that it is tolerable to fantasise about sex with children. A university and a university press should not be pushing this kind of harmful material.

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Progressives are a gift to Islamism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And yet this dangerous tendency to tolerate every and any proclivity, no matter how wicked, has become widespread: along with paedophilia, polygamy — a practice which should have ended centuries ago — is making a comeback as an acceptable form of relationship. Last year, Utah enacted Senate Bill 102, which lowers the penalty for polygamy from a felony to an offence on par with a traffic summons, as long as the new spouse consents to the marriage. Even pop culture is embracing the trend. Just this week, millennial influencer Lauryn Bosstick posted her thoughts on polygamy to her 1 million Instagram followers: “i am in to freedom of choice. i don’t waste my energy worried about what people’s relationship choices are – everyone’s different. if not hurting anyone & it works for you, go for it.”

But polygamy is harmful — to women, in particular, but also to society in general. Earlier this year, I interviewed Dr Dan Seligson on my podcast about its harms and dangers. He explained that polygamy actually breeds poverty in societies. It turns the human female into a commodity, destroys trust in society, and produces unhappiness in families. Growing up in Somalia, I have seen this all first-hand: my father had four wives. Not one of them was happy; not one of them thought their union was empowering.

And yet proponents of polygamy in the US today model their movement on the successful (and legitimate) campaign for same-sex marriage, pretending it is a similar form of liberation. Two practising polygamists summed up this tactic in a peculiarly supportive recent New Yorker profile: “I wish people would be as accepting with us as we try to be of everyone else.”

Here is where the slippery slope becomes a terrifying cliff face. Ingeniously, ‘minor-attracted people’ and polygamists are seeking the protection of the progressive umbrella. They want recognition as ‘maligned’ minorities who have been marginalised and overlooked by society. They want the freedom to love whomever they want, regardless of a person’s age or number of other partners. And it is working. The social justice movement is heeding their calls.

At the core of what we are seeing today is an assault on Western civilisation. In the West, we have a general moral framework. We share a broad understanding of right and wrong. But our norms and values are under attack. We have abdicated our responsibility to make moral judgements — and evil has started to seep in.

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Why is child marriage legal in the West?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There will be some who claim that I am overreacting; that those arguing in favour of destigmatising paedophilia and polygamy are small groups who live in the dark corners of Twitter and will never have any real staying power. But the first steps have been taken. The path ahead is clear. As activists like Allyn Walker insinuate themselves into the social justice fold, the ranks of their warped campaigns will swell.

I have been a vocal advocate for women, children, homosexuals, apostates, and religious minorities for the past two decades. I believe in giving the voiceless a voice. I have also been a free-speech fundamentalist. But there must be a red line. No matter the context, there will never be anything progressive about paedophilia or polygamy.

In no area has this become more apparent than in our perpetual “gender wars”. My own views on the issue are fairly well-known: I believe human beings have chromosomes. I believe gametes exist. I don’t think homo sapiens are a hermaphroditic species. And I don’t think that the existence of creatures like the clownfish mean that humans are hermaphroditic.

My belief is that something exists called “gender dysphoria”, but we know almost nothing about what causes it, know almost as little about how to respond to it and know infinitely too little to be assertive about it — let alone enough to medically experiment on children.

Why do I mention this? Only because, as I first expressed publicly to Lionel Shriver some years ago, it has become clear that men and women are treated differently in this debate.

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Perhaps I am wrong and I have merely been able to express my views on trans issues either because nobody has noticed what I have written or because everybody knows I am a lost cause and highly unlikely to be bullied into silence. But then it may simply be the fact that I am a man.

After all, countless female authors have written articles expressing scepticism towards the transgender movement — many of them more moderate than my own. Yet almost every time, I have watched in horror as online and offline mobs are stirred up against them and not me. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, JK Rowling, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce — some of these women have been subjected to physical assault; the rest threatened with it.

