Last year, I read about an incident in a water park in the United Kingdom.
A father took his kids to the park so they could frolic in the cool and refreshing waves. When the children said they wanted to hurl themselves down the water slide, the proud father decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for some action photos of the apples of his eye.
He positioned himself at the end of the slide, camera at the ready, only to face a muttering and hostile crowd that apparently wanted to lynch him then and there!
The justification for the violence was that he must be a pedophile. After all, what other reason would a grown man have of snapping shots of young children in swimwear? The explanation that he was only photographing his own progeny were rejected out of hand. What else would child molesters say to escape just punishment when the righteous crowd gets their blood up?
Lucky for all concerned, the police were notified by someone in the mob. A police officer arriving at the scene averted any ugly actions.
Unfortunately, I cannot now find the online article to prove to my readers in the United States that such a ridiculous incident actually occurred. It seems unbelievable, that such a climate of suspicion and paranoia can actually exist in Old Blighty. I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you thought that I was simply writing as fact a bad comedy I once viewed on cable TV, or some uncomfortable dream I once had where everyone around me turned into bizarre and violent zombies.
But such an environment of hatred and prejudice is all too prevalent in Great Britain, and simply scanning the online news article from that country proves it to be so with appalling regularity.
British Airways refuses to allow males to sit next to children they don’t know on their aircraft. Mom or Dad are seated on the other side of the child, less than one foot away and keeping an eye on their kids? Doesn’t matter, the potential child rapist must be moved. I suppose the idea is to remove any tempting prey from the reach of depraved scum. Depraved scum like a random man who just happens to be flying on a commercial flight where children are also traveling.
An 82-year-old woman was banned by authorities from photographing an empty kiddie wading pool. The reason given was that taking a picture of an empty concrete hole with water in it proved that she might be a pedophile! Because children have splashed around in the pool in the past, I suppose the idea is that it has a powerful pull to the sexual desires of sickos.
A man taking pictures of children at a public event was arrested by the police. They confiscated his camera, then contacted the police force in his home city so they could simultaneously break into his house and search his computer. The people in charge of the event are extremely pleased with themselves that they managed to have cops screw up some guy’s life for taking photos of clothed children, in public, with their parents nearby. They seem to think that they took part in averting a major crime!
The latest is this sorry tale of yet another father who was accused of burning with unbridled lust for his own children. When snapping a photo of his young son on a coin-operated ride, a security guard ordered the proud father to stop doing that. When the man, with son and wife in tow, tried to leave the mall, a police officer accosted him. Take any more pics of kids, even his own, and the cop would run the Dad in on some trumped up bullshit charge.
So why is it that the police and the public in Great Britain are so quick to condemn people who are taking pictures in public of children, or even empty places where children frequent? Why are the authorities, the very people who are trusted with the safety of the public, so enthusiastic about finding ways to punish people even though there is no evidence of anything even remotely untowards going on?
What is that ancient saying? “Where there is smoke, there is fire?” What does all of this look to someone who is outside of British society?
The only reasonable conclusion to be reached is that the British Isles must be infested with sexual deviants, just waiting to strike!
British Airways won’t let men sit next to children they don’t know, even if the parents are right there? There must have been several incidents of random males attacking and sexually assaulting children on their flights to do that! Sexual abuse right there in the center aisle, with hundreds of fellow passengers looking on! Why else take the risk of alienating one half of their customers?
The same must be true of the water parks in the UK. Sex crimes on the water slides! That must be why strangers standing in a crowd are quick to mete out mob justice to some guy with a camera, standing far out of reach of the children he is photographing. Rip him to shreds before the child comes down the chute, and he manages to get his pants off!
Octogenarian women must routinely take pictures of empty public places in the United Kingdom, the better to carefully plan their own vile crimes. Any old, frail woman with a camera is just aching to get their crone claws on a budding young child, and taking pictures is the first step!
And anyone taking pictures of clothed children in public, even though the kids are under adult supervision, must be investigated down to their pubic hair by the police! (“Grab him! Grab him! Get the camera for evidence!“) If he is taking pictures of people that are clearly visible in a public place then he has to be a pedophile! Thank goodness the police are willing to go the extra mile, and to keep digging until they find something they can use to charge this sicko with a crime!
And, of course, the police force in the United Kingdom must be complete morons and incompetents. After all, if so many people are sexually assaulting children in crowded public spaces then they aren’t doing their jobs. Why are these bastard criminals allowed to roam the streets? The police are charged with protecting innocent people, which they obviously are not doing. Every male who owns a camera, every female pensioner, and every man who buys an airline ticket should be rounded up and jailed until the end of time!
Crime rates in the UK are worse than those found in the US. Besides exclusively recruiting police officers from idiots and the mentally disabled, there just also be something rotten in British culture. Something that makes otherwise law abiding people turn into slavering beasts when confronted with a child. After all, what other reasonable explanation can there possibly be for this sorry state of affairs?
(Hat tip to Glenn. I also cross posted this at Hell in a Handbasket. Check out the comments there, as the readers of my other blog have some interesting things to say.)
You think the UK is bad, Australia is just the same. More so, the state of Queensland. Of course we have perverts but the current government and legislation allows for over zealous public servants to screw over normal everyday happenings. I am not talking about those who deserve our scorn for preying on children….unfortunately we all suffer under the guise of so called do gooders.
British culture began to collapse with the abolition of ancient British liberties and the creation of a modern Parliament. I’m glad we opted our in 1776.
