This is an excellent article by Britain’s leading sociologist, Professor Frank Furedi, discussing the latest (at the time of writing) absurd spectacle in the retrospective search for child abusers. (Oh, gosh, we all believe them that they didn’t see them at the time). This is the smearing of dead Prime Minister Ted Heath.
Frank Furedi has his finger on the pulse with the authorities’ obsession with paedophilia. As he says in this piece:
But it’s important to understand that the attempt to demonise Heath is not an aberration from the general pattern, or an unusual, one-off case. The current cultural obsession with abuse, and its intersection with anxieties about a conspiracy of elite paedophiles, has acquired a powerful dynamic. It is fuelled by an imagination that continually sees the worst in human behaviour and which compulsively looks at relations between people, and between generations, through the prism of moral depravity.
Yes. “constantly sees the worst in human behaviour” and encourages people to see all relations between adults and young people “through the prism of moral depravity”.
This has several boons for the authorities:
- It legitimizes depravity. Convenient for those in authority with depraved minds.
- It destroys normal relations in the community between young people and adults. Any such relation is now suspect. This is politically useful. Such relations (as in youth work) are potentially critical and potentially revolutionary. By smearing such relations with the brush of potential paedophilia the authorities effectively shut them down. When they do take place they now take place in a space characterized by surveillance and caution. This space is much more suited to use to communicate pro-corporate messages rather than a freer environment in which democratic messages could be more easily communicated.
- This means that any youth work or education done outside of state regulated environments is now suspect and can be closed down on “Safeguarding” grounds. For example Ofsted uses concerns about “Safeguarding” to attempt to shut down non-regulated schools. [1] There was an attempt to use “Safeguarding” to shut down Home-schooling. [2] (In the 19th century when mass state schooling was getting under way the authorities used concerns about outside lavs as an excuse to close down schools outside their system). [3]
- Those with the most depraved minds can now cast aspersions on others, enjoy the taste of their own depraved imaginations, and claim to be moral crusaders all at the same time.
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