Hiding in plain sight; the sexual abuse of children in post-war Britain

Baby boomers sometimes forget how common sexual molestation was when they were growing up and how tolerant society was towards the practice

In recent years, we have heard a great deal about the sexual abuse of children which was being carried out in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s by well-known entertainers, television presenters and others. The obvious question is how it was possible for these men to get away with such activities for so long.  During the high profile investigations into the lives and careers of men such as Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall, a phrase began to be widely used to describe the process by which  wholesale  abuse of  this sort could take place without anybody apparently noticing what was going on. It was called; ’hiding in plain sight’.  So commonly did the expression crop up in this connection, that when a biography of the disc jockey Jimmy Savile was published in 2015, it bore the  title  In Plain Sight.

    To see how the sexual abuse of children in this period could be undertaken ‘in plain sight’, it will be necessary to look back considerably further than just the 80 years or so which separate us from the birth of the first baby boomers.  Before doing so, we will examine a film made at the end of the 1960s, one which sheds light on the mores of British society at that time; particularly as they relate to sexual activity with very young girls. Only by looking at material such as this will it be possible to understand the attitudes which were prevalent when the baby boomers were growing up and so understand why it was that the indecent assault and even rape of young girls was at that time  viewed with far more tolerance than is now the case. Prevailing standards of behaviour then, regarding  girls under the legal age of consent, contrast very greatly with what is now considered acceptable. 

     In 1969 a mainstream British film called Lola was produced. It had what might justly be called an all-star cast. Among those who appeared in the film were Honor Blackman, Jimmy Tarbuck, Charles Bronson, Susan George, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley and Lionel Jeffries. Even Trevor Howard, famous for his starring role in Brief Encounter, was in it. The film was directed by Richard Donner, who went on to direct  Superman and Lethal Weapon.   Originally,  the film was called Twinky and it is from the title song, of the same name, that the quotation at the beginning of this chapter comes. ‘Dumb but pretty, like a schoolgirl should be’ sounds more than a little sleazy and suspect to modern ears; as well it might!

    Some idea of the plot of Lola may be gleaned by simply looking at one of the posters which advertised it. It shows a schoolgirl in uniform and  wearing white knee socks, together with a  harassed-looking middle-aged man. The captions read; ’She’s almost 16’, ’He’s almost 40’ and ’It may be love…but it’s definitely exhausting!’ This film is about a middle-aged pornographer’s sexual relationship  with, and subsequent marriage to, a schoolgirl. It is supposedly a romantic comedy and not one of those who produced, directed or acted in it, apparently saw anything in the least  distasteful about the subject matter. The title of the film, incidentally, is a conscious reference to that most famous exploration of the mind of a predatory paedophile;  Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita! The central character in the film, played by Charles Bronson, alludes to Lolita, when he admits to being a nymphetishist and calls his schoolgirl lover ‘Lola‘ in tribute to this inspiration.

     The song at the beginning of Lola, written and sung by Jim Dale, reveals that the eponymous heroine is not in fact ‘almost 16’, but just a little past her sixteenth birthday. Jim Dale  also wrote the lyrics of the song Georgie Girl, which was a hit for The Seekers and became  something of an anthem of the swinging sixties, following its release in 1966.  The opening words of the title song of Lola  or Twinky are;

     Never met a girl like this for me,

     Dumb but pretty like a schoolgirl should be,

It continues, by telling us that the subject of the man’s affections is;

     Sixteen summers and a month or two,

     A grown-up lover when the girls can’t see you,

These couplets are sufficient to give the flavour of the thing. The singer goes on to compare the schoolgirl to Tinkerbell and say, ‘When we touch, I feel like Peter Pan’. She is also referred to as ‘Jezebel’  and a ‘Devil’.

     The film at which we have just looked shows us exactly what was ‘hiding in plain sight’ for young girls of the baby boomer generation. It was not so much this or that singer or celebrity, but rather an entire mindset; one which accepted that schoolgirls were a legitimate object of sexual desire for grown men. That a film like Lola should excite amusement, rather than disgust, tells us a great deal about the way that children, particularly girls, were seen in those days.

     Another illustration of how it was felt 40 or 50 years ago to be quite acceptable for older men to express a sexual interest in young girls, often those below the age of legal consent, may be seen in a popular television programme made a few years after Lola was released. James Bolam and Rodney Bewes starred as the  central characters of the situation comedy, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?; which was broadcast in 1973 and 1974, at a time when they were in their late 30s.  As with the film Lola, this was not the product of some sleazy Soho studio, but was rather one of the most popular sitcoms on television at that time. It was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais; the people who gave us Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen Pet. In the episode Boys‘ Night In, broadcast on 27 March 1973, Terry and Bob, played respectively by James Bolam and Rodney Bewes, talk about their favourite sexual fantasies. Terry says that, ‘Sometimes, I’m the new master at a girls’ high school.’ Bob understands this perfectly, replying, ‘Yes, gymslips. I’ve been worried about that. I think the sexiest  TV programme  is Top of the Form, not Top of the Pops.’

