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IN DEFENCE OF THE UNTHINKABLE

STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | December 28th 2007

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Today's British public is as panicky about paedophiles as its ancestors were about witches, says Stephen Hugh-Jones. With more reason, maybe, but not with more thought ...

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Around this time of year it's my custom to sift through the articles I've clipped during the preceding 12 months (yes, clipped: I have these old-fashioned reading habits), to see which has best kept its value, and so is still worth filing, and which least. That tends to mean, respectively, what seem to me the wisest or most informative, and the silliest. Both this year came from the London Times, and a curious pair they make.

The place of honour goes to a piece by Matthew Parris, a regular columnist in that paper. It is about thought-crime. Parris was a Conservative MP from 1979 to 1986, that party's first openly gay one—not an easy thing to become in those days, or even now. That perhaps has given him a sympathy with the kind of people who are too easily damned by the public prejudice of the day, and two such people had aroused it.

One was a British actor jailed for ten months for downloading child pornography. I find paedophilia the weirdest of sexual tastes. A true perversion, I'd call it, though I imagine that, at least in part, it has genetic origins. The weirdest and the nastiest; and you can't justify its practice with the argument that what consenting adults do is their own business. Consenting or not, children aren't adults.

But that's the practice of it we're on about, not the the inclination, the imagination or even the downloading of vile images. The standard argument for punishing it anyway is that the downloaders are encouraging, and often rewarding, the child-abuse perpetrated by those who make these repugnant images. So they are; but as Parris said "you don't imprison people who knowingly consume goods produced by brutal child labour".

I'm not sure, and I doubt that he was, that that quite proves his point: forcing six-year-olds, even whipping them, to make carpets really isn't as evil as gang-raping them in front of a video camera. Yet I'm sure he is right in his general point: what people do is or may be a fit cause for punishment by criminal law, as may aiding or inciting others to do it, but what they fantasise about or indeed might like to do is not.

A court in a city near my home recently sentenced a retired judge for what awful offence? He'd downloaded pictures, thousands of them, of naked young boys. Yuk. But had he then gone out and raped their like, seduced them, touched them "inappropriately", groomed them or even offered them chocolates with those aims in mind? Nobody claimed as much. Essentially, he was convicted—and, whatever the sentence, permanently ruined in public opinion—for being what he was, feeling and thinking what he did, and failing to conceal it.

A.E. Housman, a closet homosexual, as homosexuals had to be in his day, wrote (but did not dare to publish) an angry poem in defence of the man imprisoned for "the nameless and abominable colour of his hair". For sure, homosexual and paedophile practice are not on a par. But let's not forget that in his time and earlier the homosexual variety was thought much worse: English courts sentenced nearly 70 men to hang for sodomy in the two decades 1814-34, and 39 of them actually swung. Today's British public is as panicky about paedophiles as its ancestors were about witches. With more reason, maybe, but not with more thought.

The other thought-criminal who attracted Matthew Parris's attention was of a class no more popular in today's Britain: a 23-year-old Muslim woman who had downloaded stuff which the court judged was, as Britain's new anti-terrorism law puts it, "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism." She had also—and I suspect this was the real offence that got her convicted—written a thoroughly nasty and gory poem praising the beheading of "infidels". She hadn't emailed or printed out bomb-making advice for some would-be "martyrs". She hadn't preached her brand of violence at Speaker's Corner, nor even, so far as the court was told anyway, at her local mosque; she'd written a viciously ugly little poem

I've no sympathy whatever with those who feel such bloodthirsty ethnic hate: I share the public-bar view that if this young woman detests most of her fellow-citizens so much she's welcome to leave for some civilised country, say Saudi Arabia, where she need meet few barbarians like us and will be treated as (in that country's view, and presumably hers) Islam reckons Muslim women ought to be. But I agree strongly with Parris that she was really found guilty of was not even potentially aiding terrorism but "her state of mind".

That seems to me profoundly wrong, and almost as profoundly dangerous. Britain is at risk of reverting, in some ways, to a modern version of the days when heresy could get you burned at the stake. So far, we've taken only a few steps down that road. But it could be a long one, and it's certainly a slippery one. I salute a braver columnist than myself for choosing two of the most unpopular thought-crimes to denounce the fact that thought crime is criminal at all, and urging that we halt, step backward and close the road, now.

And, in contrast, my booby prize? My silliest piece of the year (no, I don't mean written by me, though I don't doubt others can point one out)? By contrast with Parris's piece, its subject, a matter of language and literature, was trivial, though it too challenged conventional thinking, and its arguments for doing so were mostly and manifestly absurd. But more of that, for light New Year relief, next week.