It all comes down to the idea that the way to stop criminals from victimizing people is to limit and control perfectly ordinary, law-abiding people, rather than deter or incapacitate the actual criminals. This gets the police force used to spending their time and energy controlling the innocent rather than having to track down and confront actual criminals, which is hard and occasionally dangerous. And it allows police and politicians to say they are “getting tough on crime” and showing “zero tolerance” for whatever. And of course since it doesn’t actually stop crime, that allows politicians and police to think up even more ways to punish the innocent as crime rates increase.
Britain started doing this with guns some decades ago, with predictable results. America started doing it with alcohol, and it was such a complete disaster they had to back off and forbid other things as well. And since then the approach is applied in many different areas, never with any success. It would be a real mistake to imagine that this is a problem only in England, when American schoolkids are punished for giving a classmate a cough drop (zero tolerance for “drugs”!) or carrying a small plastic knife to school to cut a cake with. The media/nanny/political lobby gets hysterical about different things in different countries at different times, but the same crap’s going on everywhere.
There is always the possibility that the moral decline of both the USA and the UK is such that the odds are pretty good that the guy randomly taking phots is, in fact, a pervert of some kind. I just checked an found 30 registered sex offenders within a mile or two of my house (OK, I live in a very small town and everyone lives within a mile or two of my house), but perhaps the nanny state is the inevitable outcome of raising generations fo kids to beleive that right and wrong is whatever they decide it to be.
James — I tried to find the incident you referred to, but couldn’t. But maybe it was this one? I found it via this article.
A park, not a water park, and the “muttering and hostile crowd” was the woman running the slide plus one other parent. No lynching proposed.
But perhaps it was another incident you read about.
It’s going to be a pretty impasse on the day when I’m asked to show someone the pictures I’ve taken, or to delete them: I only have a film camera. You can “delete” the images by exposing the film compartment to light, but then somebody’s going to get a punch in the nose.
“But perhaps it was another incident you read about.”
Definitely a different incident. It made an impression on me at the time, and the details should be pretty close to my recollection.
Thank you kindly for taking the time to look!
“It’s going to be a pretty impasse on the day when I’m asked to show someone the pictures I’ve taken, or to delete them:…”
One person I discussed this with said there was going to be an international incident if a bobby accused him of pedophilia for taking pictures in public. Something about how he’d be doing the guy a favor, considering the state of British dentistry.
I think the child molester hysteria has several convergent roots.
(1) People are hyper sensitive about threats to their children.
(2) Because of (1) the media knows they can sell stories about child molestation. This creates an amplification effect that generates the impression child molesters are more common than they are.
(3) The internet exposes normal people to more shocking extremes that previous generations never saw. Prior to the internet, most people never saw child porn. Now it can show up in your inbox as spam. This too creates the impression that the phenomena is real.
(4) An overall sexualization of children in popular culture. When even pre-pubescent girls are encourage to dress like the previous generation’s prostitutes, it makes people think about sex and children more. This makes it easy for normal people to assume that others do so maliciously.
(5) Breakdown in community makes everyone strangers.
(6) Child molesters are the only subgroup in society without a spokes group. It’s the one group everyone is free to hate. Drug dealers and even adult rapers get more sympathy. This makes going after child molesters politically safe.
(7) We have vast political subcultures who thrive by destroying trust and spontaneous cooperation between people. They foster a world view in which you can’t trust your neighbors but you can trust the government. They want everyone to view everyone else as dangerous people the government must protect them from.
And here we are.
I think there is also a factor of the decreasing numbers of children. Parents who have one child may be more easily spooked by minor incidents or media hysteria. I’m struck by the changes in children’s behavior. When I was in kindergarten, I walked six blocks to my Catholic school, crossing one busy street. My mother had an older child walk with me the first two or three days. After that, I was on my own. That would be unthinkable today. My mother would probably be arrested for child abuse.
There is always the possibility that the moral decline of both the USA and the UK is such that the odds are pretty good that the guy randomly taking phots is, in fact, a pervert of some kind.
Probably much more likely that the person taking photos is either the parent of the kids, the parent of the kids’ playmates, a friend of the family, or simply someone who enjoys making photos of children and has no ill intent. The media hype “Your children at risk!” stories because it’s a good way to get attention and sell advertising, not because there’s a high risk that your kids will be victimized by strangers.
Lucky for us that the Rev. Charles L Dodgson lived in Britain well before they went berserk
Agree, there is a witch hunt mentality out there.
On the other hand:
I own a martial arts school. About fifteen years ago I started having the kids wrestle. I wrestled in Jr high and high school, and found it more useful than Judo, Ju Jitsu, Shuai Jow, etc. for teaching children. So I’m tooling around on the internet looking for other schools doing the same thing. Almost all of the sites referencing children’s wrestling had photos that primarily were crotch or rear shots. It was creepy. The photos were not instructional, they were focusing on the children’s sexual areas.
During all kids classes, all interior (closet, storeroom, office) doors are locked except the bathroom door. Parents are invited (begged) to stay and help. I want LOTS of witnesses, all the time. NOBODY who is not a parent or guardian gets to watch the kids, and I tell the parents I want the kids out before the adult students come in, and have expelled a couple of kids whose parents didn’t comply. The doors open five minutes before class. I am seriously cautious about never ever being alone with a child, and I make sure the parents know it. In almost 25 years of teaching, I have never had any question raised, and that’s the way I want it.
Aw, I like the British. They are in Afghanistan and everything! :)
Seriously, though, I think the colocalization of events Shannon Love talked about creates greater distrust in society and creates the feeling that anyone could be a menace.
Or, it could be the poor policing and rising crime in some communities. That fear takes itself out in strange ways, perhaps.
– Madhu
some interesting background http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3356573/Childcare-childs-play-is-now-a-minefield.html
one more…. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article2557637.ece