The unavoidable truth, though, and one that will be central to the inquiry, is that the majority of these rapists were of Pakistani Muslim heritage. This was laid out in an academic study of the topic in 2020, as well Alexis Jay’s 2014 report into the Rotherham component of the abuse. But to attempt to dig deeper into this tendency has hitherto been fraught — as Kemi Badenoch found out earlier this year when she clumsily referred to a certain element of this diaspora as “peasants”.

Inevitably, Badenoch’s comments were met with outrage — mainly because of the terminology she used. But there was an element of truth to her observations. Badenoch was referring to a subsection of the Pakistani community who, over the past decades have made their way to Britain from Mirpur, which is a rural district of Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir. This is a significant diaspora: 70% of Britain’s already numerous Pakistanis can trace their heritage to this poverty-stricken region in their motherland’s north. And to examine it further might be useful.

Mirpuris began to come to the UK, at first in small numbers, more than a century ago. After the Second World War, though, the British government started encouraging young, single men from Mirpur and the surrounding areas to move to the UK’s northern industrial areas to make up for labor shortages in factory towns.

This suited the Mirpuris. Their region sits on the periphery of Kashmir, which was on the Pakistani side of Partition, whose function was essentially to split the subcontinent’s Hindus from its Muslims. One result of the new border was that Mirpuris were now less able to take up jobs in Mumbai. This meant that British jobs became more attractive to villagers.

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Those who remained did not experience much largesse from the new Pakistani state. Mirpur was given little in the way of roads, schools, and other public services. Those who had settled in Britain sent back word to their kinsmen of the new opportunities that were opening up.

The migration was still not large-scale, but that changed in the Sixties. Pakistan’s construction of the Mangla Dam, which began in 1961, had submerged hundreds of villages in the Mirpur District, displacing more than 100,000 people — many of whom moved to Britain. This was the labor migration phase of the chain, which was followed by family migration and reunification in the Seventies and Eighties. The new arrivals were mostly conservative villagers adhering to a rigid set of social and cultural hierarchies. These Mirpuris, like those they were joining in Britain, were not highly educated, and they had little or no experience of urban living in Pakistan. From the Nineties onwards, Mirpuris flowed into the UK through “marriage migration”, with rural and low-skilled men from Kashmir marrying British-born Mirpuris in the UK and moving to towns such as Bradford, Birmingham, Luton and the surrounding areas.

Tony Capstick, an associate professor of language and migration at the University of Reading, has been studying the UK’s Pakistani Mirpuri population for almost 17 years, working closely with families in both Lancashire and Mirpur. “What’s happened, in a nutshell,” says Capstick, “is migrants from a very poor part of the other side of the planet, with completely different religious and cultural practices, have come to live and work in a very disadvantaged part of the UK where already there’s huge social problems”. As a result, these post-industrial towns are now embroiled in “this situation where it’s been difficult for both communities to live together”. Of course, not all British Mirpuris are conservative, and not all of them are reluctant to integrate. But a certain element has preferred to stay in insular communities, choosing to import spouses from villages and small towns in Azad Kashmir. Integration isn’t happening. 

“It’s a reflection of attitudes that one sees not just in Pakistanis in the UK, but that are commonly held by many people in Pakistan as well,” says Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani scientist who is an outspoken critic of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism in Pakistani society. “From what I saw in Birmingham and in Bradford,” says Hoodbhoy, “these communities essentially do not interact with others and look at them with a degree of hostility, particularly when it comes to their women and girls being in contact with the rest of the British population.” 

It is important to note, as Hoodbhoy does, that there is a growing movement within the population and its diaspora to embrace liberal values. Increasingly, the later generations are university educated and increasingly detached from the culture and traditions of their forebears. “But those at the lower end of the social stratum keep an insular existence, and the strong influence of the imams at their local mosques makes it even more difficult for them to break out into mainstream society.”

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Meanwhile, the number of these mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools) have been growing, from 338 mosques in 1985 to over 2,000 today. These institutions sometimes perpetuate an Islamist worldview that prevents the newcomers from seeing themselves as British — as with the hardline Muslims who tried to impose an “intolerant and aggressive” Islamic agenda on some schools in Birmingham. The more radical among them include preachers who encourage their followers to dismiss any notion of their identity being tied to Britain.

As Hoodbhoy suggests, “Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism did not take into account the regressive values that Islam can preach.” And some of those values are at odds with life in liberal Britain, as many are now pointing out. Furthermore, it’s a dynamic, suggests Hoodbhoy, that has allowed a sub-section of the community to utterly avoid integration. Indeed, rather than marrying out, many families choose to bringing over to be “imported husbands” — young men who have come to Britain via the spousal visa scheme.

In 2000, more than ten thousand Pakistani nationals were cleared to join spouses in the UK, around half of whom were male. These “unhappy husbands”, as they have been called by academics, face unenviable challenges on first arriving in the UK. They often don’t have good English, and are expected to conform to their in-laws’ expectations of what a ghar damad (house son-in-law) is supposed to do when it comes to his professional and personal lifestyle choices. Many of these men have to accept low-status employment and contend with being dependent on their spouses for their immigration status.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that this insular community has closed ranks against what it sees as persecution regarding the grooming gang scandal. The loyalties of the men involved, and of the women to whom they are married, are predominantly to their clan. Outsiders are less worthy of moral regard and protection. Might anything change this?

Hoodbhoy thinks change needs to come from the local mosques which hold such influence over the traditions and beliefs of the population. “Proselytisers crossing borders should be banned,” he says. “Madrassas deprive young children of fundamental skills which are needed for surviving in British society, and unless they are reformed in a manner that is clear and transparent to all, they should not be allowed to function.”

Capstick, though, has a more pessimistic view of the future. “I don’t see them assimilating,” he says of the Mirpuris. “I’ve been doing this now for twenty years and I haven’t seen Mirpuri men and women marrying non-Mirpuris, which, after four generations of being here, is quite unusual for a community.” The cultural dysfunction, it seems, will not be easily abated. Indeed, Casey says that grooming gangs are still operating. And as the inquiry gets underway, officials are bound to obfuscate the true extent of the cover-up — because the truth will be too damaging to contemplate.

There was, of course, a public inquiry. It concluded that most of the diagnoses by Higgs and another paediatrician, Geoff Wyatt, were incorrect. Higgs was subsequently banned by her local health authority from dealing with child sex abuse cases. But this scandal is not what it seems, and it destroyed far more than the careers of two medics. It baked into child protection services a scepticism of children’s accounts of their own experiences.

The campaigning journalist Beatrix Campbell has followed the Cleveland case since it broke in 1987. A year later, her first book on the scandal, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse — The Cleveland Case, was published. In it, Campbell examines how Cleveland council made child sexual abuse a priority, engaging with medical experts and innovative diagnostic procedures, only to be met by a backlash from statutory services. Children had not been abused, it was decided. Rather, the scandal was a witch-hunt against parents.

Now, her new book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Legacy of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Case, revisits the scandal — with the proof necessary to back up her earlier suspicions. The 30-year rule allows certain government documents to be released publicly three decades after they entered the National Archive. Thanks to this, Campbell found evidence that “there was a cover-up, and that the doctors and social workers were not wrong about so many of those children having been sexually abused”.

Shocking failures led to the government inquiry coming to a completely false conclusion. For instance, the only international expert consulted was Dr Ralph Underwager, who in 1992 helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — an organisation that claimed counsellors and parents were manipulating kids into believing they had been abused. Underwager became mired in controversy when, a year later, he gave an interview to a Dutch paedophile magazine in which he said that paedophiles should “boldly and courageously affirm what they choose”.

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Campbell also found evidence that the Government knew at least 80% of the diagnoses of these children were correct — but hushed it up because the Treasury had warned that dealing with this abuse would be expensive. Saving money was more important than saving children. Local MP Stuart Bell set the agenda, saying it was simply “not possible” that all these children could have been abused. He became, says Campbell, “the advocate for accused adults”. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister at the time, made clear her deep mistrust of social workers, and of feminists. Two days before the inquiry was announced, she was asked if she would “allocate extra funds to deal with the rising rate of child abuse referrals”. She replied simply, “no”.

Support fell behind the police — who, Campbell argues, were the main culprits in enabling abusers to evade justice. “Cleveland had a macho, misogynistic police force,” she says. And, as has been proved time and time again, “asking a patriarchal service to police patriarchal behaviour is pointless”. Cleveland was unlike other authorities, “for example in Leeds, where there was a very well-developed, collegial culture between police, paediatricians, social workers, rape crisis centres”. In Cleveland, by contrast, police “were pretty much told they didn’t have to liaise with other professionals over child sexual abuse, and that was a complete disaster, and one that was repeated in many subsequent child abuse scandals”.

The media also failed, quickly falling in line with the government. National newspapers called for the blood of social workers, and the local Evening Gazette ran a “Give Us Back Our Children” campaign. Ultimately, no perpetrators were identified, let alone charged or convicted. Following the inquiry, 27 families sued the NHS, as well as the council and individual medics, costing the state £1 million in out-of-court settlements.

Campbell tells me that what she finds most cruel in this whole story is that the children at its heart — whose difficulties had prompted responses by professionals — were then subjected to a very public inquisition. Only a handful of those children have ever come forward to tell their stories, and just one has done so both before and after reading her social service records. When, at the age of 40, Minnie* first approached Campbell out of the blue, she asked: “Are there a few of us, like me?”

In Minnie’s eyes, Marietta Higgs — who one journalist at the time of the inquiry described as “the most hated woman in Britain” — was a hero. Minnie met her after being referred to social services at the age of 10, following her brother’s revelations about child sexual abuse at the hands of their sadistic stepfather. Minnie was examined by Higgs, who found signs of rape. Higgs made Minnie feel safe. “She was my saviour,” she says.

For Campbell, this is what a good child protection system looks like: “The abused child who describes an experience of feeling saved.” And yet, the name of Marietta Higgs has long been used as a warning against overactive imaginations in social workers, doctors or other advocates for children. It has been evoked to discredit victims who choose to speak out later in life, as Minnie has.

The disgrace of it is that, when her name was first being dragged through mud, secret documents that vindicated Higgs’s conclusions were circulating around Westminster. A confidential dossier put together by the Northern Regional Health Authority was sent to the Ministry of Health in 1988 and presented to Parliament. It exonerated Higgs and accepted that around 70-75% of the diagnoses were correct. Campbell got hold of the document while updating her original book on Cleveland. She assumed that Higgs had read it, but when she visited her at her home in 2017, discovered she had not. Higgs has since retired.

One of the many disappointing things about the Cleveland scandal is that it had been preceded by a moment of enlightenment, largely triggered by feminist activism: people working in health and social services had been paying better attention to testimony about sexual abuse. Campbell sees the scandal as “a devastating example of a backlash against what feminists had achieved: as a result, all of that learning was thrown away, squandered, and condemned”.

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As a result, the campaign by Cleveland parents, and the public humiliation of the doctors at the heart of the scandal, focused on the accused adults, rather than the vulnerable children. Jean La Fontaine, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics who specialised in the study of sexual abuse, told the inquiry:

“Whenever we come to consider this issue, the children seem to get lost in the system. In the public inquiry, and before it, we heard a lot about parents’ rights. Perhaps it’s one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children’s voices have not been heard.”

The legacy of this, which lasts to this day, is tragic. “It shaped the entire approach to child protection politics for three decades, and was completely catastrophic,” says Campbell. Services today are still heavily influenced by what happened in 1987, in that few children are believed, and it is almost impossible to secure a conviction when they are. We just have to look at the so-called grooming gangs scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere to see how children are routinely disbelieved. “We now have a situation where, if you want to sexually abuse children, you can just do it, because you will get away with it,” says Campbell.