     The quiz programme Top of the Form featured teams of schoolchildren aged between 11 and 16. The fact that a man approaching 40 could describe the sight of underage girls as being sexy in this way and raise a laugh from the audience, tells us that there was something odd and disturbing going on in those days! It is this attitude, that girls of 11 and 12 upwards might be viewed as sexually attractive which was at the root of much of the abuse which was endemic in the baby boomer years. Sometimes, as in the case of Jimmy Savile, this might mean indecent assault and rape. At other times, it entailed men exposing themselves to children; something which was horribly common in those days. All such offences had in common the fact that it was not regarded as all that reprehensible to lust after pubescent girls. Indeed, as we shall see, throughout almost the whole of the 1950s, it was not even a criminal offence to interfere with children, as long as one did it in a non-violent way! Before looking at this extraordinary state of affairs, which resulted from the Lord Chief Justice himself ruling in 1951 that no offence was being committed if a grown man persuaded a girl of nine to touch his penis, we must think a little about the overall mentality which allowed adults to fantasise about and abuse schoolgirls; often with complete impunity. The state of affairs, in fact, which allowed perverts like Jimmy Savile to prey freely upon children of the baby boomer generation.

     It is sometimes forgotten that for most of the Victorian Era, the age of consent in Britain was 12. (Even this was an improvement on the situation at the beginning of the 19^th Century, when the age of consent was 10.) Girls of 12 and 13 married, had affairs and worked as prostitutes quite openly until the law was changed in 1875 and 1885; to raise the age of consent firstly to 13 and then to 16. That sexual activity with children was so common as to be unremarkable is neatly indicated by reading  what the London correspondent of the French newspaper Figaro had to say of London in the early 1870s. He described how;

     Every evening towards midnight more than five hundred girls in ages

    between twelve and fifteen years parade between Piccadilly Circus and

    Waterloo Place,  that is on a stretch of ground no more than three hundred

    yards long.

There was evidently no secret about the fact that children were openly prostituting themselves in the heart of London‘s West End.

     Even more surprising is the fact that although the age of consent for sexual activity outside marriage was raised to 16 in 1885, it remained 12 for the purposes of marriage. It was not until the passing of the Age of Marriage Act in 1929 that it became unlawful to marry a 12 year-old girl. This has a bearing on how children that age were  viewed in the past; attitudes which lingered on until the 1960s and 70s. We looked at a film released at that time about a man who has a sexual affair with and eventually marries a schoolgirl. A notable aspect is that Susan George, as the girl, talks and acts in a very childish way; more like a 12 year-old than a young woman of 16. This too, the idea of the child-wife, and also the very young girl who acts and is treated as an adult,  is an old British tradition.

     The notion of schoolgirl as lover and prospective bride is a longstanding one in British literature. Such girls are to be found in the works of both Charles Dickens and  Gilbert and Sullivan. In Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the hero is engaged to be married to a schoolgirl. Rosa Budd, known inevitably as ‘Rosebud’ is of an indeterminate age; her behaviour though suggests a young child. She sucks her thumb, is eating an acid drop when her ‘fiance’ comes to visit her at school and is generally portrayed as being immature and childish. Her chosen destination when taken out for the day is a sweet shop and after the visit, ‘She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.’ Of course, the pages of Dicken’s novels are littered with adult women who look like children, or girls who occupy the roles of adults. We think of Little Dorrit, who was so slight in stature and innocent in appearance that she was mistaken for a little girl, David Copperfield’s child-wife Dora, Jenny Wren from Our Mutual Friend and many others. Ambivalent attitudes towards young girls in Dickens sometimes spill over into frankly paedophile descriptions, as when the villainous dwarf Quilp is pursuing Little Nell and her grandfather. Nell is a little girl, ’a small and delicate child of much sweetness of disposition’, and yet Quilp desires her for his wife. Here he is, describing the child;

     Such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud…such a chubby, rosy, cosy little

    Nell…She’s so small, so compact, so beautifully modelled…such little feet

It is enough to make one’s flesh creep!

