{"id":25360,"date":"2014-04-29T08:07:40","date_gmt":"2014-04-29T12:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25360"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:34:15","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:34:15","slug":"international-pedophile-rings-a-bilderberg-of-diaper-snipers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/04\/29\/international-pedophile-rings-a-bilderberg-of-diaper-snipers\/","title":{"rendered":"International pedophile rings &#8211; &#8220;a Bilderberg of diaper snipers&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For some reason, every decade or so a new moral panic sweeps the land (in this case, it&#8217;s showing up in multiple Western countries). Everyone gets their collective knickers in a twist over some horrible outrage which requires, nay, <em>demands<\/em> that something must be done. The panic <em>de jour<\/em> is organized gangs of pedophiles (it&#8217;s been the panic <em>de jour<\/em> several times in the last forty years). <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/a_confederacy_of_coconuts_kathy_shaidle\/print\" target=\"_blank\">Kathy Shaidle<\/a> looks at the most recent eruption of out-of-control morality:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One particularly distasteful breed of conspiracy theory that stubbornly refuses to die, however, is that which posits the existence of local, national, or even international pedophile rings.<\/p>\n<p>Does pedophilia exist? Sure. However, it doesn\u2019t follow that perverts have semiorganized themselves into some kind of parody of Freemasonry, a Bilderberg of diaper snipers.<\/p>\n<p>For whatever reason \u2014 a quirk of the collective unconscious; individual shame and guilt; profound resentment of the ruling elite \u2014 the modern mind wants to believe in these vast pederast conspiracies, even though, again and again, investigations into their existence come up embarrassingly empty.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, we can argue that this is because \u201cthe authorities\u201d are members of the ring, too, but lots of \u201cauthorities\u201d were in on Mafia and KKK malfeasance; this made prosecution difficult, but certainly not impossible. There are museums packed with primary source evidence of the Klan\u2019s existence, and the Mob\u2019s; contrast that with this utterly bizarre example of what can only be described as anti-journalism that appeared in the UK\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islingtontribune.com\/news\/2014\/apr\/islington-child-abuse-victim-why%E2%80%88i-won%E2%80%99t-talk-town-hall-inquiry-jimmy-savile-link\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Islington Tribune<\/em><\/a> earlier this month:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Despite recognition that a huge paedophile ring preyed on Islington children\u2019s homes in the 1970s and 1980s no one has ever been prosecuted and all the records of the homes and the names of the children who went to them have been \u201clost.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Behold: After the longest and most expensive trial in American history, all charges were dropped in the McMartin Preschool child abuse case, during which <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/McMartin_preschool_trial#Continued_allegations_of_secret_tunnels\" target=\"_blank\">an archeologist testified to the existence of \u201csecret tunnels\u201d on the school\u2019s grounds<\/a>, and children claimed they\u2019d been raped at orgies at car washes.<\/p>\n<p>Here in Canada, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestar.com\/news\/ontario\/2009\/12\/16\/huge_inquiry_fails_to_find_pedophile_ring_in_cornwall.html\" target=\"_blank\">a $53 million inquiry<\/a> failed to uncover a widely rumored pedophile ring in Cornwall, Ontario. (The Ontario Provincial Police had already reached the same conclusion eight years earlier.) At the end of the day \u2014 or, rather, the decade and counting \u2014 only one individual was ever convicted of any crime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/14_2_oh_to_be.html\" target=\"_blank\">Theodore Dalrymple<\/a> observed a decade ago that the people most likely to express outrage about pedophiles are actually those whose own kids tend to be neglected:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On no subject is the British public more fickle and more prone to attacks of intense but shallow emotion than childhood. Not long ago, for example, a pediatrician\u2019s house in South Wales was attacked by a mob unable to distinguish a pediatrician from a pedophile. The attackers, of course, came from precisely the social milieu in which every kind of child abuse and neglect flourishes, in which the age of consent has been <em>de facto<\/em> abolished, and in which adults are afraid of their own offspring once they reach the age of violence. The upbringing of children in much of Britain is a witches\u2019 brew of sentimentality, brutality, and neglect, in which overindulgence in the latest fashions, toys, or clothes, and a television in the bedroom are regarded as the highest \u2014 indeed only \u2014 manifestations of tender concern for a child\u2019s welfare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>An earlier example happened in my home town in the late 1980s, although fortunately for Middlesbrough&#8217;s reputation the name of the county was the usual label for the moral panic: the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cleveland_child_abuse_scandal\" target=\"_blank\">Cleveland child abuse scandal<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Cleveland child abuse scandal occurred in Cleveland, England in 1987, where 121 cases of suspected child sexual abuse were diagnosed by Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, paediatricians at a Middlesbrough hospital (in the now abolished county of Cleveland). The children were subject to place of safety orders, and some were removed from their parents&#8217; care permanently. While in foster care, the children continued to be regularly examined by Dr. Higgs who subsequently accused foster parents of further abuse leading to them too being arrested.<\/p>\n<p>After a number of court trials, cases involving 96 of the 121 children alleged to be victims of sexual abuse were dismissed by the courts, and 26 cases, involving children from twelve families, were found by judges to have been incorrectly diagnosed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Despite the judicial results, the bureaucrats believed (and apparently still do believe) that the sexual abuse of all those children really did occur and that even that large number was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/tees\/content\/articles\/2007\/05\/21\/child_abuse_feature.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">less than a tenth of the actual problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For some reason, every decade or so a new moral panic sweeps the land (in this case, it&#8217;s showing up in multiple Western countries). Everyone gets their collective knickers in a twist over some horrible outrage which requires, nay, demands that something must be done. The panic de jour is organized gangs of pedophiles (it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,28],"tags":[374,127,343,931,139,1289],"class_list":["post-25360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-law","category-media","tag-children","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-moralpanic","tag-psychology","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6B2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25360"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25364,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360\/revisions\/25364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}