This could have been stopped in 1987, when there was a unique opportunity in Cleveland to bring the prevalence of child sexual abuse out of the shadows. Instead, it set back the issue significantly. It plunged Britain back into a dark age, by telling future generations of abused children that if they spoke out, they would not be listened to. It also created professional anxiety among doctors and social workers, who feared being treated as Marietta Higgs was.

Campbell met endless obstacles in the course of her reporting, from unobtainable documents to the influence of “false memory” organisations on the general public. Campbell even found herself arguing with her publishers’ “sensitivity readers”, who were offended by the description of “anal dilation” being used to detect whether the children had been anally raped. “I am offended at child rape, and those that seek to cover it up,” she tells me. The truth is gruesome, but that doesn’t mean we should hide from it.

As for the Cleveland children, they are now well into adulthood. Aside from the small number that have ever spoken out, where are they now? “We don’t know what happened to them because there was no follow-up,” says Campbell. “It would be like 121 children falling off a cliff in a bus and surviving terrible injuries, and nobody was interested in how they managed.” We can only hope her reporting is the first step towards the public hearing these children’s stories again — and, this time, believing them.

*This name has been changed.

The Japanese government is considering raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 as part of a package of sex crime reforms. Yes, you read that right, the age of consent in Japan is currently 13, one of the lowest in the world and the lowest in the G7. A justice ministry panel is also recommending redefining rape to make court judgements more consistent. As it stands, it must be proved that not only was sex non-consensual, but that the victim had been unable to resist due to “violence or intimidation”. The new law will allow courts to consider drugging, intoxication, “catching the victim off-guard” and psychological manipulation in their definition. Voyeurism will also be outlawed.

That Japan is only now updating its laws is troubling, as it suggests a society indifferent to the fate of vulnerable minors and sexual assault victims. Just last week, a former J-pop star Kauan Okamoto claimed to have been sexually abused by the now-deceased music producer Johnny Kitagawa when he was 15. He thinks many more boys who worked for Kitagawa were also abused, but were afraid that speaking out would ruin their fledgling pop careers. “I believe that almost all of the boys who went to stay at Johnny’s place were victims,” he told reporters . “I would say 100 to 200 boys stayed there on a rotation basis during my four years at the agency.”

All this appears to add substance to the implications of the “weird Japan” reportage that fixates on the seedy elements of Japanese culture, such as the popularity of disturbingly young girl bands who cavort scantily clad in glossy videos. (Some members of the J-pop band NMB48 are just 14.) But as ever with Japan, things are not what they seem. The salacious Orientalist myth needs to be separated from the more prosaic reality. For one thing, it’s not exactly true to say the age of consent in Japan is 13. Most prefectures (or counties) interpret laws against “lewd acts” to include sex with minors. This means the real age of consent in much of the country is 18 — though penalties for “lewd acts” are generally lighter.

Still, that hardly explains why Japan’s sex crime laws haven’t been updated since the late Meiji period. The answer may lie in Japan’s traditional “black box” attitude to sexual crime. In a culture where direct expressions of opinion or intent are considered impolite and injurious to societal harmony, and everything is caveated or left unsaid, it is often considered too difficult to determine what happens in the “black box” of an intimate encounter between two individuals. The police and judiciary would rather not be asked to get involved — and nebulous sex crime laws that deter victims from coming forward have long suited them. Of course, it also benefitted predatory men.

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Then there is the fact that the public was, until recently, largely unaware of the flaws of the outdated laws. Japan has a low official rate of sex crime at 1.02 per 100,000 citizens (the UK’s figure is 27), and horrific stories of abuse do not appear on the news. Nor does sexual abuse ever feature as a storyline in TV dramas. In the absence of compelling evidence of a problem, the dusty old ordinance remained on the statute books as there simply wasn’t any clamour for change.

That is, until recently. Japan is at its most dynamic and progressive when it feels the world’s gaze upon it, a phenomenon known as gaiatsu (“outside pressure”). Not all Western-inspired protest movements translate to Japan (BLM flopped), but MeToo took off in 2017. The behaviour of celebrities came under intense focus, with particular attention paid to how “talents” interacted with their very young fans. In 2017 the bassist of the band Tokio quit after forcing a kiss on a high-school girl, and actor Keisuke Koide had his contracts for TV dramas cancelled when it was revealed he had slept with a 17-year-old. Then, in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister, was forced to step down after implying that women talked too much in meetings. The director of the opening ceremony was sacked for likening the female star to a pig.

At the heart of Japan’s MeToo movement was Shiori Itō, a journalist and filmmaker whose rape allegations against a high-profile colleague saw her awarded substantial damages in 2019. Her memoir Black Box, published in 2017, became a bestseller, and she has since campaigned to change Japan’s century-old rape laws.

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Ito’s story raised many awkward questions in Japan. Those impressively low crime statistics came under scrutiny: a government survey in 2019 found that only 14% of victims of sexual assault had reported the crime. And the survey only questioned those aged 16 and above. The reasons given were a lack of faith in the police, a belief that their trauma was unimportant, and shame. In a country where stoic endurance is prized and maintaining societal harmony is considered of far greater value than personal suffering, underreporting is a serious issue.

However, there is a limit to Japan’s tolerance. In 2019, a series of technical acquittals in four sex abuse cases involving minors sparked outrage. This included a horrific case in Nagoya, where a man was acquitted despite the judge acknowledging he had repeatedly raped his teenage daughter and had threatened to beat her if she refused. The judgement hinged on whether the young woman could have resisted: the judge ruled she could have done. A higher court overruled the judgement, and the man was given a 10-year sentence, but the dangers of the ossified penal code had been exposed and calls for changes to the law intensified.

Gaiatsu may be a factor in the timing of the proposed changes. Japan will host the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida — who was schooled in the US and is on a mission to harmonise Japanese society with Western norms — will not want any embarrassment spoiling his showpiece.

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Kishida has already made efforts to rid Japan, which is ranked 116 out of 146 in the gender gap index, of its chauvinist reputation. Last June’s Intensive Policy for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women required firms to disclose their gender pay gaps; last December, Japan hosted the sixth World Assembly for Women, featuring luminaries such as Malala Yousafzai and Christine Lagarde. Kishida is likely to welcome the justice ministry’s sex crime reforms and push through the necessary legislation swiftly.

This is all well and good, except that the proposals appear to be more about sanitising Japan’s international image than protecting vulnerable young people. The bar for rape conviction will remain high: Human Rights Now have said it will still fail to meet international standards. Whether the new policy will cut through on the international stage is also in doubt. Two weeks ago, thousands of tourists flocked to Kawasaki to attend its annual Penis Festival — much to the mirth of the Western press. But what foreigners often don’t realise is that the defining aspect of Japanese sex culture isn’t, as A.A. Gill claimed, its weirdness — but its secrecy.

Billy Bragg didn’t much care for my appearance on Andrew Doyle’s Free Speech Nation.

He got it wrong, though. I had not accused trans people or gay men of anything of the kind. I had simply pointed out that Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs), a sanitised term for paedophiles, were being included by queer activists in the ever-expanding rainbow flag and that it should be a matter of some concern. What I said was: “I don’t, as a lesbian, want to be lumped in with ‘minor attracted persons’, which, of  course, is the latest addition to this rainbow coalition and means ‘child abusers’”.

The first use of the euphemism “minor attraction” to describe those who desire sex with children was back in 1988, by a journalist called Elizabeth Peterson in a Christian publication. She was appealing for empathy and understanding towards “paedophiles”. Since when, there has been a creeping attempt in certain quarters to normalise their desires.

In particular, a number of British academics within the Queer Theory discipline have, over the past few years, pushed the idea that “paedophilia and child abuse are not the same thing”, and that “paedophilia is a sexual attraction pattern that shares common features with other sexual orientations”. Bafflingly, child sexual abuse is being described by some clinicians as a sexual identity worthy of empathy. Additionally, attempts have been made  to bring it under the rainbow coalition where it should be treated with dignity and respect; Norwegian “queer” academic  and professor of ethics Ole Martin Moen argues that paedophilia should be treated as a sexual identity.

Jacob Breslow, feels the same. He was, until his affiliation with organisations promoting paedophilia as a sexual identity came to light, a trustee at Mermaids. When a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Breslow gave a presentation at a 2011 event for the US-based organisation B4U-ACT, co-founded in 2003 by a convicted child sex offender to help people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. There, he said that: “Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons.”

Then, in June 2021, trans-identified queer scholar Allyn Walker published their book A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and their Pursuit of Dignity, making a clear link between queer theory and child abuse apologism.  In it, Walker posits there are many similarities between MAPs and lesbians and gays. Walker’s PhD thesis, titled “Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals”, argued that such men should be permitted to view child abuse imagery as a “harm-reduction technique” or “form of therapy” to help “maintain abstinence from sexual contact with children”. Following complaints about their book being “pro-paedophilia”, Walker was suspended from their professorial post at Old Dominion, Virginia.

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You might remember Karl Andersson, a UK-based student in queer studies at the University of Manchester, who got into trouble last year when an essay based on his experiences of masturbating to Japanese comics of child sexual abuse was published in the academic journal Qualitative Research. When the complaints flooded in, the university had no choice but to suspend Andersson, claiming that because he worked in a “niche area” of studies, no one noticed what he was up to. That “niche” is queer studies.

Andersson also publishes the magazine Destroyer: A Journal of Apollonian Beauty and Dionysian Sexuality, a Swedish-based journal focused on sex and “romance” between men and underage boys. Its stated objective is “to bring back the adolescent boy as one of the ideals of gay culture”.  Breslow has praised Destroyer in his own work, claiming it documents the “sexual desire of boys”.

Queer theorists such as Breslow, Walker and Andersson are pushing the line that paedophilia is a hardwired medical condition, and that therefore there must be some kind of “paedophilic gene”. And if these attractions are both innate and uncontrollable, the answer is, according to queer theorists, to feed the beast.

Craig Harper, Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), also promotes this line of thought. He collaborates with Prostasia — a California-based charity which advocates the use of sex dolls as a way for men wishing to rape small children to vent their sexual frustrations. Prostasia also gives pointers on its website as to “age play” — adults fantasising during sex that one of them is a child.

Harper says MAPs are targeted by unfair online abuse. His study on their use of child sex dolls found that “when asking participants directly about their engagement with criminal activities, we found that there were no differences in self-reported offending between those who owned child-like dolls and those who did not.” The term “self-reporting” is key here. As Caitlin Roper, feminist activists and author of the book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating points out, arguments used in support of men’s use of child sex abuse dolls, “build on previous arguments by paedophiles and queer theorists in support of men’s sexual access to children”.

A number of organisations, such as Virtuous Paedophiles and B4U-ACT, argue that child abuse imagery and sex dolls are good ways of keeping these men “satisfied”. But Kathleen Richardson, Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at De Montfort University, is deeply concerned about the way that men’s desire for sex with children is being enabled and encouraged. “For adults to identify with practices that involve the abuse of children implies these are not lone individuals,” says Richardson, “but groups to discuss these issues and are working with academics who use ethics to do their politics of persuasion by arguing they present no harm to children. In fact, it is impossible to have a ‘sexual identity’, without consideration of what it entails.