     It is not only our national author who features in his works young girls being pursued by adult males; often with no condemnation of their actions being implied. Perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan’s best-loved operetta is The Mikado. In it,  we meet another schoolgirl who is engaged to be married to one man and, like Rosa Budd, is the object of desire by somebody else as well. In this case, the girl is called Yum Yum; suggestive of a tasty morsel. One is reminded of the alternative title of the film Lola, at which we earlier looked. The other name by which the film was known was Twinky, which is an American candy bar. Yum Yum,  like Rosa Budd, is of an indeterminate age. She introduces herself and her sisters by singing with them;

     Three little maids from school are we,

     Pert as a school-girl well can be,

     Filled to the brim with girlish glee

     Three little maids from school

These are not the only examples in Victorian literature of schoolgirls being presented as prospective sexual partners for grown man and a line may be drawn straight from this tradition, through the St Trinian’s films to productions such as Lola, at which we looked above. What, some readers might be asking at this point, could possibly be wrong with the St Trinian’s films? Surely, it was all harmless, British fun, with Alistair Sim  cross-dressing as the hapless headmistress of the ill-fated school? There was in fact a distinctly dubious and unsavoury side to these films, produced during the baby boomer years, which in a way exemplified the subject at which we are looking.

      ‘Flash Harry’, played by George Cole, in the St Trinian’s  films, ran the St Trinian’s Matrimonial Agency; arranging dates with wealthy men for the schoolgirls. Once again, the idea that schoolgirl brides are somehow a desirable thing. In one of the films, a schoolgirl gets a job as a stripper. Some of the girls are played by actresses in their 20s, wearing absurdly skimpy gymslips, so short that their knickers are revealed. We are plainly meant to see them as attractive young women, rather than immature girls.   It is this sexualisation of schoolgirls and acceptance of them as being appropriate targets for male attention which was hiding in plain sight in the 1960s and 1970s when people like Jimmy Savile were operating. Things have, mercifully, changed since then and a middle aged man today who expressed an interest in having sex with or marrying a schoolgirl would be viewed askance, but at the time when the baby boomers were growing up; it was felt by many to be no more than a bit of saucy fun; at worst a little risqué, like a Donald McGill postcard.

     This awful mindset, the openly expressed belief that it was quite natural for adult men to find schoolgirls attractive or even to pursue them for sexual purposes, lingered on in this country until well into the 1980s and 1990s. It is still around of course, although not perhaps spoken of so casually and with the assumption that other men will sympathise with such a point of view in the way that we saw James Bolam and Rodney Bewes doing in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? As late as 1986 a major British film was produced, featuring a subplot involving sexual activity between  a schoolgirl and a teacher  presented in a light-hearted and supposedly amusing fashion. Clockwise, starring John Cleese, Penelope Wilton and Alison Steadman, was essentially a comedy road movie in which Cleese and a schoolgirl attempt to reach an important conference in time for him to give a speech. In the course of the journey, the girl reveals that she is having an affair with a married teacher, but this is played for laughs. The teacher himself is shown to be a bumbling comic character and we are invited to accept this dreadful business as being a bit of harmless fun.

     The girls born between 1946 and 1964 were victims of an entrenched  culture in Britain, which regarded any post-pubertal girl as being fair game for sexual fantasies or even predation. To use an exceedingly vulgar  saying which was current at that time; ’Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.’ In other words, the onset of the menarche signalled a girl’s availability for sexual activity.  Even many grown women subscribed to this perverted view and a schoolgirl who was seduced by an adult was quite likely to find herself being blamed equally for what had happened, even by her own parents; expressions such as, ’She must have led him on!’ or ’It takes two to tango!’ being freely tossed about in the aftermath of such situations.

     The fact that they were  likely to be held at least partly responsible  for any abuse which they suffered acted to discourage girls from reporting anything untoward to their parents. There was another reason for this reticence. Sex was a taboo subject in many families.  It was not something which most children would dream of discussing with their mother or father. If they were interfered with, then the chances were that they would not mention it to their parents; it would simply be too embarrassing for all concerned. This too goes a long way towards explaining why so much of the sexual abuse in those days remained hidden from view.  Almost unbelievably, this state of affairs  is also remembered with affection by those growing up in the post-war years! Here is an adult recalling the childhood days of the late 1940s, when life was so much simpler. One of the contributors to a  book called A Mobile Century, about the changing habits of travel in Britain, was a child in the years immediately following the end of the war. She talks of how children at that time, ‘swam in dirty canals and played in air raid shelters and did not tell their parents about encounters with “flashers”.’ There is a lot to think about in this short statement about the way life once was for children and before we look at the idea that it might ever have been desirable for a child not to tell his or her parents about ‘flashers‘, let us consider briefly the other two points raised.

