It is easy to condemn a convicted paedophile and far more difficult to catch an active predator
Everybody hates a paedophile. In theory, at least. Following the death of former Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins, plenty of people have been eager to voice their satisfaction. In 2013 Watkins was convicted for, among other offences, the attempted rape of a baby, While not necessarily condoning the kind of justice meted out to him (he was stabbed to death by fellow inmates at HMP Wakefield) there’s no shortage of those expressing delight at his passing. Judging by that alone, you could be forgiven for thinking we lived in a nation where almost everyone, from prisoners to priests, was obsessed with child safeguarding.
A shared hatred of child sexual abusers … somehow doesn’t translate into a collective effort to prevent abuse happening
Yet a shared hatred of child sexual abusers — even a willingness to view them as the worst criminals of all — somehow doesn’t translate into a collective effort to prevent abuse happening in the first place. If anything, the seriousness of the crime — its very unimaginability — can make it harder, not easier, to whistleblow. Once a person is convicted, or when they are dead, or when some tipping point has been reached whereby there is no longer any social cachet in siding with the accused, we can all shake our heads and say never again. Tomorrow we’ll all be Sinéad O’Connor, bravely ripping up the photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Until such a point, though, it’s very easy to present those pointing the finger as mad, spiteful or fuelled by some idiotic moral panic. Child sex abuse is so bad that accusing someone of child sex abuse is one of the worst things you can do to a person (apart from the actual abuse, but where’s the proof for that?).
In the case of Watkins, there were multiple attempts between 2008 and 2012 to alert South Wales Police to his activities. Six different people made complaints, including an ex-girlfriend, Joanne Mjadzelics, only to be dismissed or referred to non-specialist investigative teams. A 2017 report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that one of the reasons detectives took little action was due to Watkins’s fame. It was believed that this would motivate fans and embittered ex-partners to make false allegations. Electronic evidence existed but was not checked at the time (although in 2014 police found time to charge Mjadzelics for collecting the images she had wanted them to consult several years earlier. She was later cleared for, in her own words, “doing the police’s job that they couldn’t be arsed to do”).
All of this was happening while the UK was supposedly facing a reckoning due to the exposure of Jimmy Savile’s extensive history of child sexual abuse. The past, we were told, was another country. People sort of knew about Savile, but they sort of didn’t. No more would the powerful use their fame to “hide in plain sight”. There was something reassuring in believing we now knew where to locate the badness: in now-uncool celebrities from the seventies and eighties, and — with no apologies to O’Connor — the Catholic church. Did this make it any easier to accuse those who did not fall into such categories? Perhaps, one would like to think. But without any deeper analysis of the dynamics of child sexual abuse — how it is encouraged, justified, excused and covered up in the broadest range of families and social hierarchies — the same “reckonings” can function to entrench the belief that it only happens elsewhere. To accuse someone close to you, or who holds high status in your own community, can still be perceived as a form of attack, not least because you are likening them to members of the out-group.
Like Watkins, Surrey Pride founder Stephen Ireland appears to have been protected from earlier investigation due to his status. In June this year Ireland was sentenced to 24 years’ imprisonment for raping a 12-year-old boy. The alarm had already been raised about Ireland by Marion Harding, a Pride volunteer, in 2021, yet Surrey County took little action. Just as Mjadzelics was undermined by the belief that famous men are targeted by vindictive women, Harding — herself a lesbian — found herself up against a willingness to write off concerns as motivated by bigotry and transphobia. At one stage, Harding and her partner were even barred from attending a Pride event due to her “discriminatory nature”.
If everyone was as horrified by child sexual abuse as they claim to be, why aren’t women such as Harding and Mjadzelics listened to right from the start, even on the off-chance that abuse is taking place? Years ago I recall men’s rights activists telling feminists that being falsely accused of rape was worse than being raped, therefore it was better not to take accusations too seriously (even if that meant some real victims became collateral damage). I often feel as though we’re still in that place when it comes to child sexual abuse, only not just with MRAs.
There is little appetite to consider feminist analyses of sexual abuse, or the role of the porn industry, or the fact that power is relational and shifting (the man who is vulnerable in one context can have plenty of opportunity to silence victims in another). Instead what we often see is a game of deciding which social, religious and political groups are fair game for marking out as harbouring abusers, and which ones would only ever face accusations from damaged, malicious or bigoted bad actors (and such groups tend to be the ones containing people like us, or people we admire).
I hope Stephen Ireland is protected from assault in prison, not because I have any pity for him, but because this is not how justice works. A meaningful response to his crimes is not to wait for the day upon which one might celebrate his demise, but to consider the ways in which further abuse can be prevented. This doesn’t come from making sure the world knows you love it when sex abusers die, or even from adding “Pride groups” to your approved list of “where abuse can happen”. It comes from listening to whistleblowers, even when it’s inconvenient to your own belief system. It comes from centring victims and wanting the cycle to end.