Joyce, whose excellent book Trans came out last month, is just the latest to be hounded. For her troubles — a deeply researched, humane and thoughtful piece of work — she was subjected to entirely baseless and libellous claims of, among much else, anti-Semitism. Because there is nothing a trans extremist won’t say to try to intimidate their opponents. Libel laws appear not to bother them.

Another of the things that all these attempted witch-hunts have in common is that they are orchestrated by a small number of highly motivated activists who behave as they do precisely because they are so deliriously certain that they are on the right side. And no one is more certain in this regard than the YouTuber Owen Jones.

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Like me, Jones happens to be a gay man. But unlike me he seems to think that transgender activism is simply the latest, logical progression in the gay rights movement. I think that transgender people are as deserving of dignity and respect as anyone else in society. I never have, nor ever would, treat them with anything other than courtesy and respect.

But I remain deeply uncomfortable about the idea of a young effeminate boy being told he is actually a girl or a young tomboyish girl being told that she is a boy — and then being medically transitioned to approximate the opposite sex. Rather than being seen as an advance for gay rights, I see it as the opposite. In fact, knowingly or otherwise, it absorbs one of the most homophobic tropes of the past: that men and women should fit a particular stereotype.

But so high on certainty is Jones that he consistently uses his considerable social media platform to denounce “transphobes”, who invariably end up being women.

That isn’t to say that Jones has never targeted a man. He has, for example, on a number of occasions libelled me, and on one occasion I suspect tried to have me sacked. So much for his concern that gay people are underrepresented in journalism.

But none of this bothers me. What does bother me is that he was one of the people — along with the very weird gays at a pseudo-publication Pink News — who has repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation after the country’s most successful author had the temerity to say that women exist. Jones, Pink News and others consistently suggested that Rowling had said things she had not said, deploying one of the nastiest tactics of this inquisition. They pretended that rather than expressing a view they disagreed with — and that Rowling had every right to hold — she was, in fact, attacking trans people.

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This is, of course, a deranged claim. But it is not an uncommon one. Last year, for instance, Jones was one of the more prominent figures in the witch-hunt against the then Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore. Moore happens to be someone I often disagree with. She is Left-wing; I am not. But by any standards, as a columnist she is one of the standout talents of her generation.

She is also one of the rare examples of a working-class woman who has made her way up the ranks of Britain’s commentariat solely through her own talent. But for Jones, any professed solidarity stopped the moment that a working-class woman dared to disagree with him on the issue of transgenderism. Eventually Moore was indeed pushed out of her position at The Guardian.

There is now a pattern. This week, Jones targeted another exceptionally talented female writer, Sarah Ditum, for the same reason: she disagreed with him about trans issues.

But this time, people started to notice the trend. As the Left-wing journalist Helen Lewis — formerly of the New Statesman — observed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jones only seems to go for female journalists. She pointed out that a male journalist recently wrote something similar to Ditum, and did so in the low-circulation New Statesman to boot, yet Jones did not organise a pile-on against him.

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Why is the woke mob so scared?

By Douglas Murray

And so I wonder if it’s time to start treating Jones in the same unforgiving way he treats everybody else. In a discussion with the campaigner Nimco Ali, which Jones enjoys circulating online, he obsesses over a single stupid phrase (“bum boy”) used by Boris Johnson in a Telegraph column a quarter of a century ago. He then asks Ali, who is godmother to Johnson’s child, whether she believes he is a homophobe.

But let us apply the same endlessly uncharitable interpretation to him. Owen Jones’s problem is that he hates women. He is a misogynist. Using his skewed logic, we might even say that because he treated Nimco Ali with such visible disdain he also has a particular problem with women of colour.

This is how Jones and his supporters treat their opponents. They distort their opponents’ language and demonise them. So why not treat him in a similar manner? The answer, of course, is because it would be terrible to live in a world where the rules were set by such awful people.

According to Helen Lewis, a number of her mutual friends with Jones no longer speak to him because they believe he has become a bully. She also observed that Jones has spoken publicly about feeling like an outsider, and about the times he’s been the victim of abuse in the past.