     It is certainly a debatable point as to whether swimming in dirty canals is sensible activity. Apart from the risk of drowning, accidental deaths among the under-16s were far higher at that time; there is also the question of disease. There were no vaccinations in the late 1940s and infectious diseases such as polio were spread by contaminated water. There were definitely disadvantages too for young girls in playing in air raid shelters. Robert Black, who was convicted of the murder of four little girls over the course of a long career of child molesting, began his offences at a very young age. In 1959, when he was just 12, he tried to rape a girl. Four years later, in 1963, he discovered a seven year-old girl playing in a park without any adult looking after her. This practice of playing out alone, while beloved of many baby boomers, was sometimes fraught with hazard. So it proved in this case. The 16 year-old Black lured the child into a disused air raid shelter, on the pretext of wishing to show her some kittens,  and then attempted to strangle her. When she was unconscious, he indecently assaulted her, pushed various objects into her vagina and anus and then finished off my masturbating over his half-dead victim. By which it is seen that not all children’s games in air raid shelters ended happily.

     Returning now to the question of remaining silent about abuse, we consider the final part of the statement quoted above, that children in the late 1940s, ‘did not tell their parents about encounters with “flashers”’. It was precisely this, that children very often did not tell their parents about sexual encounters with adults, which allowed abuse to flourish at that time. It was not only ‘flashers’ that children did not tell their parents of, but also overly affectionate teachers and swimming coaches with a propensity for touching their bodies. Silence of this kind is pernicious and helps promote the sexual abuse of children. That anybody could grow misty-eyed and nostalgic about such a state of affairs is frankly incredible.

       So far we have been looking at older girls; those roughly of secondary school age. Genuinely little girls, those who had not yet undergone puberty, were regarded as strictly off limits, even in the 1960s. A sharp line was generally  drawn  between the pursuit of the sexy little minx in a school uniform and the molestation of little girls of seven or eight. The one was a little daring; the other, utterly beyond the pale.  Never the less, the abuse of very young children was also tolerated in the first three decades after the end of the war in a way that most of us find shocking today. Take the case of one of the commonest forms of abuse, then, as now; indecent exposure.

     These days, if a man exposes his penis to a child, we take the matter pretty seriously and if it comes to light, then the police are more than likely to become involved. It was not always so. Certainly during the post-war period, this offence and others leading on from it were often overlooked; even when children reported them. There were several reasons for this; chief of which being that ‘flashing’, or exposing one’s self to a child, was not until 2003 classified as a sexual offence. Prosecutions were instead made under two obscure pieces of nineteenth century legislation.  One of these was the 1824 Vagrancy Act and the other the 1847 Town and Police Clauses Act.

      These laws were passed not to tackle sexually motivated exposure of a man’s genitals, but rather the inadvertent sight of them consequent upon urination. Before public lavatories appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, any convenient alley-way or secluded corner was liable to be used, principally by men, to empty their bladders. The idea that a Victorian lady might thus catch a glimpse of a man’s exposed penis was felt to be very shocking and  laws were needed to discourage the habit. There are still old signs fixed to the walls of London streets, bearing the legend, ‘Commit No Nuisance’. This is quaint way of warning men not to urinate in the area.

      There were two consequences of this legal situation. The first was that no real statistics are available for the prevalence of this offence; they were buried among convictions for other trifling matters under the two acts, convictions relating to public health, Sunday trading and so on. There is no way of knowing which of the men who appeared in court and were subsequently convicted under the Vagrancy Act had been exposing themselves; unless a newspaper reporter happened to be present in the court.  Secondly, and more seriously, the charge against those accused of indecent exposure quoted the law, which was that the man had exposed himself to ‘a female‘; It being only women who were thought liable to be affected by such an experience. This meant that there was absolutely nothing to hinder a man showing his penis to small boys if he wished. Only girls were protected against this type of low level abuse. Nor was this the only problem, as the law stood at that time.

     Common sense tells us that the younger the victim of the ‘flasher’, the graver and more reprehensible the offence. What might be laughed off by a young woman of 18 could be a most distressing experience for a girl of six. In the 1950s, this was not at all how the matter was seen. Since the essence of the offence was that a ‘female’ might be shocked or insulted  by the sight of a man’s genitals, the question was seriously debated that there might be a lower age limit below which neither insult nor offence could properly be said to exist. After all, it was argued, what possible harm could be done to a girl of two if she glimpsed a man’s penis? The significance of catching a fleeting glance of that part of the body would be quite lost on such a young child. What about a four or five year-old? The same grounds could perhaps be advanced for supposing that in such cases too, no real harm was done and the girls concerned would not be in the least shocked.

     The law itself, of course, did not distinguish in this way between different ages; it was a question of the judgement made by individual magistrates when cases of this kind were brought before them. The result was that the police too used some discrimination in deciding which cases they could successfully  prosecute and others  which could be settled with a quiet word to the man reported for ‘flashing’. This was all bound up with the perception of indecent exposure as a relatively trivial, low-level offence which was unlikely to lead to anything worse. There are to this day two schools of thoughts about this. Some believe that ‘flashers’ are essentially inadequate and harmless individuals who resort to this behaviour because they are too timid to do anything worse. Then again, there are some experts in the field who view indecent exposure as a ‘trigger’ offence; a warning that here is a disturbed person who might commit other and more serious sexual crimes if not deterred.