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There are, according to Gail Dines, author of Pornland, studies of use of Internet pornography which have drawn attention to the extent of adult sexual interest in children. “Clinical experience and now research evidence are accumulating to suggest that the Internet is not simply drawing attention to those with existing paedophilic interests but is contributing to the crystallisation of those interests in people with no explicit prior sexual interest in children,” says Dines.

Prior to the internet, groups of men that seeking to decriminalise child sexual abuse met as special interest groups. In 1974, a group of “paedophile rights” activists in the UK formed the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and somehow managed to be welcomed into the upper echelons of polite, liberal society.

PIE, which openly argued for the abolition of the age of consent, convinced the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) to accept them by claiming to be an oppressed sexual minority similar to the gay community. When I interviewed PIE leader Tom O’Carroll in 2015, he told me he had never liked the word paedophile, and that one of the main positives of being accepted by the NCCL, and, as a result, by some gay groups, was that it would mean that men like him could unify and “organise against oppression”. “We were kind of stuck with the word,” O’Carroll told me. “If we had another word, more like gay, it would be hard to stigmatise us.”

O’Carroll suggested that, rather than “paedophile” the word “kindly”, should be used, because it was similar to the Dutch word “kinder”, meaning “children”. “Being ‘kind’ as well as being sexual,” he said.

Alarmingly, these men were not only being painted as harmless, partly by their association with NCCL, but also potentially beneficial to society. In his study of PIE, published in 1983, the psychologist Glenn Wilson made the extraordinary claim that “many members admitted sexual feelings for children which they had been able to contain or turn to social good. Some gravitated toward occupations such as schoolteacher or social worker, where they could enjoy the company of children without plotting abuse”.

But the bad old days of PIE appear to have taught us nothing. PIE was disbanded in 1984, up until 1983 it lobbied for the age of consent to be abolished, appearing on Newsnight to argue its case.

Their influence is being felt still within the echelons of academia and now echoed in the thoughtless slurs of musicians. Those of us who campaign to end the sexual abuse of children do not point the finger at gay men as likely perpetrators, despite Billy Bragg accusing me of doing so. I lived through the Eighties when it was a regular occurrence for lesbians to lose custody of their children, usually to violent ex-husbands, because we were considered to be sexual perverts and dangerous for children to be around.

It is clearly an abhorrence to suggest that gay men, by virtue of being same sex attracted, are a danger to boys. But our defence of gay men from prejudice and bigotry must not act as a smokescreen for those groups that are seeking to normalise sex with children. And this is why including so-called MAPs as part of the rainbow flag would be a disaster.

We should have learned by now that sexual predators of children are not just another oppressed sexual minority in need of support and understanding. Their apologists should not be corrupting our universities with a dangerous ideology. The sexual abuse of children is stigmatised for a reason, and so it should remain.

Since the advent of “content creator” platforms like the one offered by Pornhub, it can also be a very well-paid job. One performer, Wolf Hudson, explains how he went from earning $4,000 a month working for porn studios, to well over $10,000 as a free agent monetising his work through Pornhub’s Modelhub service, which launched in 2018. “Content creation has shown that performers have always been in charge,” he says. “Without us, there would be no industry.”

For Milf performer Cherie DeVille, Modelhub was a source of “autonomy, power, a good bit of money”. Siri Dahl says it’s the reason she was able to buy a house. More than that: she credits her porn work with giving her, as a survivor of sexual abuse, an arena in which she had full control of her sexuality. “Like, one of my favourite things about the industry I work in is the fact that we care about consent.”

Through Modelhub, verified performers can collect a share of the revenue from ads served against their videos. They can also charge consumers for downloads or custom videos. Essentially, it was an answer to the problem that had been stalking porn since the internet decimated the industry in the Noughties: how the hell was anyone going to earn money from making it? Which means that Modelhub was Pornhub’s answer to a problem Pornhub had played a significant role in creating.

By the time Pornhub was founded in 2007, the porn industry — like the music industry and Hollywood — was already foundering under pressure from the internet. Porn had done very well out of the VHS era — some histories even credit it with VHS’s victory over Betamax in the format wars — and had been expected to do equally well from DVDs. But DVDs arrived at roughly the same time as the mass internet, meaning that porn was, suddenly, everywhere all of the time. And all of it was free.

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Previously, consumers had expected to be ripped off for their porn, handing over fistfuls of dollars for a handful of scenes strung together. Now they could download an illegal torrent of anything they could imagine, a process made simpler by the foundation of the “tube” sites, which allowed users to upload their own videos — or anyone else’s. It wasn’t in the sites’s interests to police copyright violations, since they made their money by serving ads, and more videos simply meant more eyeballs, which meant more profit. So, the late Noughties were a golden age of pornography for almost everyone involved, apart from the people who actually made it.

In a 2009 sketch of life in “the Valley” (the San Fernando Valley in LA County, where porn studios have historically made their home), the writer Susannah Breslin charted a bleak scene. The producers, nearly all men, were largely despairing of turning a profit, as they competed against pirated versions of their own work; the ones who did were those willing to push their scenes to greater and greater extremes of shock and violence. The women who participated talked, not about liberation and empowerment, but about their debt and shame. One female performer told Breslin, through tears: “It is kind of wrong, I think, and it’s very degrading, I think, and it’s just — I need the money that bad.” She made $500 for a shoot.

At the time Breslin was writing, at least, porn was not an industry that universally “cared about consent”. It’s a principle that often seemed to be honoured more in the breach, through scenes that eroticised the coercion and rape of women. A woman who says “yes” to being beaten and fucked on camera because she needs $500 to get through the next week is hardly offering her free and happy participation.

The “sex work is work” position sometimes attempts to negate experiences like this by trying to argue for continuity between sex work and other forms of labour. “Maybe the difference is the contact or the penetration?” argued a 2015 post by the academic Lisa Wade. “But there are other jobs that centrally involve bodies and some involve kinds of penetration. What about the dentist climbing in your mouth?”

This would be a more robust comparison if dentists were paid for allowing us to climb into their mouths rather than the other way around, if PPE wasn’t required in dental surgeries, if the average dentist’s salary wasn’t upwards of $200,000, and if more dentists ended their shifts crying about the degradation of it all. It only holds if there’s nothing uniquely valuable about sex, and yet the sex industry would not exist if there was nothing uniquely valuable about sex.

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More convincing, perhaps, is the argument that sex work can be degrading, but the degradation is a function of a badly structured industry rather than inherent to sex work. And it was Pornhub that decisively changed that structure. Under pressure from tube sites, many of the studios that populated the Valley went bust, at which point Pornhub (or, more specifically, Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek) was there to buy them out. The result, explained a 2014 Slate article, was “a vampiric ecosystem”: “Mindgeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek.”

Eventually, though, vampires need new blood. Modelhub was a way to provide this, and the performers could only be grateful for it. After all, it was better to be your own boss than be exploited by a studio. It didn’t matter that Pornhub was the reason their economy had collapsed: the condition of the “content creator” on any platform is one of Stockholm Syndrome, endlessly prostrating yourself to the algorithm gods that profit from your labour.

But Pornhub was still, at base, the thing it had always been: a tube site, with all the problems that implied. There were the copyright breaches, of course, but there was also much worse. “If you let just anyone upload anything,” says DeVille in the documentary, wide-eyed, “you’re going to get anyone uploading anything.” So, there was revenge porn. There were spycam videos, videos of rapes and assaults. There were children. “If you’re interested in the ‘Content Formatter’ job,” warned a Glassdoor post quoted in the 2014 Slate article about Pornhub, “just be aware you’re basically a glorified child porn screener, and you will be watching disgusting videos all day.”

In theory, moderation should have meant that none of this material made it onto the site. In practice, a team of about 30 was attempting to screen between 700 and 1,000 videos a day. Scrubbing through at high speed, with the sound off, it is impossible to tell a simulated rape from the real thing. Even if a video was flagged, there was no guarantee it would be removed: former moderators have said that management discouraged them from pulling popular content. And even if it was taken down, there was nothing to stop it being uploaded again.

Like the performer Breslin had met in the Valley, the moderators doing this work undergo it for money, not desire: it’s easy to joke about “watching porn for a living” until you realise the stuff they were filtering included incest and bestiality. Moderators ended up suffering burnout and panic attacks. As one researcher into the industry has said: “Horrifying labour conditions make free porn possible.”

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For a long time, though, Pornhub remained a PR triumph, thanks to a mix of quirky data-mining stories (which state has the most searches for cheerleader? The answer may surprise you), celebrity tie-ins (hello Kanye) and headline-grabbing gimmicks, like sponsoring a snow plough. That finally started to change in 2020 with Nick Kristoff’s New York Times article, “The Children of Pornhub”. Among the horrors he detailed were a missing 15-year-old girl from Florida whose mother found 58 videos featuring her on Pornhub, and a 14-year-old girl from California whose sexual assault was uploaded and seen by a classmate. Because the uploaders of illegal content tended (for obvious reasons) not to be verified users, they couldn’t profit from this material. But Pornhub could still serve ads against it.

In the documentary, the performers sound — for the most part — appropriately horrified that this material existed on the platform where they worked. But what distresses them most of all is the terrible unfairness of their work (on Pornhub) being associated with child sexual abuse footage (also on Pornhub). The documentary doesn’t push this point, but the disjunction still stands: they seem to believe they should have their share of Pornhub’s profits, without responsibility for the abuses that helped underpin them. Plus-size performer Gwen Adora dismisses the reaction to Kristoff’s article — which resulted in payment handlers including Mastercard and Visa cutting off services to Pornhub, and Pornhub deleting millions of unverified videos — as a “Twitter kerfuffle”.

On the one hand, pornographers maintain that the highest value of all is sexual self-determination, embodied in their work. On the other, when women and girls are violated and their violation is compounded by being turned into a masturbatory aid, this is simply a “kerfuffle”. Siri Dahl explains how distressed she was that Kristoff quoted her in his article without mentioning the fact that she’s a survivor of sexual abuse. Her experiences do not seem to have made her more empathetic to women whose abuse happens through porn. If your job relies on a platform that makes money from rape, maybe your job simply shouldn’t exist, however nice it is that it’s enabled you to buy a house.

The porn industry breaks everything down in the end. The studios strip-mined the bodies of performers, then Pornhub strip-mined the studios in turn. But even the winners in the flesh trade — and the performers interviewed for this documentary are undoubtedly in the top tier of their profession — seem to be corroded by belonging to it. Sex work is work, but what kind of work?

A kind of work where sharing a shopfront with child porn is an occupational hazard. A kind of work where the mythology of individualism bleeds into a near-sociopathic solipsism. A kind of work where people become things, and what happens to those things ceases to be anyone else’s concern. A kind of work where the exploitation is baked in, all the way down. Once you accept the proposition, all kinds of moral compromises become possible.

It was the fifth ballot since Tuesday night, and they knew it would be the last. After that first vote, there was a ripple of surprise when the bookies’ favourite, the scholarly but energetic Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, received 30 votes instead of the anticipated 40. The runner-up, with 26 votes, was the cardinal who came second to Joseph Ratzinger in 2005, Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

Most commentators had written off Bergoglio because he was 76. But, of all the candidates, he seemed the most determined to clear out the filth in the Vatican. The year before, Benedict XVI’s butler had leaked documents revealing the industrial-scale blackmailing of senior clerics with an appetite for gay sex parties and money-laundering. The old pope was not personally implicated, but he clearly didn’t have a clue what to do about it. When he announced that, at 85, he no longer had the strength to do the job, few cardinals doubted that the so-called “Vatileaks” were to blame. Likewise, no one doubted that Bergoglio — who had been a nightclub bouncer before becoming a Jesuit priest — was looking forward to knocking heads together.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the horse-trading began, carried out sotto voce during meal breaks and rest periods in the Domus Sancta Marthae, a cross between a five-star hotel and a prison where the cardinals are incarcerated between ballots. By the fourth ballot, the Argentinian Jesuit was unstoppable. The fifth ballot was merely an opportunity for as many cardinals as possible to vote for the winner.

