Shame on you Guardian, shame on you Zoe Williams

[lensman]

This article is so wrong in so many ways. Don't read it if you're easily offended by Ignorance.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/rolf-harris-pantomime-act (seems TOR-safe, but the Guardian pages are full of scripts so best turn-off javascript anyway)

Rolf Harris's pantomime act should never have fooled us
His childlike persona helped project a finely honed image of naivety. We must learn to look beneath the surface
'Rolf Harris's whole schtick was a smokescreen for a darker personality.' Illustration: Belle Mellor

Rolf Harris is guilty on 12 counts, seven of them related to his repeatedly molesting a friend of his daughter, from when she was 13 until she was 19. The charge that he groped a girl of seven or eight is upheld. He is not that lovable, trustworthy figure his inane jingles insisted upon. That whole picture – of a boyish, guileless, eternally young, unthreatening creature – will have to be remade. The cultural backdrop is corrupted. How much of a loss will this be, you might think, being unable to hear Two Little Boys played innocently again?

But consider the fight his fans put up, in defence of his reputation – he was voted one of Australia's 100 most trusted people even while fighting these abuse charges. As the evidence was coming in, people couldn't make sense of this betrayal. And I'm amazed to find myself amazed by the incongruity of that notion – Rolf Harris, sexual predator.

As director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer did peerless, unprecedented work on how sexual assault and victimhood are perceived, and how the cases are treated in court. Twenty years ago, victims weren't heeded at all. Gradually, the criminal justice system started to support victims, but with that support came, Starmer told me just before he left his post, "a number of assumptions about what real victims do. A real victim goes straight to the police; a real victim will give the police a coherent and consistent account in chronological order; a real victim would never go back to the perpetrator; a real victim wouldn't dress in a particular way, or drink or take drugs. Over time, those tests or assumptions have, I think, ended up ringfencing some of the most vulnerable victims from criminal justice protection."

It is impossible to overstate the impact Starmer had on this terrain. Without his insistence that a crime is still a crime, irrespective of when it occurred, I wonder if the police would even have launched the Yewtree investigation. It was against a backdrop of a different Crown Prosecution Service, not some nebulous atmospheric change in the culture, that Harris was prosecuted.

Yet if there are assumptions about victims, there are preconceptions, too, about what a perpetrator should look like, how he should behave, what face he should present to the world. Harris makes an unlikely suspect because he was always so childish himself.

In 1985 he produced his song about child abuse, intended to arm children with a ready answer, should anyone try to touch them inappropriately. This has been used to illustrate his manipulative, Savile-esque, hiding-in-plain-sight strategy, which of course it does. But at the time, it was mainly noticeable for how immature it was. "My body's nobody's body but mine," it ran. "You run your own body, let me run mine." I was 12 then; we used to sing it as a joke, the underlying comedy being its radical unintelligence. The conceptual scope of the argument seemed to be at about the level of a three-year-old, and yet what toddler could tell an adult to leave them alone to run their own body?

In terms of the agency you'd need to enact his stupid song, you'd have to be at least eight. But the certainty he describes earlier in the song – "When I am touched then I know how I feel/ My feelings are mine and my feelings are real" – you probably wouldn't have until you were an adolescent. Put simply, it seemed to be a song from a man who didn't really understand sex at all, let alone physical autonomy and how to present that to a child, a man who hitched himself to an anti-paedophilia campaign for some other purpose altogether, to get in with the in crowd, or for attention. In fact, he had been abusing his daughter's friend for years.

His naivety was carefully honed from the beginning, with the cheerful, inexplicably restrained kangaroo – and even more lovingly protected. I interviewed him a decade ago, and he described in huge detail the circumstances that led to the replacement of each of his lifetime's poodles (in a nutshell, every time one died, he bought a new one). It wasn't like talking to an adult at all. It was like talking to a child who had been forced to attend a cocktail party.

This was just pantomime; a person who uses other people instrumentally, who exploits vulnerability, who gropes a seven-year-old then makes up a ditty about how to avoid people who want to grope you, who lies without compunction, who clings on to his own daughter for protection against the justice sought by her friend, this person is not a naif. His whole schtick was a smokescreen for a darker personality, and it turned out to be surprisingly profitable in its own right.

But knowing what we know now, there is no feeling of a mystery finally unpacked; there is no relief, as there was with Savile that, finally, this manifestly creepy man has been unmasked. There was no sixth sense, screaming "wrong 'un". He was cheerful, avuncular, daft, extrovert. The qualities one would expect from a predator – borrowed, reasonably if metaphorically, from nature – are the opposite of Rolf Harris: stealth, cunning, detectable malice, demonstrable self-interest, unmastered appetite.