     That indecent exposure can lead to something worse, is indisputable. Such a case occurred in 1951 and the consequences were far-reaching; arrests and convictions for the indecent assault of children dropping sharply in the aftermath of what was known as the ‘Clitheroe Case’. For the best part of a decade after the judgement, there was no realistic chance of gaining a conviction for the indecent assault of children; provided always that the children had been cajoled, bribed or otherwise persuaded to engage in sexual activity.

    In the middle of May 1951, four little girls, ranging in age from six to nine, were playing by a deserted river bank in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe. A man appeared and began urinating into the river. This was evidently no more than a pretext for getting out his penis, because he then called over one of the girls, who was nine, and asked her to touch his penis. She did so. By good fortune, she was not afraid to tell somebody what had happened and the man was subsequently arrested and charged with indecently assaulting the child.  He appeared at the local magistrates court on 24 May 1951 and the case was dismissed. The police then appealed against this decision and on 17 October 1951, the matter eventually ended up being heard  before the Lord Chief Justice; Lord Goddard.

     There was no doubt at all about the facts, as they had been presented. The only question to decide was whether or not what had happened to the little girl that May had been an assault. The court ruled that it had not.  The three judges sitting that day were unanimous in their belief that an assault must be accompanied by hostile action of one kind or another; whether words, gestures or physical contact. In this case; nothing of the sort had happened. The man had simply asked the girl to touch him and she had done so willingly.  The implications of this judgement, Fairclough v Whipp, were profound for children throughout the rest of the 1950s. In effect, the highest court in the land had ruled that molesting children was perfectly legal, as long as you could persuade them to touch you; rather than the other way round.

     Modern readers might feel shocked to learn that a ruling like the one above could be made, but the law as it stood made such a decision inevitable. The Clitheroe Case was by no means the worst example of how this legal loophole left the police powerless to act against even the most disgusting offences against children. Consider a case two years later; DPP v Rogers, 1953. An 11 year-old girl was sitting in a downstairs room with her father. He came over and sat next to her; putting his arm around her shoulders. Then he led her upstairs to his bedroom; where he got her to masturbate him. Today, we find it almost inconceivable that such a course of action would turn out to be quite within the law, as it stood. Never the less, the father, although arrested, was acquitted when the case came to court; the precedent in the Fairclough v Whipp case being binding upon lower courts.

     Anybody hoping to understand sexual abuse of children during the 1960s and 1970s, whether by famous singers and disc jockeys or merely within a normal family setting, will be quite unable to make sense of what was going on at the time, unless they  are aware of the background and legal judgements  such as those  outlined above. Throughout most of the 1950s, adults were free to abuse children as the mood took them; always providing of course that they did so without violence or threats. The law simply could not touch such awful behaviour.  It was not until the passage of the Indecency with Children Act, which came into force on 2 July 1960, that it became possible to prosecute adults for inviting children to touch them indecently. The Indecency With Children Act of 1960 was the first gender-neutral legislation in Britain designed to deal with cases of sexual abuse of children. Up until then, such offences had been strictly demarcated into those against girls and others against boys.

     One factor which complicated matters relating to the sexual abuse of underage girls was that the school leaving age in Britain was, until September 1972, set at fifteen. This meant that until the 1970s, there was nothing to stop a girl who was not old enough to consent to any sort of sexual activity getting a job as a cocktail waitress, dancer or even striptease artiste! Those seeing what was apparently a desirable young woman in such roles might very well make an erroneous assumption about their age and maturity. A case illustrating this point with great clarity came to light at the beginning of 2016, when it was revealed that a well-known BBC disc jockey had been fired for allegedly being evasive about the circumstances of an investigation into possible sexual impropriety 45 years earlier.

     In 1971, the girl whose name had been linked with that of the disc jockey, was found dead of a drug overdose. She had taken her own life at the age of fifteen. Incredibly, this child had featured a number of times on the television programme Top of the Pops, where she was shown dancing on stage. The camera tended to focus upon her because she was very attractive and looked considerably older than her actual age. The line became very blurred at that time between grown women and children; a circumstance which tended to play into the hands of potential abusers. A few years earlier, another famous disc jockey, John Peel, had actually married a 15 year-old girl in the United States and then brought his bride home to Britain.