When it was over, 90 out of 115 had backed Bergoglio. The white smoke billowed forth and the bells of St Peter’s rang out to confirm the election (a recent innovation, just in case the accident-prone Vatican sends out black smoke by mistake). The new pope, who had chosen the name Francis after the medieval saint who embraced extreme poverty, walked on to the balcony of St Peter’s minus the traditional gorgeously embroidered stole. His disarming manner sent the crowd into an ecstasy of cheering. The next morning, Francis turned up at the counter of the Domus to pay his bill in person. He rang his newsagent in Buenos Aires to tell him to stop delivering the papers. The media were charmed by these faux-humble stunts.

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And so began one of the darkest decades in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. The cardinals had been taken for a ride. They had elected a man about whom they knew little: a divisive and intellectually lazy clerical politician.

But that is not the worst of it. The truth — unforgivably obscured by a mainstream media that relies on papal allies for “commentary” on Vatican affairs — is that Francis himself, both before and after his election, has empowered and protected predatory clergy and their accomplices.

No one paid any attention at the time, but one of the cardinals who joined the “humble” new pope on the balcony 10 years ago was the late Godfried Danneels, former Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels. In 2010, shortly after the very liberal Danneels retired, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges admitted to his former boss that he had been sexually abusing his own nephew. Cardinal Danneels met the victim and, unaware that he was being recorded, told him to shut up about the abuse until the revelation would cause less embarrassment. Police questioned Daneels about the attempted cover-up and raided his offices. The recording was made public and Danneels — who once nurtured ambitions to become pope — was torn to pieces by a Belgian media that had once admired him.

So what was he doing on the balcony with Francis? And why, in 2015, did the Pope invite Danneels, guilty of trying to cover up incestuous abuse of a minor, to a Vatican Synod on the family, of all subjects? I asked the late Cardinal George Pell, who at the time was in charge of reforming Vatican finances. “To thank him for the votes,” replied Pell. Danneels was a member of the so-called St Gallen Mafia of elderly liberal cardinals who lobbied for Bergoglio in 2005 and 20213. In Pell’s mind, at least, rehabilitation was his reward.

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Consider, also, the case of Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, who twisted arms for Bergoglio. It was an open secret in Rome and the US Bishops’ Conference that “Uncle Ted” loved to seduce seminarians. When Benedict XVI discovered this, he banished him to a life of prayer and repentance. As soon as Francis was elected, McCarrick found himself back in favour, travelling around the world as the Pope’s unofficial emissary and fundraiser. Eventually the New York Times revealed that McCarrick was being accused of child abuse, at which point Francis had no choice but to strip him of his title of cardinal. But it should have happened years earlier given that, on becoming Pope, Francis was told that the Vatican had a thick file on McCarrick’s sexual activities.

One of Francis’s first acts as pope was to make his friend Fr Gustavo Zanchetta the Bishop of Orán in northern Argentina despite claims that he was corrupt. In 2017, aged only 53, Zanchetta resigned for “health reasons”. In fact, he had been reported by the Vatican nunciature in Buenos Aires for alleged abuse; in 2015, graphic gay sex images of himself and “young people” had been found on his phone and were reportedly shown to the Pope. (Zanchetta claimed they had been planted.) There were extensive allegations of misuse of funds that led to a raid on his former office by Orán police.

And what did Francis do after Zanchetta resigned? He created a special job for him in the Vatican “assessing” the assets of the Holy See. He would probably still have it if, in 2022, he hadn’t been sentenced to four and half years in jail in Argentina for the sexual assault of two seminarians while Bishop of Orán.

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A pattern emerges. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio commissioned a report attempting to exonerate Fr Julio Grassi, who was jailed for molesting residents of his Happy Children homes for street children. As Pope, Francis denied on camera that he sponsored the £1 million secret document. Unfortunately, it bears his name. Fortunately for him, no major English-language media outlet has devoted significant resources to investigating his record of protecting abusers. An ordinary bishop who did these things would almost certainly be made to resign. But no one can be forced to resign the Holy See; indeed, any forced resignation of a pope is automatically invalid.

A succession of disgraceful episodes raise the question of whether Bergoglio should have been allowed to become a small-town priest, let alone spiritual leader of more than a billion people.

In 2018, the Vatican signed a deal with Beijing that handed President Xi Jinping the power to appoint official Catholic bishops. As a result, faithful Catholics are being herded into so-called “Masses” in which the worship of the Chinese Communist Party takes precedence over the worship of God. Lord Alton of Liverpool, the Catholic human rights campaigner, has described the pact on Twitter as “at best naïve and at worst a gross betrayal”. Cardinal Joseph Zen, former Bishop of Hong Kong, was so appalled that, in 2020, he travelled to Rome to appeal to the Pope to appoint a bishop in Hong Kong who would resist China’s illegal attempts to force its fake Catholicism on the province. The 88-year-old Zen asked for just half an hour with the Pope. Francis refused to see him. Moreover, he has never condemned his Chinese allies’ genocidal campaign against the Muslim Uyghurs, which includes forcing their women to have abortions.

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McElroy’s elevation to the college of cardinals was especially provocative. In 2018, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington was forced to resign when his clergy refused to believe his claim that he knew nothing about the sexual activities of his predecessor, Theodore McCarrick. Francis planned to replace Wuerl with McElroy, who was also a McCarrick protege — but such a move would have provoked open revolt in Washington. Hence the huge and unprecedented consolation prize of a red hat for the Bishop of San Diego, which has enabled McElroy to join Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, and Kevin Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, in the club of Francis-appointed cardinals who were once close to McCarrick.

Curiously, although McCarrick had once been a notoriously predatory Archbishop of Newark, his successor Cardinal Tobin said he didn’t believe any of the stories about him — until the truth emerged. Cardinal Farrell was McCarrick’s auxiliary in Washington, shared an apartment with him, but never suspected a thing. The future Cardinal McElroy, meanwhile, was informed by the late clerical abuse expert Richard Sipe in 2016 that McCarrick was a serial abuser. He took no action. And, to spell it out, these three cardinals — Farrell, Tobin and McElroy — are crucial allies of Francis “the Reformer”.

There is a chance, however, that Francis will regret the elevation of Bob McElroy. The Pope’s biggest headache at the moment is his pet project, absurdly entitled the Synod on Synodality, that Francis intended to push the Church surreptitiously in a liberal direction. What has happened instead is that the ultra-liberal German Church has gone full Protestant on Francis, using what it calls the “Synodal Way” to turn itself into a version of the Church of England. Last week, it voted to allow gay blessings in church.

Meanwhile, McElroy has taken a huge risk, calling for a “radical inclusion” of LGBT couples that would enable them to receive Holy Communion, a move that Francis does not support. This provoked Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, to accuse America’s most recent cardinal of heresy. Even the Pope’s most fervent supporters are worried. If the Catholic Church in the United States, Germany and other liberal European countries falls apart in the chaotic manner of the now-defunct Anglican Communion, then history will blame Pope Francis — not necessarily for sowing the seeds of secularisation, but for his theologically incoherent thrashing about in the throne of Peter.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Latin Mass. Francis’s suppression of this ancient liturgy is losing him friends even among liberal bishops, who now find themselves forced to themselves forced to carry out witch-hunts on behalf of the Pope’s thuggish liturgy chief, Arthur Roche, another wildly unsuitable recipient of a red hat.

Let me leave you with this disgusting paradox. Earlier this month, the Pope’s Jesuit friend Fr Mark Rupnik, a celebrity mosaic artist, was allowed to concelebrate Mass publicly. Meanwhile, claims that he grotesquely abused women have not been fully investigated because Francis refuses to lift the relevant statute of limitations.

At the same time, faithful priests have been expelled from churches where they offered the traditional Mass and now are forced to do so in church halls and basements. They represent the only community of Catholics that is growing in the 21st century, and the Pope is literally driving them underground.

When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”

In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.

As the grooming gang scandals erupting in the UK have shown, this permissive attitude towards CSA seems to be spreading. A new documentary by GBNews attempts to uncover why the abuse scandal in Rotherham — in which more than 1,500 underage, often impoverished, white girls were groomed and raped by gangs of Pakistani men — was allowed to go on for decades without the authorities intervening. One obvious reason is that these authorities were afraid of being seen as “racist” for focusing the investigation on the predominantly Pakistani men who are running these rings. But it’s equally important to recognise that these crimes were covered up by the Pakistani community itself, which allowed abusers to continue with impunity. The documentary shows how Pakistani-British policemen and Rotherham city councillors either tried to suppress reports about the scandal, or deny it was happening at all.

To reject the uncomfortable truth is the modus operandi in Pakistan, where more than 12 children are reported to be sexually abused every day. In the tight-knit, working-class communities where it’s most likely to take place, fear of bringing “shame” on the family is prioritised over safeguarding individuals, even if they’re children. A conservative attitude towards discussing topics of a sexual nature doesn’t help. A 2013 report by Save The Children offers an insight into how family dynamics play out when CSA is uncovered in Pakistan, where its prevalence “appears to be high”. Of the 99% of mothers in Pakistan who were aware of CSA, around one-fifth either considered children as compliant, or blamed them for the abuse. Confronted with the grizzly details of such crimes, it is common for Pakistanis to downplay their severity, with men often seeing it as “a part of life”, to use the report’s phrase.

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In Rahim’s family, when the eldest sister finally told their mother that an uncle had regularly raped three of the four children in the house, Rahim’s mother didn’t believe her, instead accusing her of “being hysterical and dramatic”. When her siblings insisted that the abuse was, in fact, happening, their mother finally confronted the uncle — but didn’t mention it to Rahim’s father, a marine engineer who was away from home for up to 10 months of the year. The uncle apologised, and the abuse stopped — but just for a few months. It was only when the uncle got married and moved out that the children’s five-year ordeal finally came to an end. By then, Rahim says, the eldest sister’s “problems started manifesting because of the trauma and she started rebelling”, eventually running away from home and telling the authorities about the abuse. When Rahim’s father was told, he didn’t believe any of it was true.

We have to recognise that these attitudes are cultural, if we are to understand what happened in Rotherham. Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation UK, has often commented on the over-representation of Pakistani men involved in grooming gangs in the West: “They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.” In communities where parents are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to “keep the peace”, it’s rare for anyone to stick their neck out to speak up for the rights of poor and vulnerable white girls, who are considered outsiders. The general attitude seems to be: those non-Muslim “white slags” had it coming.

Predators exploit the high-trust environment enjoyed by citizens in more developed nations, such as the UK and Canada. Girls outside the Pakistani community are more accessible to predators because they have greater social freedom; the most accessible are those without reliable carers. One of the eeriest moments in the documentary was when a victim of the grooming gangs described what happened to her as “normal”. The sexual abuse of young girls like her was so commonplace in these towns, they didn’t think it was unusual to be drugged, gang raped, and trafficked by young men who passed themselves off as the girls’ boyfriends. Is this what a multicultural society is supposed to tolerate under the guise of “social cohesion”?