If that’s true, one might expect Jones to act with more compassion. But self-reflection has never been his forte — as countless women are starting to discover.

“Many of these cases demonstrate the Church of England’s failure to take abuse seriously, creating a culture where abusers were able to hide,” the independent inquiry concludes. Too many bishops were more concerned with supporting those who had been accused of abuse than looking after the victims. Abuser priests were quietly moved on to a new parish when news of their activity reached the attention of their bishops. The language of a “fresh start” and “forgiveness” became a kind of cover for deeper concern for reputational management. Those who had been abused were treated like a problem that needed to be hushed up, made to go away quietly.

It was at St Paul’s that I first heard the weasel phrase “reputational risk”. It wasn’t used with respect to child abuse, but was a catch-all warning for anything that might potentially tarnish the good name of the church. The irony, of course, is that the fear of reputational risk may have been the very thing that led the church to cover up many of its dirty little secrets.

Of course, over the last 70 years the Church of England has changed beyond all recognition. The “long withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith, has removed the old deference towards the clergy which meant abuser priests were believed over their victims. The last time I wore a clerical collar in the street, a passing motorist wound down his window to shout “paedophile” at me. Even so, the line that it is all very different now is still unconvincing. In 2018, over 2,500 “safeguarding concerns” about children and vulnerable adults were reported to dioceses. Some of these may well have been as unfair as the malicious shout from the window of a passing car. But some of them won’t have been. There are still abusers in the church. And the collapse of deference has not deterred them.

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By Christopher Rhodes

The church, when I joined, used to have a very clubby feel and there was a sort of vestry chat that would look upon and describe lay people as “Muggles”.  Now frowned upon in all but the most defiantly Anglo-Catholic of circles, it was an expression of clerical solidarity. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. But it engendered a kind of closed ranks mentality when ‘one of our own’ was accused of something. And there was often a kind of gloomy Gothic creepiness about clergy bonding that bracing sunshine of secularisation has done much to dispel. Not that child abuse in the church is a peculiarly Anglo-Catholic thing. But with evangelicals it generally seems to have a more sado-masochistic expression, as with the punishment beatings handed out by the abuser John Smythe on the Iwerne Trust Christian camps, or the naked ice-baths and beatings delivered by Rev Jonathan Fletcher. I experienced something of this kind of abuse myself and the emotional scars will always be with me.

So although much has indeed changed, I still don’t really trust the whole “much-has-changed” line. It is true that what is now called Safeguarding has become an over-riding obsession within the church’s hierarchy. And at times it seems that the whole apparatus of church administration is bearing down upon this issue, with continual directives seeking paper exercises to monitor the situation. I suspect that part of the church’s highly defensive reaction to Covid has been driven by this concern. And the worry about Safeguarding will, I fear, be used as a reason to introduce even greater centralisation into church structures. This, in turn, will alienate further many clergy already alienated by the way the central church is busy accruing to itself the sort of authority that has traditionally been located on the ground, in parishes.

But the evil of abuse is highly adaptive and can inveigle itself within even the most administratively focused of approaches. For despite the voluminous interventions of the central church, there remains the problem that church people are largely too biddable, too conflict-averse when it comes to this enemy within. Wickedness often places itself adjacent to virtue as a mechanism of disguise. And those of us who feel it our calling to recognise the good in other people can be poor judges of the dark side that can sit closely alongside it.

Suggested reading

Have I become a bourgeois cliche?

By Giles Fraser

The problem is that when someone is exposed as an abuser people fall over themselves to re-remember what they thought of them, not wanting to be counted among those who were fooled. And so we build up a picture of the abuser in which it now seems obvious that they were what they were exposed to be. But this is a dangerous retro fitting of the imagination.

A man such as Bishop Peter Ball, for instance, was widely recognised during his public ministry as a man of great virtue. In 2015, he was sentenced to 32 months imprisonment after admitting the abuse of 18 young men over a period of 15 years. So now Peter Ball is remembered as a nasty creepy paedophile. And, of course, he was. But this picture of him doesn’t help us discover the people who are like that and currently operating in the church. He was perceived as a remarkably holy person – which is why the then Archbishop, George Carey, failed to believe the accusations of abuse against him and why Prince Charles could write to the bishop saying: “I wish I could do more. I feel so desperately strongly about the monstrous wrongs that have been done to you and the way you have been treated.”