     So far, we have looked only at the abuse of girls during the baby boomer years. What was the situation with boys at this time? As has been seen, one of the commonest forms of low-level abuse, the crime of indecent exposure, did not even count when carried out against male children. The difficulty about researching statistics and figures for the sexual abuse of boys is that it was  enormously widespread and very little of it was recorded. It is impossible to say whether it was more common than the abuse of girls, but it was definitely regarded in a different light. In some settings, schools and scout groups spring to mind, paedophile abuse of boys was, if not accepted; then without doubt expected. The schoolmaster and scout leader with an unhealthy interest in little boys may be  stereotypical figures but they are rooted firmly in historical fact. Both existed for many years and were simply a known, but regrettable  feature of schools and youth groups. Such men, for men they almost invariably were, were regarded as pathetic, but not particularly wicked. Often, they were figures of fun, rather than objects of hatred

     It seems strange to believe that the systematic abuse of young boys could ever have been thought of in this country as amusing; but it is never the less true. The late Arthur Marshall,  broadcaster and newspaper columnist, most famous for his appearances on the television programme Call My Bluff, was well known as a humorous writer. In 1974 he published a book called Girls will be Girls; a miscellany of his writings for various magazines and newspapers. Included in the book were sketches of his childhood at a well-known boarding school. These too were written for laughs, with farcical accounts of the tribulations facing a sensitive boy at a school renowned for its sporting prowess. It is the section dealing with paedophilia which causes one to gasp with amazement today. Marshall writes that;

     Preparatory schools at that time seemed each to have its quota of

     unmarried masters who were still waiting for Miss Right…Some of them

      were by nature looking about for Miss Right rather less vigorously than

      others. Dedicated paedophiles stalked the linoleum-covered corridors and,

      sensing a non-frosty reception, pounced. No boy who wasn’t actually

      repellent could consider himself safe from an  amorous mauling among the

      rows of pendent mackintoshes.

This account relates of course to events in Arthur Marshall’s own boyhood, perhaps 50 years earlier, but it is quite extraordinary that he should have been able to write  in a book published in the 1970s so light-heartedly about systematic abuse of this kind. The reason was of course that paedophile teachers and scoutmasters were just as common when he was writing in 1974 as they had been during his school days in 1924. People knew that they existed and were abusing children on a regular basis. It was just one of those things and if a famous humorist like Arthur Marshall could see the funny side of being abused like that; well then, maybe we should too! This too is indicative of the attitudes to paedophile abuse 40 or 50 years ago.

     Another fascinating glimpse into the mindset of those days, indicating the widespread acceptance of the sexual abuse of children in the years at which we are looking, was provided a few years ago by the renowned and controversial biologist Richard Dawkins.  He revealed that he had been abused by a teacher, when he was at school in the 1950s. The language that Dawkins used to describe this awful experience is telling; indicating a similar attitude to that displayed by  Arthur Marshall towards the sexual molestation to which he was routinely subjected. Richard Dawkins relates that he was pulled onto the lap of a male teacher, who then pushed his hand inside the boy’s shorts and fondled his genitals. Incredibly, 60 years later, the victim of this abuse refuses to condemn the perpetrator; even now minimising the action by describing it as, ’mild touching up’.

     These two accounts typify the  attitude of many  people until relatively recently to the abuse of schoolboys by scoutmasters, teachers, youth club leaders and others. It was felt to be, if not normal, then certainly unsurprising. Even the victims often put up with what was being done to them; viewing it perhaps as just another of those tiresome rites of passage which children and adolescents had to endure. Mercifully, this has now changed, but unless one understands the endemic sexual abuse in the decades following the end of the Second World War, then it will be altogether impossible to make sense of the attitude towards their abuse of people like Richard Dawkins. That kind of thing   was the subject of jokes, rather than outrage.

      To show how some sexually motivated activity which targeted children was not taken at all seriously; even by the victims, we turn to accounts from the 1970s. Here is Arthur Marshal again, describing a visit to some public lavatories during a school trip to a cricket match;

     Our first concern, after the hour’s drive, was to make for the lavatory, an

     open-air and rather whiffy square construction of brick, conveniently close.

     As we hastened in, a solitary figure drew all eyes. In a corner, and facing

     outwards, an aged and decrepit clergyman was standing, smiling

     encouragement and  wildly waggling. At our fairly tender years this was a

     startling spectacle and one hardly knew where to look. Where not to look

     was plain to all.  Subsequent visits found him, hope on hope ever, still there

     and at it

Although this ‘humorous’ account was written in the 1970s about something which took place back in the 1920s, such attitudes were still very strong throughout the formative years of the baby boomers. Low-level sexual abuse of this kind was just something which happened to schoolchildren and there was no point in making a fuss about it.

      As we know, exposing one’s penis to little boys in this way was not even against the law when the baby boomers were growing up. Inevitably, this immunity from the law led inexorably to some men going even further; confident in the knowledge that their actions would probably not even be regarded as a criminal offence. From showing their penis to a boy, it was only a short step to masturbating in his presence. A boy sitting alone in a cinema might find a man coming and sitting next to him, who, as soon as the lights went down, would take out his penis and begin playing with himself. Very few boys would have even thought of telling their parents about such a thing in those days.