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Unfortunately, the Pakistani community is still not ready to talk about CSA — a fact recognised by those few British Pakistanis who have spoken out against it. Shame and honour codes hold too much power, and those codes are hard to change. Shafiq, of The Ramadhan Foundation, notes that “for years some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand about these predatory grooming gangs”. When family members of perpetrators were interviewed, they described white girls as “filthy”, commenting on their clothing, and saying, “they have no shame, no fear of Allah”. When asked how she would feel if her own daughter were abused, the Pakistani wife of one of the predators replied: “It can’t happen to our children because they are not in the streets. We look after them.”

When Rahim’s uncle was finally arrested, following the revelation that he had abused other children in the neighbourhood, the Pakistani community came together to do damage control. By this point, the abuser had two young children of his own. Rahim’s parents were advised by other Pakistani immigrants not to talk about his crimes because “they didn’t want the family’s image to be tarnished in the community”. They put pressure on Rahim to write a letter to the judge asking for a lighter sentence, their logic being that his cousins shouldn’t be made to grow up without a father.

“I was young at the time,” Rahim reflects. “I just did whatever the adults told me to do, so I wrote it.” His uncle went to prison for two years. When he was released, he and his family moved to Alberta. “His wife never left him, and his kids have no idea,” Rahim says. Rahim’s father forgave his brother, and even flew across the country to meet with him. “When he was in prison, everyone asked where he was, and we just lied and said he got a job up in the Northwest Territories and he’s making a lot of money up there. It was the community convincing my parents to cover it up.”

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Tragic as it is, Rahim’s story is not unusual. It illustrates how sexual abuse goes unchecked within Pakistani communities. Rapists know that the community will not ostracise them. They’ll never be without a home or a job. Their mothers, siblings, wives and friends will actually cover for them. Even if they are convicted, they will most likely spend only a few years behind bars before they’re free to re-offend. They may even be encouraged to see themselves as victims of a racist criminal justice system that treats minorities unfairly. In Shafiq’s words: “They believe it is they who are victims of a racist witch-hunt — despite the fact that Pakistani gangs were allowed to rape their way around Rotherham for so long because, in part, politically correct officials were terrified of being accused of racism. They see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’.”

Sadly, there is little hope of justice for the victims of grooming gangs in the UK without the cooperation of the Pakistani community. And unless Pakistanis find the courage to shine a light on what is an atrocious open secret within our communities, I fear what happened in Rotherham will continue to happen, devastating the lives of countless children and women, immigrant or otherwise. It pains me to think that what has recently been discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, there is plenty more abuse taking place across the UK within insular Pakistani communities. And change can only come about if we set aside the tribal instincts that have enabled one of the worst cases of child sexual exploitation in modern history.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the victim.

Cheryl had always been “the life and soul of the party” before Andrew came along and won her over with his charm and intelligence. But almost as soon as the relationship began, Cheryl changed. “She was always very stressed and on edge,” Georgia says. “Every time they went out, she was always trying hard to put on a front. She was always having to make excuses for his behaviour. By the end, I didn’t really recognise my mum anymore.”

Georgia knew that her stepfather resented her. “I was just a piece of baggage that he had to put up with, but he gaslit and controlled me in just the same way as he did with mum,” she says. “I was boisterous, I was loud and I needed a lot of attention which he didn’t like. Mum was trying to keep me calm and keep him happy, which must have been a nightmare for her.”

Cheryl wanted to leave Hooper, says Georgia, but he had “tied up her finances”, made her “feel worthless” and left her completely dependent on him. But people knew what Hooper was like: “Locally, he was known for being aggressive and violent. He would go out and fight on nights out and get blind drunk.”

Cheryl increased her efforts to get away from Hooper after he started to turn violent. On one occasion he smashed in their television and opened his gun cabinet so that mother and daughter knew how serious he was about not letting them leave. “My mum was shaking so violently, it was horrible,” says Georgia. “She knew it was a threat that he would kill her. I was the one that pushed her to leave in the end.”

Cheryl and Georgia originally left Hooper in December 2017, although they returned for Christmas when Hooper threatened to kill himself. After they left again, Hooper started stalking Cheryl, phoning and texting constantly; he even fitted a tracker to Cheryl’s car. “He was driving around everywhere to find my mum, and told someone, ‘If I can’t have her, nobody will,’ says Georgia.

“I lived in dread for years,” says Georgia. “I knew he was capable of doing us both serious harm.”

Weeks later, Cheryl was dead and Georgia deeply traumatised.

“I had no support from specialist services after it happened,” says Georgia. “Absolutely none. As a family we had a little bit of help from Victim Support but nothing geared towards me as a child.” Yet she had lived for seven years with an abusive stepfather. Inevitably, Georgia “went down a dark path for a very long time”. She admits she turned to smoking and drinking when she was just 14. “I was incredibly lost.”

Domestic violence ruins lives: not just the women who are the victims, but also those poor children who are caught up in the crossfire.

Around 62% of children are present during domestic abuse incidents, and at least one in seven children will have lived with domestic violence by the time they reach 18. A recent report by Action for Children found that support for children affected by domestic abuse was “patchy, piecemeal and precarious”. And yet those children will carry what they have seen with them for the rest of their lives.

The effects can be devastating: girls are more likely to develop an eating disorder, or to harm themselves by taking overdoses or cutting themselves, and boys often learn the behaviour from the male abuser and begin to act out in violent and aggressive ways towards the mother.

Rachel Williams knows only too well the terrible toll it takes on children. In 2011, she was shot by her ex-husband Darren following months of stalking and harassment after she finally plucked up the courage to leave him due to extreme physical and emotional violence.

Tracking Rachel down to the hair salon where she worked, Williams fired two gunshots which hit her leg rather than her stomach as intended. Williams then turned the gun on himself.

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Rachel’s son Jack, 16, who had lived with the abuse since he was two, went to stay with his paternal grandparents while his mother recovered in hospital. Rachel was surprised that Jack didn’t visit her, given how close they were, saying “he was like my shadow, wherever I was Jack was”. Instead of a visit, Rachel received angry texts from Jack blaming her for his father’s death. Then, six weeks after Rachel had been shot, Jack killed himself.

“Had Jack been given the support he needed when this happened, rather than just being told he was 16 so could live where he wanted, he would probably be alive today,” says Rachel. “Jack was very popular and outgoing. He had no problems at all with his mental health until the shooting. Jack was a victim of domestic abuse, not just a witness.”

Georgia, who went to live with her loving grandparents following her mother’s death, managed to stop abusing alcohol and turned a corner from a path of self-destruction by turning instead to campaigning to end domestic violence.

During the desperate 18-month wait for Hooper’s case to go to trial (he eventually was convicted of murder and sentenced to 31 years in prison), Georgia began researching people who’d been through similar situations and she found Rachel’s book: The Devil at Home.

Following her experiences, Rachel founded Stand Up to Domestic Abuse (SUTDA), mainly for those forgotten victims of domestic abuse: the children. “I was like a GP on call in those early days,” says Rachel, “and when a message came in on my Facebook page from Georgia, my heart went out to her.”

Rachel invited the then 15-year-old Georgia to attend a conference she was hosting which focused on domestic abuse survivors. It was there that I heard Georgia speak for the first time about the terrible events leading up to her mother’s death. “Looking back now I can see the signs of how his controlling behaviour became worse,” she said. “And because she was trying to leave the relationship he decided she was not going to be allowed to do that.”

The entire audience was profoundly moved by this young woman making sense of how domestic abuse entraps women and their children, and her rally cry for better understanding and provision for those affected.

“My mum was an incredibly strong character, and not someone you would see as a ‘typical victim’ as if there even is one,” says Georgia. “She gave me that little voice in the back of my head telling me, ‘You can’t let your mum down’.” It was important to change the narrative about who becomes a victim of domestic abuse: these women aren’t necessarily weak or complicit.

Women make up the vast majority of domestic abuse victims. Those most likely to be stalked and harassed, and to sustain serious injury are those who have ended (or attempted to end) a violent relationship. Each year, more than 100,000 people in the UK are at imminent risk of being murdered or seriously injured as a result of domestic abuse, with the risk increasing for those women that leave.

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In England & Wales, more than 50,000 high-risk victims and 70,000 children are considered to be at “high risk” of serious harm, including homicide, by statutory agencies.

When PC Mike Taggart was 15, his mother Donna was murdered by her violent, alcoholic husband after she told him she wanted a divorce. “She was outgoing, warm and bubbly, but 11 years married to him changed her totally,” says Taggart. “It was constant belittling and misogynistic stuff.”

“He was dominant and aggressive to my sister and to me,” says Taggart. “We would do all we could to avoid him, including staying with friends every weekend. That was when he would get steaming drunk.” But it was impossible to escape the effects of living with domestic violence. “We walked on eggshells and would be dreading his next move.”

Taggart, who joined the police at a very young age, has focused on improving police practice regarding domestic abuse, and was awarded an MBE in 2021 for services to victims. He does his work not just with his mum in mind, but all the women and children in a similar situation. And there are so many.

The effects of not dealing with those children caught up in the crossfire of domestic violence and abuse is catastrophic. Numerous studies show that children who grow up with violence are at serious risk of long-term physical and mental health problems, such as chronic anxiety, addiction, depression, and self-harming.

But, in recent years, campaigners have lobbied to change the narrative from “witness” to “victim” when it comes to such children. Under a new law that came into force last year, children affected by domestic violence will finally be considered victims.

Given the numbers of women who suffer from domestic violence, the number of children growing up in a violent household is catastrophic. These children suffer quietly, desperately. They often do badly at school because the frightening experiences at home make it difficult to concentrate. Many refuse to go to school altogether, because they are too anxious to leave their mother alone with the abuser. Then there are those who simply cannot cope at all. So many children are prevented from leading fulfilling lives by witnessing such brutalisation.

Georgia doesn’t live in dread any more. But she can’t envisage a time when she will give up campaigning. “There is so much left to do. So many mothers have lost their lives, and there are countless children who have been left behind.” She’s positive about the new law. Those children may no longer be so easily forgotten.

During my investigation, I accompanied police officers to an amusement arcade where Charlene had been last seen. The detectives were looking out for any of the men under suspicion for her disappearance. During that two hour visit, over 30 convicted male sex offenders were later identified from CCTV footage. That’s one premises, in one night, in one town.

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

The sex trade – both legal and illegal – is rife. The proliferation of lap dance clubs and bars catering to groups of men on stag weekends has given the town a reputation as a haven for sex tourists. Queen Street, which is a focus for Blackpool’s night life, has also seen an increase in underage prostitution. Last year there were 87 visits by police and local authority inspectors to premises where children were believed to be sexually exploited.

Lisa* is a serving police officer in Blackpool and tells me that the town is known as a “safe haven for nonces”.

“They come out of prison and come here,” Lisa tells me. “They know they’ll get a friendly reception in a place jam packed with vulnerable children, and barely any support from social services.” It would be hard to deny that Blackpool can be a miserable place for children, particularly those in low-income families, to be raised.

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But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast  about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The  majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

So why might this be so?

Claire*, who grew up in Blackpool, is working for a charity that supports female victims of male violence. She tells me that the links between the rise in young females being referred to gender identity clinics and the realities of growing up in places like Blackpool are obvious. She cites high levels of poverty and the normalisation of the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade.

As a child, Claire, who was raised in Blackpool, was subject to men’s violence and consequently wanted to “opt out of girlhood”. She says: “The option to be removed from the harms of men would be appealing to most survivors. I am furious that we are allowing girls who need care and support to go down irreversible paths.”

I have long argued that the majority of girls presenting as gender dysphoric have experienced childhood trauma. What if the availability of breast binders, puberty blockers and instant affirmation as trans is a handy way for traumatised sexual abuse victims to dissociate from the abused body?

