No Laughing No Talking No Moving No Red Light

When I was young paedophilia didn’t exist. Well ok it did but we didn’t call it that. We were warned about oul fellas hanging around the toilets at the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire—and I remember a boy was accosted in the toilets on Bray seafront. But we lived through it and we were careful, never getting in to cars with strangers and generally avoiding adults where possible, mainly because in those days childhood was a parallel world rather than the all-inclusive world it has become today.

It seems the biggest harbourer of evil in the modern world is the internet and social media. We are told that paedophiles stalk the pages of Facebook and Twitter looking for victims. We are informed that serial abusers groom children for possible sexual exploitation and that criminal gangs target young women around the globe for trafficking into prostitution. This is I am sure very true, but how prevalent is it? I don’t know to be honest but I doubt if it’s all that common as it hasn’t happened to anyone near me, has it happened to anyone near you?

The modern media is made up of absolutes there are a list of evil things and they remind us of them daily—yes some are heinous but others are less so but the obsession it seems is to make the world safe and perfect and I wonder regularly if this is achievable. The list goes like this chief enemy number one are paedophiles, ok accepted not a nice bunch of people—but is there ever an effort to understand the nature of paedophilia and ask why people abuse children. We have it everywhere in the Catholic Church in state run institutions, in care homes etc. But the internet is not where abuse of children starts or ends as the media would have us believe, no most abuse cases take place within the family home, and no matter how much the politicians legislate they cannot police that. So isn’t it time to sort this problem at source and rather than be hysterical about it lets try to own up to the human condition, and admit to its failings, and try to understand and deal with this dreadful problem rather than sensationalise it.

Politicians like Joan Burton have now adopted paedophilia as a weapon to beat her enemies, like she constantly taunts Sinn Féin with accusations against republicans, whilst ignoring all scientific facts in relation to child abuse. Which acknowledges the family home as the main danger area in child abuse.
Yes we have become very black and white—with the notion that tough law will halt all of the world vices. They talk of Twitter and Facebook as loose cannons out of control with no editorial responsibility, so by inference it should be regarded as dangerous. But it is actually the main stream media that has become increasingly dangerous. The nightly news bulletins and the daily editorials are all censored and skilfully edited to present a point of view that serves a particular agenda.

Take RTE nine news last night—it opened with Francis FitzGerald’s new bill on controlling sex abuse and other vices. Yes we welcome anything that reduces the risk to children of exploitation, grooming, trafficking, all heinous crimes but then the newsreader told us that the buyers of sex from prostitutes are to be criminalised. Ok so now prostitution which is legal in many countries is to be tagged to all the heinous crimes mentioned above. As far as I know prostitution is legal in parts of Germany the biggest player in the European Union. It is also legal in New Zealand where only recently they refused to adopt the Nordic models now been proposed by Fitzgerald. RTE interviewed one interested party and she was from 'Ruhama.' a lobby group who’s agenda is to abolish prostitution, like this can be done? They are according to their spokespeople working with prostitutes i.e.: trying to save and rehabilitate fallen women—yet they are continually challenged by sex workers on their interpretation of sex workers lives and aspirations.

So according to our safe media prostitution is a dark crime in line with heinous abuse, and the clients that serve them are criminals this in Ireland but not in Germany, and not in New Zealand and many other countries.
This is all based on a Nordic [Swedish] model that spawned from an extreme feminist lobby in the Swedish parliament. It has had mixed results with some success at first [removed visible prostitution] but then reports came in showing that it actually isolated sex workers, and pushed them into the hands of criminal elements. My own view is fairly simple in that prostitution will never go away no matter how much the moralists do-gooders or religious bigots want –it is here to stay and either the state controls it, or the criminals do, Francis Fitzgerald will take the first step in handing it over to the criminals if this legislation becomes law next summer.

The rise of political correctness has a correlation with all things blown in on the wind of neoliberalism, and even Sinn Féin have fallen victim supporting this daft legislation in the North. It seems the clever people with the agenda have managed to blur many issues with emotion, and a fake attachment to the perception of what is seen to be women’s rights. We go on the merry go round, and new, and old cases of institutionalised sexual and physical abuse emerge to shock us but hardly increase our understanding of this strange murky world. The clever people use all of this ammunition to propagate their agenda of prohibition, and we all know what prohibition gave to the world.

When I was a child we used to play a street game called ‘No laughing No Talking No Moving No Redlight,’ it was a simple really, a few of us would stand on one side of the street, and we would be told to take so many steps forward. The person, who was ‘On,’ came up close to our faces, and if he or she could make us laugh or talk-move or go red, we had to go back to base, and it was the first across the line on the far side that won. I was reminded of the game when I watched last night’s news, and I realised the pitiful view society takes of sex workers, in that they can be lumped into the genre of heinous crime so easily. With nobody to listen to their voices, which scream that they want to work legitimately in their chosen jobs, work safely and profitably, so as to pay their bills and feed their families. Perhaps this is something that the new moral ‘pass a law brigade,’ don’t quite get as they wish for their perfect world, may they wish!