     The 1950s and 1960s were certainly a golden age for those who wished to indulge in the sexual abuse of children. Some of this abuse, exposing one’s self to a boy for instance, was not even illegal and for the whole of 1950s it was not even against the law to persuade a little girl to masturbate you. Combined with the legal situation was the fact that most children would not have told any adult about abuse, even when it was of the grossest and most unpleasant kind. Sex was something which was off limits as a topic of conversation in the average family.  After encountering the man who was, we are given to understand from Arthur Marshall‘s account, masturbating in front of schoolboys; not one of them reported the matter to a member of staff. As the author went on to say, ‘Instinct told us not to discuss the matter with Matron…’ During the first two or three decades following the end of the Second World War, it was quite common for all the pupils in a school to know which of the teachers was a pervert, but for parents and staff to be completely in the dark. Both girls and boys would warn each other of the perils of being alone with this or that PE or music teacher, and yet the information never reached an adult.

     When it did became apparent, as happened from time to time,  to a school, scout group, church or other organisation that one of the adults working for them had an unhealthy interest in children, the chief emotion felt by all parties was embarrassment. Nobody wished to make a distasteful fuss and the commonest mechanism for handling the problem was that of a discrete word being spoken to the person concerned; who then went off quietly, often to join another youth club, athletics association or whatever, where he could then continue his predations against little boys or girls. Until very recently, this was almost invariably regarded as the most satisfactory means of tackling a very unfortunate and awkward situation. It was felt to be in nobody’s interest, least of all the children concerned, to see the matter dragged through the courts. All of which made it very easy and satisfying to pursue a career of child molesting during the years at which we are looking.

     Even if a report was made to the police and resulted in a court case, as did happen from time to time, the chances were that any conviction would only be registered at the local magistrates court, rather than finding its way to the Criminal Records Department of Scotland Yard. Providing that the case was not reported in the local newspaper, there was every possibility that the offender would be able to move from the scout group where he had carried out the abuse and simply begin running the local church youth club or helping out at air cadets or some other location which would give him access to children. In this way, men at that time were able to abuse children for many years with complete impunity. Sometimes, a case would reach the papers, necessitating a move to another town which gave a fresh start and the continuation of sexual abuse; perhaps under a different name.

     Following a number of well publicised murders, including that of two little girls at Soham in 2002, by a school caretaker about whom insufficient enquiries had been made before allowing him unlimited access to children, matters changed dramatically and anybody working with or having regular access to children was required to undergo background checks; including a search for convictions  at the Criminal Records Bureau. This made it very difficult, indeed next to impossible, to conceal a murky past which included convictions for, or even suspicions of, sexual activity with a child. One might think that nobody in his or her senses could possibly object to moves designed to prevent predatory paedophiles from gaining access to new victims, but one would be quite wrong. There was enormous opposition to the new system when it was first introduced. Baby boomers who had grown up at a time when the sexual abuse of children was a constant background in their lives were, surprisingly, in the vanguard of the struggle to ensure that child molesters continued to enjoy easy and unrestricted access to their prey. Admitting that abuse was distressingly common when they were children, would have run the risk of tainting the fantasy world which many of them had constructed and it was easier to object to the process of CRB checks as just one more aspect of the ‘Nanny State’. Rules and regulations dealing with adults working with or coming into regular contact with children are often dismissed as unnecessary red tape by older people who should know better. To understand the point,  it will be necessary to look in some detail at an unappetising topic; that of what child molesters actually did to their young victims in the 50s and 60s.  

      With modern, twenty-first century attitudes to sex, there is a tendency to assume that sexual activity almost invariably entails genital contact. This was not at all the case 60 years ago; especially where child molesting was concerned. Often, the activity took place while the adult participant at least was fully clothed. What Arthur Marshall described as ‘amorous mauling among the rows of pendent mackintoshes’ provides us with a good example of this type of thing; whose technical name is frottage.

     Even in the old days at which we are looking, the sight of a naked teacher or scout leader fooling around with a child might have been expected to raise eyebrows a little, and so much of the abuse was conducted by means of men rubbing themselves, fully clothed against the children in whom they had a sexual interest. This could be done in the course of play-fighting, tickling, sport, seemingly innocuous cuddles or while a child was seated on the man’s lap. This activity gave the adult perverts a pleasurable thrill and could even result in orgasm, given the right circumstances. There is a very detailed and appallingly accurate passage in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita which describes precisely how this process takes place. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, has manipulated a 12 year-old girl into  laying across his lap. This gives him an opportunity to rub  his  clothed genitals against her body for some time, until he, ’crushed out against her left buttock the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.’ 