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One study, published back in 1994, looked at the issue of transsexualism and the connections with dissociation and child abuse. It found that of the 45 female to male transsexuals interviewed, more than 60% reported one or more types of severe child abuse. The sample group also disclosed symptoms and responses that are known to be typical effects of child abuse, such as fear, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, aggression and suicidal thoughts. The author suggests that transsexualism “may be an adaptive extreme associative survival response to severe child abuse”.

Kirsty Entwhistle is a former GIDS employee who turned whistleblower in 2019 when she wrote an open letter to Polly Carmichael, head of GIDS. Entwhistle was a clinical psychologist at the Leeds GIDS clinic between 2017 and 2018 and was struck by the similarities between some of the disturbed young girls who were demanding puberty blockers with those she had encountered while working in a children’s home in Rochdale in 2003.

Entwhistle became aware that some of the girls were being sexually abused and pimped by gangs of men in what became known as the “Rochdale grooming gang scandal”. At GIDS, she saw much of the same behaviour from some of the girls presenting as trans and demanding puberty blockers, with some threatening to harm themselves if they were refused hormones.

She said: “I knew that the kids would harm themselves to access something that is actually harmful to them. Just because a young person kicks and screams and tries to burn the house down, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for them.”

Female to male trans teenagers from Blackpool interviewed for the podcast on GIDS speak of teachers giving young girls breast binders without the knowledge of their parents; of a GP prescribing testosterone to a teenage girl who hadn’t even been seen by a counsellor or attended the gender clinic; and a school support worker who helped a young girl change her name by deed poll to that of a boy.

In Blackpool, local LGBT+ support services have been given funding specifically to work with “trans children’ as young as 10. UR Potential runs, Butterfly Trans Youth for ‘LGBTQ+ and non-binary young people’ in Blackpool, plus a trans-only young people’s group.

In June 2016, UR Potential CEO Linda Markey said: “We are receiving more and more referrals about transgender young people from schools, colleges and organisations who work with young people. Some young transgender people are as young as 12. Schools are struggling to meet the demand for support and staff need specific training.”

Many professionals responsible for child protection, such as teachers, counsellors and social workers, seem to be keen to offer support to young people with gender dysphoria, but what of the sexually abused girls? What is happening to protect them from this tsunami of male violence? Could it be that for many abused and neglected girls, presenting as transgender can be a form of attention seeking and validation?

Until recently, Norma* was a secondary school teacher in Blackpool. She tells me she saw transgender ideology creeping in among young girls: “I tried to raise the alarm of the potential harms surrounding gender non-conforming young women and girls to safeguarding leads. This was met with naivety of the realities of the situation and their insistence on using ‘he/him’ pronouns with no scrutiny as to any other issues.”

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At one Blackpool school, several students in three consecutive years transitioned around the same time; while kids need support in dealing with the distress of gender dysphoria, immediately affirming them as the opposite sex is not helping.

Abused, damaged and traumatised girls have long self-harmed by cutting or starving themselves in an attempt to escape their bodies. Hadley Freeman has written eloquently about the glaringly obvious links between teenaged girls’ trauma and trans identification. So why are these agencies and charities so ready to suggest puberty blockers rather than properly scrutinising what makes a teenager believe she’s a boy?

Blackpool seems to offer a clear example of how vulnerable, damaged children are being drawn to gender ideology because it offers a “one stop shop” solution to the pain of living as a female in a hellish world of abuse. “These girls have been horrifically betrayed,” says Norma. “Why are we sending them for irreversible, damaging treatment, when what they need is protection from sexual violation and abuse?”

Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based non-profit B4U-ACT in 2011. According to its website, B4U-ACT promotes services and resources for people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. In his 2011 paper, Breslow compares a child to a shoe — which, in case you weren’t sure, is an inanimate object. He stated:

“Just as the desire to and the act of cumming on a shoe requires a rethinking of the shoe and how it comes into being, I want to now argue that the desire to and the act of cumming on, or possibly even with, a child requires a rethinking both of the child, which we just begun, and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner.”

Breslow wrote in the same paper that “allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand minor-attracted persons [MAPs].”

Beneath the usual academic gobbledygook, this statement is clear: the intention is to ally those who identify as “MAPs” — who others would rightly label as adults that desire sex with children — with the rest of the rainbow community, including lesbians, even those who campaign to expose the atrocity of child sexual abuse.

This scandal might date back 11 years, but there is ample evidence that Breslow has only strengthened his views rather than backtracking from them. He is, for example, writing a book on “the queer lives of children’s desires”. Five years after his presentation for B4U-ACT, having argued in his PhD thesis that some kids were “queer”, Breslow defined this as “the queering that ‘queer’ does to the child, is one of resisting the child’s alleged asexuality and heterosexuality; allowing for the child’s pleasures, desires, and perversities…”

Mermaids, clearly, did not check Breslow’s suitability as a trustee prior to him being appointed in July this year, or surely they would have rejected him as unsuitable? Or maybe they do not consider his beliefs to be in any way problematic. He is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality (what else?) at the London School of Economics, and his profile on the university’s website revealed how wedded to trans ideology he is. This thread by feminist barrister Anja Palmer lists some of the other easily-available clues that Mermaids either missed or ignored. The charity Sex Matters also picked apart the crazed beast that is the LSE Gender Studies Department, by exposing an article by one of Breslow’s students, Matt Thompson that was peppered with sexualised threats against women in public life. Thompson wrote that he would “take my knife to your throat” in response to perceived transphobia — from women, of course.

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Perhaps they were keen to appoint Breslow as a trustee because he appears to be a virulent critic of so-called TERFS, and has practised castigating academics who defy trans ideology — such as Professor Jo Phoenix ,who was hounded from her job at the Open University following accusations of transphobia. In the spirit of “your enemy’s enemy is your friend”, Mermaids recruits all the support it can get on its mission to discredit anyone that exposes its dangerous practices and belief system.

Mermaids, had they responsibly scrutinised Breslow prior to inviting him to become a trustee, would have seen that his child abuse apologism was neither hidden nor obscured. In January this year, in an article on feminist website 4W, Dana Vitalosova wrote: “Jacob Breslow … does not only rally against women critical of faux feminism. Despite his young age, he has already established himself as a prolific campaigner against child safeguarding. Last December [Breslow said] during a launch of his book: ‘Is it really that children or young people having sex is the problem? Or is it [the problem] the conditions under which that sex happens?’”

Any minute now, an apologist for Mermaids will start arguing that it’s wrong to dig up comments made 11 years ago to discredit a person who has doubtless redeemed himself. The apologist will remind those of us who are deeply critical of Mermaids, and the trans ideology that props it up, that we have railed against similar tactics against us. After all, I have been targeted and vilified since the publication of a 2004 Guardian Weekend article that saw me eternally labelled as transphobic. Almost 20 years later, that article regularly gets wheeled out as evidence for why I should be de-platformed and publicly condemned as soon as I am invited to speak at any event in universities.

So why does it matter what a Mermaids trustee said 11 years ago?

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Any charity that focusses on children should — and I can’t believe I have to spell this out — make it their business to avoid any association with advocates of sex between children and adults. But unfortunately, Mermaids has a history of disregarding the safety of children — and promoting an ideology that sexualises them, as well as “affirming” absolutely anything a child says they want, however vulnerable and mixed-up that child might be at the time. It has continually argued, despite reems of evidence to the contrary, that puberty-blocking drugs are perfectly harmless and totally reversable. It promotes disturbing gender ideology to young children in schools across the UK. And it justifies sending breast binders to 13-year-old girls without their parents’ consent, despite being fully aware of the damage they can cause. This is dangerous stuff because it presupposes the “agency” of the child — which may then absolve the responsible adult of any wrongdoing in relation to it.

Mermaids is lauded by those who adhere to queer theory. This rainbow alliance first emerged in the Eighties, when the National Council of Civil Liberties caused a scandal by supporting the inclusion of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). There was much dissent among feminists and lesbians, who were appalled that PIE was looking to join hands with those who were sexually “non-conformist”. Many gay men did not see that those lobbying for the normalisation of child sexual abuse had misappropriated their legitimate fight for equality, protection and rights.

Sexual libertarianism is the backbone of queer theory and is often promoted by gay men. Look at staunch supporter of Mermaids, gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who recently appeared on TV in order to defend Mermaids over the breast binding scandal. He has long campaigned for lowering the age of consent for all to 14.

Trans ideology, part and parcel of queer theory, also legitimises the prostitution of children. For example, Janet Mock, a male-to-female transgender activist, appears to celebrate it, writing: “I was 15 the first time I visited Merchant Street, what some would call ‘the stroll’ for trans women involved in street-based sex work. At the time, I had just begun medically transitioning and it was where younger girls, like my friends and myself, would go to hang out, flirt and fool around with guys and socialise with older trans women, the legends of our community.”

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Mock goes on to explain how they “idolised” the prostituted trans women in the area. “These women were the first trans women I met and I quickly correlated trans womanhood and sex work,” says Mock, explaining that they came to understand the role of the sex trade as a “rite of passage” for “trans girls”.

The link between queer theory, transgender ideology and child abuse apologism has never been clearer. The recent revelation that German sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann, a board member of the Gay Counselling Service in Berlin, authored a book entitled The Lust for Children: A Portrait of Paedophiles is further evidence that this is a widespread and increasingly normalised phenomenon. Pro-paedophilia is the latest ideology included in the LGBTQQIA+ acronym.

This latest scandal should be the nail in the coffin of Mermaids, which is a danger to children and should be immediately shut down. Perhaps the many celebrities, corporate entities and high-profile individuals who have passionately defended and supported it — such as Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil, Little Mix, Harry and Meghan, Starbucks and Wagamama — will now publicly denounce the charity. Perhaps those of us condemned as bigots for raising red flags about Mermaids over a number of years will receive abject apologies.

Even if we do, the fight must go on. Queer theory still dictates the mission of far too many charities and institutions that are supposed to protect children. This ideology tears down boundaries between the adult and the child, and dismisses safeguarding put in place by those of us who fight night and day to end child sexual abuse and exploitation. It cannot be allowed to corrupt all of society.

When Byron was 20, Boatswain died of rabies. Devastated, he composed a poem that captures his grief and the sense of losing an irreplaceable relationship:

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron made provision in his will to be interred with Boatswain, but he was hardly the first human to form such a bond; the earliest known remains of humans and dogs buried together date from 14,000 years ago.

Until last week, I’d only ever kept cats, and didn’t really get the dog thing. Then we got a nine-week-old Labrador puppy. Now, my every moment and mood is shadowed by a creature who thinks I’m some kind of divine being, and who wees on the floor whenever she gets excited, which is often. It’s been intense.

But as intense as a baby? A few days into dog wrangling, a friend texted me to ask how “new motherhood” was going. There are plenty of articles which will tell you parenthood and dog ownership are comparable, or that you should try raising a puppy before you try raising a baby as a sort of trial run, or that the former is even harder.

And some dog-owners insist flat out that dogs and kids are on a level. “Am I comparing my dog to your kids?” asks young dog-owner Eva Hall. “Yes, yes I am”, because “I love him as much as you love your kids” and “let’s face it, he’s just better than your kids”. For those, like Hall, who see no distinction between dogs and kids, a puppy isn’t like parenting: it is parenting.

My already well-thumbed copy of Puppies for Dummies reinforces this, referring throughout to “dog parents”. Some of the products that cater to these “dog parents” are startlingly expensive and similar to the baby kit now in my loft. I’m not sure why a dog would need a pushchair, as puppies can walk from three weeks old; but you can still spend £350 on a deluxe dog buggy. There are slings, too; this one has a thousand or so positive reviews, many of which include photos of delighted owners carrying baffled-looking canines, slung like babies on their chests.