If we simply dismiss such sentiments as the establishment looking after itself, we will miss the way in which paedophiles not only were, but continue to be, highly plausible. To speak of a cover up is a form of self-comforting delusion. The truth is much more disturbing. People really did genuinely believe that Ball was a man of great virtue. And we may well believe that about some of the abusers currently operating within the church.

The report is correct to advise that ultimate responsibility for Safeguarding should be taken away from bishops. The pastoral responsibility that bishops have for their clergy presents a conflict of interest when it comes to the need to weed out clerical abusers. The power and responsibility for safeguarding has to be an independent matter – but not as a way for trust in the church to be re-established. Abuse often takes place when we trust too much, too indiscriminately.

The language of love and forgiveness must not be diminished by all of this. That is the church’s core message – yes, even for abusers. But some acts of forgiveness are above our pay grade and reserved for God alone. The Peter Balls of this world will also have to face the judgment of God. But this side of the last judgment, it is the church’s job to protect the vulnerable. And that requires us to have a more clear-eyed assessment that, notwithstanding the commandment to love and forgive each other, sin also exists as much within the church as it does elsewhere.

The need to root out evil is always a work in progress. Let us not tell ourselves that things are better, even if they may be. Let us not be confident we now have the right tools the address this issue. The enemy is always among us.

#MeToo is about saying: this happened to me, I’m not lying, I’m not mistaken, I’m not exaggerating; it was abuse, and it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Here is my truth.

More Christmas Reading

The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Sharing our truth is powerful and important, but there are many stages still to go before we find peace (forget about resolution, justice or karma!). Luckily, there are many books that can help this process.

My #MeToo story is called ‘Emotional Violence and Social Power’ and while I don’t have the space, strength or tears to go over everything that’s happened since I wrote it, I want to share some of the books that I’ve read since. I have no idea when or if true recovery will ever come, but the books I’ve named here, none of which are self-help books and all of which are written by experts in their field, are valuable reads. All the books take a holistic view, looking at the psychology, physiology, sociology and the cultural ramifications of aggression, survival, and the search for justice and emancipation from the triggering, flashbacks, nightmares and other effects of trauma.

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery is an international bestseller and the definitive book on PTSD. Be prepared to cry. It’s a wrenchingly honest, compassionate and honourable read, written with deep understanding. Alongside that I would recommend several complementary classics: Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score and Babette Rothschild’s The Body Remembers both examine how psychological pain is held in the body as well as the mind.

More Christmas Reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I also strongly recommend Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd, which looks at the effects of detachment, abandonment, abuse of trust and violation in childhood. Freyd is a real buzz-name at the moment. The aptness of her acronym for the behaviour of wrong-doers when confronted, DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – is evident in the reactions of high-profile abusive men as they are brought to account.

While I don’t think it’s our responsibility to psychoanalyse our aggressors or listen to their excuses, there are some fascinating books on abusers. They make for a grisly, shocking and – be warned – sometimes triggering read. Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door is a sensational introductory book and a good starting point.

For anyone who has survived an abusive relationship, there are some very striking and (again) classic works: Power and Control by Sandra Horley, Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft and From Charm To Harm by Gregory Zaffuto are all precise examinations of abusers who are often glib and charming on the surface and who rely on control, gaslighting, isolation and threats to first psychologically manipulate and then physically terrorise their victims.

More from this author

The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

Finally, as awareness of coercive control and abuse develops, I want to recommend a remarkable memoir by Helen Walmsley-Johnson. Look What You Made Me Do is a survivor’s memoir written with depth, literary flair, candour and clarity by one of the most insightful journalists working today.

When I read these books, I cried with pain, recognition, admiration and gratitude for these writers’ wisdom and compassion.