In July 2005, in Angers, France, a court jailed 65 women and men for sexually abusing, exploiting and prostituting 45 children aged between six months and 16 years, many their own children and grandchildren. The details were dreadful and don’t need to be repeated, but more shocking was the ordinariness of those involved. And that nobody noticed the goings-on in a sub-society of venality, cruelty and sexual addiction in these ordinary flats, in a state housing development, in this neighbourhood.
There were warning signs, though police, social workers and friends didn’t pick up on them until one brave child made a formal rape complaint. One regular customer had been convicted twice, which was why he liked wearing a mask. Another had been jailed in 1991 for raping his son, and now faces another 28 years for doing the same to three grandchildren. The son, who had facilitated much of the abuse in his flat, faces 18 years’ imprisonment. Nearly half of the accused were women, which defenestrates my assumptions about ‘caring’ mothers. One mother used to collect the fees and smoke while the kids screamed as they were serviced in another room in her flat.
Most disturbing of all was that nearly all those convicted had themselves been abused as children.
We don’t know the precise incidence of paedophilia because it is so socially repugnant that most paedophiles have become expert at hiding in the community. In June 2005, New Zealander Graham Capill was jailed for nine years for rape and other gross sexual offences against three girls under 12. Capill was a former police prosecutor and, until 2003, leader of the Christian Heritage Party, a ‘family’-oriented political group that campaigned for traditional family values and against child abuse. His sentence was longer than he anticipated, largely because of an email that Capill sent to his supporters claiming that one victim had consented to their ‘relationship’. The presiding judge took a dim view.
More than 50 years ago in Australia, under the Fairbridge Farm Scheme, the British government sent thousands of orphans, like Western Australia’s Robert Excell, to Australia. Many of these children endured years of forced labour, physical abuse and neglect, including the pain of believing they were unwanted and unloved. A few had the added trauma of sexual abuse. Excell got the lot, which goes some way to explain, though not excuse, how he came to sodomise a