It’s true that in the case of both babies and puppies, you build an attuned relationship on caretaking and body-language cues rather than — as with adult friendships — conversation or shared interests. There are also broken nights, the cleaning up of bodily waste, and the sense that you’re in charge of creating a routine for a dependent other.

But I scarcely need list the reasons why a dog is a dog, and a baby is a baby. Yet many seem determined to flatten the distinction. And while it’s common to decry this as “selfish”, or blame the housing crisis for making human offspring unattainable, this trend has also paralleled a wider one, now decades old, away from boundaries, distinctions and formal hierarchies in the way we organise our social life.

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Today household-name management consultancies extol the benefits of “unstructuring” your corporation, and “unschooling” advocates wonder if parents imposing rules on kids creates more problems than it solves. Beneath it all lies a profound ambivalence about authority that’s percolated even into the asymmetrical relationship between owners and their pets.

But while many now seem uncertain about whether love is compatible with being in authority, radical equality even with kids or pets doesn’t always mean more love. Or, at least, it doesn’t always mean the right kind of love.

Over my lifetime, the trend has been away from formal acknowledgement of hierarchies in schools, families and the wider social fabric, toward a more egalitarian style. Parenting norms have shifted toward empathy rather than pulling rank. Advocates of “gentle parenting”, for example, suggest “negotiating limits” with your kids instead of telling them what’s going to happen: not “we’re leaving the park in five minutes” but “how many more goes on the swing shall we have before it’s time to go?” “Peaceful parenting” challenges the idea that “kids are less than”, arguing that it’s wrong to use “privilege as an adult” to control children’s actions and feelings. Instead, the child’s autonomy is emphasised; some even advocate asking a baby or toddler for consent before changing a nappy.

And as more parents seek to place kids on the same level as them, something similar is afoot with pets. The “multispecies family” is so pronounced a trend it is the subject of books and academic research, and three American states have recently passed laws obliging courts to treat pets as family members rather than possessions in divorce cases.

This all suggests a deep ambivalence about whether love and authority are compatible full stop. For the egalitarians, this is never the case. Children are an oppressed class; and pets are “infantilised objects of resource in a speciesist society”, forced to live in environments that do “psychological violence” to them.

This would, I suspect, have baffled the aristocratic Byron, for all that he loved his dog. If Boatswain’s epitaph is anything to go by, for him the dog wasn’t a substitute baby but something more like a deeply-loved feudal retainer:

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone

It would have flummoxed my farming grandparents, too. They kept a working dog, a relationship that has the same feudal undertone as the one Byron describes. Their dog was a member of the household, scrupulously well-cared-for but given clear rules that marked her out as absolutely not on a level with the humans.

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In contrast, a growing number of dog owners shrink from the idea of such a distinction in status. Such people would reject the term “owner”, preferring to anthropomorphise their canines, or otherwise emphasise the parity between them: for example by donning a matching dog costume to play with them or letting them into the bed.

But this comes with downsides, too. The arguments against swapping authority for empathy in parenting usually point to badly-behaved children. And if poorly-managed children may cover your walls in Sharpie, poorly-managed dogs may just be sharp. These are the creatures that gnaw at furniture, or maul livestock or humans — and who end up being euthanised.

And along with the risk that too-egalitarian a relationship will make for open season on misbehaviour in kids or animals, comes the creeping possibility that it will do so for adults as well. For once you argue that kids and animals are on a level with adults, and their autonomy a key factor in the relationship, you’re close to claiming — as the advocates for nappy-changing permission do — that we should elicit the consent of children or animals to the way we treat them.

If you’re arguing that kids and pets should consent, though, that implies they can. On the face of it, this sounds good and compassionate. But “consent” also implies a relationship between relative equals, in which both parties have similar levels of autonomy. Where this is understood to be the case, between adults, the modern world routinely treats consent as an adequate substitute for moral rules: we don’t need to say any action is wrong in an absolute sense, if everyone affected agreed to it.

Most people understand that the difference in capacity between an adult and dependent pet or child is so great that such a “consent” model only applies in a very limited sense. But the radical push to flatten all structures pulls us in the opposite direction — and for a minority, this leads to dark places.

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For it’s also now a mainstream view that consent is the sole arbiter of whether a sexual act is acceptable. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that as parenting and pet-care have become more radically egalitarian, a few are tempted to imagine the capacity for “consent” some now ascribe to children and animals in other areas of life might apply here as well.

One recent book by a UK academic argues that while sexual intimacy between humans and animals is often abusive, it needn’t be by definition. And it may or may not be a coincidence that the same writer who declared “‘parent’ is an oppressive class” worked as Communications Director for Prostasia, an organisation that supports the “liberation” of “minor-attracted people” from stigma.

For most, the retreat from authority is not a step toward abuse, just a well-intentioned effort to avoid undue harshness when in a position of authority over kids or pets. But while authority may be misused, asymmetries of power and responsibility don’t go away just because you wish they weren’t there. Children and domestic animals are genuinely in need of adult guidance if they are to integrate into the human social fabric. Refusing to provide this isn’t compassion, it’s cowardice.

More seriously still, abdicating our responsibility to accept the obligations that come with being in authority over dependents risks abuses far worse than badly-behaved kids or pets. For pretending we’re on a level with our pets or kids doesn’t diminish the power we have over them. It just makes it easier to conceal that power, and convince ourselves they’ve consented, as equals, to whatever it is we desire. And very few individuals have no desires they’re ashamed of.

It’s not just unruly dogs that need to be kept on a leash, but also the dark side of humans. If we’re to wield power responsibly in our households, we owe it to our dependents to acknowledge where it lies.

“He was pinned to the grass face down, with his arms behind his back, by a young male teacher wearing blue latex gloves while a small group of other staff looked on,” she tells me. “Olly later said that he’d been carried through the school by four staff, one to each limb and thrown.”

Olly, who has Down’s syndrome, was fortunate enough to be able to move to a school more sensitive to his needs. But his disturbing treatment remains a frequent occurrence in educational institutions across the United Kingdom — and it is overwhelmingly disabled children who are being left both mentally and physically scarred by it.

Previously, the abuse of children in schools was thought to be a disturbing product of a bygone era; something that took place in Victorian Britain rather than the 21^st century. That is, of course, partly due to the shameful lack of media interest in this area. Indeed, it’s rather telling that in the past year, the only time it has been significantly covered in the national press was last month, when Paris Hilton spoke out about her own experience of restraint and seclusion in a Utah boarding school for so-called “troubled teens”. She tells me: “That small room, covered in scratch marks and smeared blood, with no bathroom, is one of the most vivid and traumatising memories I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

It was a grim, honest account of abuse in school — and one shared by countless children here in Britain. Restraint forms part of a sanctioned group of so-called “restrictive practices” used in education, health and social care settings, as well as, unsurprisingly, in prisons. In the UK, these practices are regulated with a duty “to record and report” in all settings except education. Methods include physical restraint (with a number of different holds taught), mechanical restraint (such as being tied to a chair), chemical restraint (using drugs) and the use of seclusion, with children being sent to rooms or even tents and confined within them.

Add to this the emerging practice of imposing “blanket restrictions”, whereby children are not allowed to walk, run or play with their peers, or must visit the toilet at a set time (which is often not appropriate for some disabled children), and it’s no wonder that so many parents of disabled children are terrified for their well-being.

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For most parents, the zero-tolerance behaviour policies enforced in so many schools are to blame for this hidden crisis. As one campaigner, Beth Morrison, tells me: “We banned the belt in the eighties; now we are bringing physical punishment back for disabled kids by the back door.”

Beth’s son, Calum, who has epilepsy and support needs, was restrained on a number of occasions at a school in Dundee between 2010 and 2013. On one occasion, after he failed to follow a prescribed route when riding a bike designed for children with disabilities, he was restrained by four people and left with sixty bruises on his body. Dundee City Council say that they have fully engaged with police and prosecutors, and have taken on recommendations from the subsequent report. But Calum’s experience inspired Beth to set up the charity Positive and Active Behaviour Support Scotland (PABSS) in 2017, and has since collected more than 1,200 testimonies from families whose children — the youngest of whom was just aged two — have been restrained or secluded. In one recent case, a child who was held face down in the playground now needs a skin graft.

Yet when Morrison attends school meetings at the request of anxious parents, she says it’s a common refrain for senior teachers to dismiss their concerns by saying: “We have no records, so you have no evidence.” Indeed, a recent survey by the Children’s and Young People’s Commissioner for Scotland revealed that one third of Scotland’s local authorities did not expect schools to keep a record. (The shocking findings have since forced the Scottish government to agree to produce guidance on the use and monitoring of restraint and seclusion.)

The Northern Ireland assembly is also starting to wake up to the trauma and injuries endured by disabled children every day. Last month, Deirdre Shakespeare gave harrowing testimony about the experience of her son, Harry, now nine, to the assembly’s education committee. She tells me that Harry, then aged five, had been happy and placid. But after attending a “special school”, he started to have panic attacks and night terrors, and cowered in fear whenever his parents approached him.

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The family later discovered that he had been strapped to a chair for different activities, including learning, feeding and playing, even though he has no mobility issues. Colin McMenamin, from KRW, a leading Irish human rights law practice, said: “We have issued proceedings on this important matter and are seeking judicial oversight on what remains a very sensitive issue.”

When I approached Education Authority Northern Ireland for comment, a spokesperson said that the authority does not comment on “matters relating to individual children”. It is worth noting, though, that Morrison and Shakespeare told the Assembly that 22 Northern Irish families with disabled children aged between four and eleven had reported similar cases to PABSS, including physical injuries such as scratches, bruising and abrasions from being dragged. Moreover, the Northern Irish children’s commissioner, in a submission to the UN Committee Against Torture, has called for tougher laws, saying that schools should be required to report and record cases and that the law around when restraint can be used needs to be clarified.

The Welsh government is also currently consulting on guidance to better monitor restraint and seclusion across all age groups. In England, however, the Department for Education (DfE) is lagging behind, despite overwhelming evidence of harm in English schools.

In February last year, campaigners and advocates gathered at the House of Lords for the launch of the Reducing Restrictive Interventions and Safeguarding Children report. It included the testimony of one family whose child, referred to as Annie, was restrained 158 times in the space of eighteen months. “Many of these restraints spanned considerable time periods and involved multiple staff members,” it said. Annie “started self-harming and making suicidal threats” and “is now having trauma therapy”.

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On the same day, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced that it would hold an inquiry into the practices in English and Welsh schools, and should report within the next few weeks. Yet campaigners and experts fear that nothing will change in England.

And if history provides a guide, they may well be correct. Even back in 2011, a review of restraint and seclusion in English and Welsh schools by Charlie Taylor, then the government’s behaviour advisor, looked at the recording and reporting of use of force. His conclusion? That schools should not be forced to record such incidents because it would add to “their bureaucratic burden”. Eight years later, the DfE eventually produced non-statutory guidance on the use of the practices for disabled young people — but only in specialist settings. It did not cover mainstream schools and did not require schools to inform parents, many of whom want their disabled child educated alongside their non-disabled peers.

So many are left looking, albeit with a hint of cynicism, to the DfE’s current behaviour tsar, Tom Bennett, who is set to launch a Behaviour Hubs programme, which he says will encourage schools to be “low tolerance” regarding behaviour, rather than zero tolerance. The DfE were approached for comment about parental concerns but did not respond. Bennett, however, has said that restraint is “incredibly rare in mainstream schools” and that the rules about restraint are adequate because it is rare and defends the use of “removal rooms and parking students separately from their classes…a common and useful part of many mainstream schools”.