The urge to preconceive is partly self-soothing; it would be nice if people likely to do harm could be striped yellow and black like a wasp, and just as good if we could bore into their eyes and see their character there. But there is an element, too, that we want criminals and victims to all come in prescribed guises so we can judge the rights and wrongs without having to listen. Perhaps that will be the legacy of Yewtree: the insistence that, to know, you really do have to listen.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

[Sierra]

Should this one not be in the Criminal links subboard now?

[Gaki]

Indeed it should, and thus moved...



This is obviously an editorial piece.  Editorial authors are reown for basically spouting their feelings without any restraint.  A few choice phrases: "His naivety was carefully honed" ; "a man who didn't really understand sex at all, let alone physical autonomy and how to present that to a child"....  And yet, with naivity, with a lack of understanding, they still blame him...

Worse, the notion that for some reason fame gives their fan-base the right to put them onto some sort of strange pedestal where they can/should do no wrong, I have never understood.

I am sure this is no where near the end for this man, as I see more accusations are lining up - either for fame or retribution.  I do not envy him.

o.0

[ministraw]

lol someone should make a CL troll account and twitter troll her.

[lensman]

Comments opened briefly for this article and closed after a day with over 600 comments. There are plenty of censored comments. What is left pretty much toes the party line and all say pretty much one thing - variations on "so be on your guard for 'nice' men as well as dead-eyed, bearded creeps - if you look deep enough into their eyes you should be able to tell" - I can guess what a lot of those moderated comments were saying - I know because I've often had my most innocuous comments censored by the Graun because my stance was not obviously anti-paedo.

I wanted to post the following comment:

"What nearly all of the preceding comments don't realise is that a genuinely nice, caring and talented person can be a 'paedophile', and a 'paedophile' can be a genuinely nice, caring and talented person. The talent, the care and the 'niceness' aren't a 'front' - they are what the person is and they are things that lie deeper than that person's sexuality.

You think you're being clever when you say things like : "be careful - paedos can fake avuncularity, talent, and niceness", but you're not. You're still trying too hard to maintain an idea of the paedophile as something 'other' - a monster .

Just as much as that monster your fevered, ill-informed imaginations like to conjure up : the sweaty, bearded, shifty, dead-eyed lurker behind the trees in the park hoping to ease from you your innocence, the paedophile can be that brilliant teacher who inspired you as a child; or the only adult who'd listen to you, understand you and care for you when no one else could or would; or the grandfather who told you those beautiful stories that made you laugh and cry and fired your imagination; or the family friend who taught you to swim, to ride a bike and to love nature - yes they can be the 'paedophile' too.

These are people for lack of whom many children's lives would be the poorer.

Yes the truth is far more complicated and troubling than you think, hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, -mon frère."

I don't think it would have gotten past the mods, though...

[Ex-Chaste-Lover]

This piece annoyed me. Not because it's pointless and aggravatingly close-minded, but rather because she keeps insulting his charming personality, and great music. There's no call for that. His actions don't change the fact that he's a nice guy, nor do they add sour notes to his tunes.

[treetop]

Comments opened briefly for this article and closed after a day with over 600 comments. There are plenty of censored comments. What is left pretty much toes the party line and all say pretty much one thing - variations on "so be on your guard for 'nice' men as well as dead-eyed, bearded creeps - if you look deep enough into their eyes you should be able to tell" - I can guess what a lot of those moderated comments were saying - I know because I've often had my most innocuous comments censored by the Graun because my stance was not obviously anti-paedo.

I wanted to post the following comment:

"What nearly all of the preceding comments don't realise is that a genuinely nice, caring and talented person can be a 'paedophile', and a 'paedophile' can be a genuinely nice, caring and talented person. The talent, the care and the 'niceness' aren't a 'front' - they are what the person is and they are things that lie deeper than that person's sexuality.

You think you're being clever when you say things like : "be careful - paedos can fake avuncularity, talent, and niceness", but you're not. You're still trying too hard to maintain an idea of the paedophile as something 'other' - a monster .

Just as much as that monster your fevered, ill-informed imaginations like to conjure up : the sweaty, bearded, shifty, dead-eyed lurker behind the trees in the park hoping to ease from you your innocence, the paedophile can be that brilliant teacher who inspired you as a child; or the only adult who'd listen to you, understand you and care for you when no one else could or would; or the grandfather who told you those beautiful stories that made you laugh and cry and fired your imagination; or the family friend who taught you to swim, to ride a bike and to love nature - yes they can be the 'paedophile' too.

These are people for lack of whom many children's lives would be the poorer.

Yes the truth is far more complicated and troubling than you think, hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, -mon frère."

I don't think it would have gotten past the mods, though...

That is true with a lot of so called "news papers" be it their sites, tv or the actual news stand.  They control what is being said and when. So Gaki is right. They spout off nonsense to toe the party line with their BS and they wonder why their readership goes down when they do nothing but troll their own comment sections