Child abuse at Westminster: We haven't even begun to awaken from the nightmare

Cyril Smith, the MP for Rochdale, whose genial public persona hid a dark secret.

“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,” warned the eminent social thinker Lloyd Demause back in 1974. Over forty years later this nightmare is not only still with us but is arguably more vivid. Barely a week passes these days without further revelations about endemic child abuse.

Demause’s seminal essay on the evolution of childhood is a reminder that children have always been cruelly exploited. In ancient Greece boy brothels flourished and men kept slave boys for abuse. In the literature of the time, Petronius describes the rape of a seven-year-old girl with women clapping in a long line around the bed. And infants in imperial Rome were castrated in the cradle to be used in brothels by men who liked buggering young castrated boys.

These horrors quite rightly sound like chilling tales from centuries ago. But like the heads of the Hydra, once one monstrous horror is cut off at the source another springs up, manifesting itself differently throughout the ages. What remains constant over the centuries is a kind of droit de seigneur; the right of powerful people to sexually exploit vulnerable children from lower social classes.  Historians of the future will undoubtedly look back at our age as a time when MPs like Cyril Smith and other powerful figures abused children in care. When paedophile gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxfordshire abused poor working class children on an industrial level. And when famous personalities like Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile used their celebrity to cruelly trap and abuse vulnerable young fans.  (more...)

Child abuse at Westminster: We haven't even begun to awaken from the nightmare