James Betts, a solicitor at Irwin Mitchell, who acts for families representing a group of children who were restrained across the UK, disagrees. “Our most vulnerable children are being failed on account of the lack of adequate legal safeguards, and the families I act for believe that current restraint practices in the UK leave children with learning disabilities or autism at a very real risk of serious injury or even death,” he says. “Until robust action is taken, the children and families I act for will not rest. They deserve answers, accountability and real change to protect others in the future.”

Her most revealing video, “Not My Responsibility”, is so dimly lit that she’s barely visible at all; it feels more like a confrontation than a seduction. In the shadow, you can just make out that she’s wearing a bikini top, while her whispered voiceover challenges the viewer for all the ways they might judge her body. But of course, keeping her body relatively concealed didn’t actually stop people from judging it: a paparazzo shot of her wearing a perfectly decent strappy vest and shorts kicked off a tiresome round of body-shaming followed by clapbacks to the body-shamers.

“Not My Responsibility” was released when Eilish was 18, by which time she’d passed from “promising” to “successful” to “terrifyingly, staggeringly famous” in a remarkably short time. The documentary The World’s a Little Blurry (new to Apple TV) tracks this extraordinary path, bringing home how bizarre her life has been: fly-on-the-wall style footage shows her with her family, working on music with her brother in his shabby-looking bedroom, then heading out out to play the global superstar. Her designer stage outfits go through the family washing machine.

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Other stars say they’re like their fans, but with Eilish — at least at the start — it’s really true. In concert footage (recorded pre-Covid), she performs her songs of melancholic ecstasy to an audience of girls who look just like her — one mass of self-ironising, tragic girlhood with their eyes closed in the bliss of pain and their phones held high. In Salt Lake City, she descends from the stage to embrace them. “They’re not my fans,” she tells the camera later, “they’re like a part of me.” She’s still a child at this point: 17 years old and about to record her gigantically successful debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We All Go?

That’s near the start of the documentary. Towards the end, we see another encounter between her and the public, from about a year later, by which time When We Fall Asleep has become number one in 37 countries and made Eilish the youngest female artist to top the UK album chart. She’s doing a post-gig meet-and-greet in New York, but it doesn’t have the spontaneous affection of the earlier scene. Instead, it goes off-script and Eilish walks away.

Of course, someone comments on social media that she was rude. Eilish then berates her team (which includes her mother) for leaving her exposed:

“I don’t want anyone who knows who I am, who is any sort of fan or knows a fan, to see me in any sort of awkward situation. It’s embarrassing and I have to keep smiling and if I don’t they hate me and they think I’m horrible.”

She sounds like any teenager dealing with a fraught social situation; she sounds like no other teenager in the world, negotiating global scrutiny of her every scowl.

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The film, directed by R. J. Cutler, is a document of the costs and calculations of fame — and the way those costs and calculations are heightened when the subject starts young. Eilish has now been living in public for about a quarter of her life, and the film shows her to be both adept (like most teenage girls, social media is her natural element, and every time she makes a decision she asks herself what the internet will say about it), and overwhelmed.

Because how can you foresee what an existence like this will do to you? And how much protection can the people around you give? There’s a scene where a representative from Eilish’s record label discusses the song “Xanny” with Eilish and her mother. The song is critical of substance abuse; but, counsels the label rep, “maybe you grow up and feel differently and then get dragged for it.” Eilish’s mother is outraged, partly at the suggestion of Eilish compromising her voice (although elsewhere, she also questions her daughter’s use of suicide themes), but mostly at the implication that Eilish might “fuck up” in her future.

The spectre of the fuck-up. The label rep feels it and Eilish’s mother feels it and Eilish feels it too, because everyone knows that this is what happens to those who become famous when they’re young. The one-time child actor Mara Wilson, best known for starring in the film of Matilda, recently wrote about this in a column for the New York Times which looked back on her own experiences in light of the recent reassessment of Britney Spears’ career.

Wilson calls it “The Narrative” — the arc from prodigy to tragedy that defines Spears, and Judy Garland, and Drew Barrymore, and Corey Haim, and River Phoenix, and Aaliyah, and Lindsay Lohan, and any number of others you can think of. These children were all exposed to the corrosions of an industry in which punishingly hard work is demanded and sexualisation is standard. (From the age of six, interviewers would ask Wilson whether she had a boyfriend.) And their falls, says Wilson, were all helped along by prurient journalism and the public that consumed it, something now amplified by the panopticon of social media.

They were adored for their youth, then tried as adults in the court of reputation. But a child star, however autonomous they might seem, is still foremost a child, and to say otherwise is to write a licence for those who would abuse and exploit young people. Or as the writer Tavi Gevinson (a famous style blogger at 12, editing her own magazine at 15) put it in an article for New York Magazine, also inspired by Spears: “even if someone is precocious, it is their youth that makes them precocious. If you can still be considered ‘mature for your age,’ you are not an older person’s equal.”

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There’s another potential price to child stardom, though — a price that’s less horrific than mental illness or sexual violence or addiction, but that is still colossally bleak. What if early fame leaves you fixed forever in the shadow of the child you were? Gevinson is an intimidatingly good writer, but there is still a part of me that, having followed her career since she was a tween, reflexively and superfluously adds the words for her age (she is now 24). And Wilson, though she has evaded “The Narrative”, is still essentially famous for being the woman who used to be the girl who was Matilda.

When you’re beloved for being young, ageing can only make you a disappointment. John Logan’s play Peter and Alice imagines the real-life templates for John Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland meeting as adults. “Here’s a burden: the only reason anyone remembers me now as Alice in Wonderland is that I decided to sell my hand-written manuscript of the book,” Alice tells Peter in the play:

“But do you know why I sold the manuscript? Because I needed the money. To heat my house… Now, is that the Alice people want to know? Or is it just possible they would rather remember that little blond girl in the dress, eternally inquisitive, impossibly bold, never changing and never growing old?”

For Eilish, never changing and never growing old has a particularly grim implication. In the documentary, we see her looking at her journals twice. Once near the start of the film, when she excitedly shares her doodles and lyric ideas; and once when she’s 18, looking back on how, aged 14 or 15, she would lock herself in the bathroom and self-harm. Some of the girls who adore her for articulating that pain could make a snare of their love, demanding that Eilish go on hurting for them, rejecting her if she threatens to leave them behind.

Becoming an adult means letting things go as well as embracing the new experiences of maturity, and there’s a grief in that — even if what you’re letting go of is grief itself, as you resolve the anguish of your teens. Those who truly survive child stardom are the ones who get the opportunity to grow up, reinventing themselves in public as their adult selves. Think of Taylor Swift, Thomas Brodie-Sangster or Justin Timberlake, who no longer really count as child stars now: they’re just stars, their career beginnings a mere anecdote eclipsed by ongoing success.

The test of whether Eilish lives through her fame or ends up destroyed by it isn’t only in whether she “fucks up”. It’s also in whether she’s trapped forever as this Billie, or gets to become the next version of herself. In the future where she makes it, we’ll never talk about her age at all, and the incredible, inhuman fact that she had to navigate all this when most people are still messing up their homework will be forgotten.

Every month, 400 men are arrested for viewing indecent images of children. Instead of charging and prosecuting them, Bailey suggested they be put on the sex offenders register, and given counselling and rehabilitation. This seems an outrageous proposition: how is it not an insult to the victims and a derogation of morality to treat looking at (and, let’s not forget, masturbating to) pictures of child abuse as such a low-level thing?

But in practice, it’s already common for men convicted of these offences – even those involving category A images, the most serious kind – to receive non-custodial sentences with a rehabilitation requirement. It’s probably not irrelevant here that these are often white-collar criminals, middle-class men with middle-class jobs and families. They acted monstrously, but they don’t look like monsters. Even if they did, it’s hard to see where an already overcrowded prison service would fit so many extra occupants, and hard to argue that prison has any solid track record of improving the character of those who pass through it.

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So, there is a problem. What should be done with these 400 newly minted paedophiles each month. That is the subject of a documentary to be broadcast on BBC Three, which asks: Can Sex Offenders Change? Presenter Becky Southworth, a victim of sexual abuse by her father, talks to men with convictions for sexual offences involving children who are involved in treatment programmes, and to some of the experts providing the treatment. “I don’t want there to be any more victims,” she says. “I want to believe these programmes are actually working.”

What she doesn’t say is that treatment of sex offenders has a dubious history. Last year, it was ruled that the Ministry of Justice unlawfully continued the use of the Sex Offender Treatment Programme for five years after the evidence showed it was ineffective – or rather, that if it had any effect at all, it was to make participants more likely to offend.

A report into the treatment programme found it was effectively a networking opportunity for paedophiles: “When stories are shared, their behaviour may not be seen as wrong or different; or at worst, contacts and sources associated with sexual offending may be shared.”

The experts Southworth meets are not involved in that discredited programme, and claim good success rates – Belinda Winder, of the Safer Living Foundation, tells Southworth that of 60 high-risk offenders the foundation has worked with, only one has reoffended. The perpetrators give a closer view of what that success might look like, and it isn’t easy to sympathise with.

They fall into two broad camps. On one side, there are men like “Kyle” (all the men’s names have been changed and their identities obscured), whose compulsive use of pornography led them into more and more extreme territory, including imagery of children. They often describe themselves as “addicted” and attribute their crimes to stress.

On the other, there are those like “Andrew” who are sexually attracted to children – the “true paedophile”. It’s “Andrew” who causes Southworth the most concern. “He talks about his attraction to children as a sexuality,” she says, “and for me a sexuality isn’t something you can change, even with therapy.”

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One thing the experts emphasise is that ostracising these men is the worst possible thing. The more they’re cut off from society, the less they have to lose from acting on their impulses. It’s one thing to hear that, and another to be confronted with the reality of “Vicky” who has stood by her partner “Chris” after his conviction for accessing child abuse images. Southworth starts by wondering how anyone could stay with a man like that, but at the end of their conversation, the question is more one of what “Vicky” is getting out of this. It might be good for society, but it doesn’t seem great for her.

With “Andrew”, the bar to empathy is even higher. He claims that early trauma has fixed him in a child-like mentality of which his paedophilia is one expression: Becky, who knows more than most people about trauma, gives a look of peerless scepticism to the camera at this point. The problem is that “Andrew” as a concrete person, rather than an abstraction, is pretty disgusting: when he complains that “I’m treated like a predator, but in reality I’ve always been much closer to a victim,” you wonder what room his philosophy contains for the actual victims in the images he used.

Maybe “Andrew” will read me calling him disgusting, though, and spiral into more offending. What is there to hold men like him back from acting on their desires? They know they’re held in public contempt. The only place they get to feel normal is with others who share their transgression – the main way images of child abuse proliferate is by informal distribution through paedophile networks. The men Southworth meets are reprehensible people, or at any rate, people who’ve done reprehensible things. Experts say their rehabilitation depends on them learning to think of themselves as not wholly reprehensible. It’s hard to stomach.

Like Southworth, I started this documentary wanting to believe sex offenders can change. I ended it with profound admiration for the people providing the programmes, because it turns out this is a point where my compassion cannot pass.

I want these men to live in shame of what they’ve done and terror of what would happen to them if anyone found out. I want them to have their second chance in theory, but in practice I can’t think of a single one I think they deserve. I want them to disappear. Instead, there are 400 more of them every month.