Crime & Insanity

Last weekend a national newspaper published details of known paedophiles.  Is this an invasion of privacy or does the public need to know?  If a criminal has served his sentence should the punishment continue?

In general, the tabloid newspapers tend to publish their stories as sensations or spectacles, which is not especially helpful in establishing facts or in promoting rational debate.  On this issue, however, I find it hard to be critical of the way in which this matter has been brought to the attention of the public.  A decent society deserves protection from its paid police and politicians.  If that protection is not forthcoming the people and their tabloids are entitled to air their concerns.  The Government has responded with some knee-jerk reactions, but there is no clear policy statement dealing with the problem.  We have not even had the courtesy of a leaked memo!

The first question to ask ourselves is what is a paedophile?  Is he a criminal or is he sick?  Will a prison sentence deter would-be offenders?  After serving sentence will a convicted paedophile still be a risk to the public?  We seem to be unsure.  We treat him as a criminal but try to monitor his life in some way after release from prison.  The basis for monitoring is a register, but as 300 sex offenders have absconded this is far from satisfactory.  In fact, those on the register are allowed to take a fortnight's holiday, so the system offers very little protection.  Tagging might facilitate monitoring, but it would not prevent a crime. 

400 years ago John Donne wrote that no man is an island, that we are all part of the same continent.  Today we recognise the validity of regarding planet earth and its occupants as a complex interconnected organism.  We should question the sanity of anyone who chooses to damage the organism that supports his life, and perhaps one day we will regard all criminals as sick.   Meanwhile we regard as criminal someone who makes a rational decision to commit crime, someone in the mould of Norman Stanley Fletcher, from the sit-com Porridge.  For such people prison might be the most appropriate punishment, acting as deterrent and temporarily removing them from society. But if someone is sick, prison will not serve any useful purpose.

I do not believe that the paedophile chooses to prey on children, rather I see him as a victim of his own uncontrollable urges.  On release from imprisonment the paedophile will be just as much a threat to society as he was before.  In normal psychological development we learn to relate to other human beings as we mature.  In adult relationships we enjoy contact, stimulus, sex, fun, even though in many cases there might be an imbalance in the power base.  But someone who doesn't mature through normal psychological development is unable to form adult relationships.  He has the same needs as everyone else but lacks the social and emotional skills to satisfy them.  He turns to individuals weaker and more vulnerable than himself: another adult who is also emotionally underdeveloped, or a child.

Whether we have the counselling and psychiatric skills to assist the paedophile in dealing with his inadequacies is a moot point.  But until we can do so society deserves to be protected, and the tabloid's distasteful 'naming and shaming' might just spur the Government into action.

ã Harvey Tordoff
25^th July 2000