     The practice of frottage, sometimes known as ‘dry humping’, was one of the commonest types of sexual abuse carried out against children. There were a number of advantages from the point of view of the abuser; chief of which was that there was always an element of what might not inaptly be termed ‘plausible deniability’. In cadet units and scouts troops, there was often play-fighting and rough games in which an adult might join in without anybody remarking on it as being peculiar. This gave some men the chance to rub their groins against young boys, thus gaining sexual satisfaction. The same end might be achieved with young children by hugging them, teaching them sports, showing how to hold a musical instrument or sitting them on one’s lap.

     At the end of such an episode, even the child might not be sure just what had been going on and to spectators, the whole thing might look like a bit of harmless rough and tumble, with a grown man entering into the spirit of children’s play with a refreshing and charming lack of self-consciousness. This is another way in which the abuse of children could take place, quite literally ‘in plain sight’.

     Most British baby boomers will know about the practices outlined above, which makes it all the more mysterious that some of them are still seemingly opposed to putting an end to the conditions which allowed child abuse like this to flourish for so many years.

     Whenever any change relating to people’s safety is proposed, a new regulation or law which prohibits or restricts some supposed liberty which was previously enjoyed, some baby boomer may always be relied upon to raise the cry of ‘Health and Safety gone mad!’ or ‘The Nanny State!’ Sure enough, when attempts began to be made to limit physical activity between adults and children, by suggesting that the less grown-ups rubbed their bodies against those of little boys and girls the better it would be, this too was denounced as a pernicious interference in the natural relations which should exist between the generations. Frank Furedi, the well-known professor of sociology, even wrote a book on the subject. The subtitle of this book, Licensed to Hug, was; How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector.

     The psychology of the baby boomers which leads them to adopt such a strange attitude towards the protection of children from sexual predators is curious. Essentially, the position held by many older people in Britain is that their own childhoods were pretty well perfect and should be held up as the model for modern childhood. If children today are not getting as much exercise as they did themselves or are eating more than children  did at a similar age in 1955, then there is something wrong. In the same way, if children today are slumped in their  bedrooms chatting on the internet for hours, instead of queuing up outside a red telephone box, then this must mean that childhood today is somehow disordered and in need of repair. Any deviation from the childhood pattern of the 1950s and 1960s is automatically seen as a change for the worse.

     This peculiar frame of mind leads to government initiatives intended to encourage children to walk to school, as they did sixty years ago, and eat a healthier diet, as was allegedly once the case. Childhood in the days when the baby boomers were growing up is the ideal to aim at. The idea that an awful lot of children were being sexually abused or even murdered by lust-driven paedophiles does not accord with the image of a supposedly gentler, safer and more civilised era and so is subconsciously rejected by many older people. This in turn means that all these CRB checks and vetting is viewed as a lot of expensive and time wasting nonsense; the only practical effect of which is stopping adults from cuddling a distressed child.

     Frank Furedi’s book, Licensed to Hug, promotes the notion, popular among baby boomers, that safeguarding is pretty pointless.  In a chapter entitled Child Protection and ‘No Touch’ Policies, Furedi, himself of course a baby boomer, suggests that policies formulated by official bodies or voluntary organisations to discourage adults from pressing their bodies against children are unnecessary and in fact harmful to children. He quotes research by academics at Manchester Metropolitan University into, ‘the problematic of touching between children and professionals’. This was said to explore ‘the tension between children’s need for nurturing contact and the fear that such contact may be interpreted as abuse’. Among the ideas at which this study looked were, ‘minimising cuddling young children, even requiring particular ways of doing this, such as the sideways cuddle (to avoid any full-frontal contact)’.

     The thrust of Licensed to Hug,  which many older professionals working with children thought to be a long overdue expose of health and safety madness, is that worrying about physical contact with small children is largely a lot of fuss about nothing. Ideas such as the ‘sideways cuddle’ are mentioned in such a way as to suggest that only somebody looking for risks where there were none to be found would even consider something so bizarre. In fact of course, the whole aim of the sideways cuddle is to minimise opportunities for what Arthur Marshall called ‘amorous mauling’. Pressing their bodies especially, for obvious reasons, the groin area, against children’s bodies has always been a mainstay of paedophiles who are unable to get a child alone; this manouvre being quite possible to undertake in public in the context of a music or sports lesson. Anything which discourages adults working with children from rubbing their groins against children in this way is surely to be welcomed, rather than ridiculed.

     What is interesting and perhaps significant is that children and young people themselves see very well why such rules are in place. The younger a person; the less likely they are to object to policies of this sort which are designed to protect children from covert abuse. By and large, the only people who grow impatient about or mock such initiatives are baby boomers; many of whom have in the years since their childhood managed to forget how common sexual abuse of this kind once was.