So it is a relief this week to praise a magistrate who has refused bail to an 18-year-old boy/man accused of defiling/raping his younger sisters – repeatedly, according to the sisters. The lawyer defending this person argued that the accused should be granted bail, and could live with a relative (at least he didn’t expect him to stay in the same house as his own sisters who he is alleged to have abused!), but the magistrate obviously saw the dangers of that, and must have felt that common sense dictates that sisters colluding with each other to falsely accuse a brother of rape is more than unusual.
We generally deal with rape far too lightly here, usually rape of women and of boys and girls, so it is no wonder so few bother to report the mountain of rapes that occur, compared to the molehill that are reported, from wives who are repeatedly raped by their husbands, to partners who do the same or those who are date-raped by having their drinks spiked at parties – an occurrence that is not at all rare and unusual. But who would face the publicity of our courts after that experience?
Just put yourselves in the shoes of those young girls who are betrayed in this way by men, and particularly those who are raped by their own father. How they can ever trust men again is beyond me, because truly parents who abuse their own offspring, (and their partners usually close an eye to what is happening) must be, at the very least, the sickest of them all, and I hope sentencing in these cases will start to reflect society’s horror at paedophilia, made even worse when it involves relatives you are meant to be able to trust without question.
Relative danger is the most hidden of all and perhaps the hardest to uncover. Stranger danger is another thing altogether and most of us think, at least those of us who have lived in cities, about someone jumping out of a dark corner while you’re returning home, while you’re running in the park or whatever story of rape hits the headlines.
But the internet is becoming incredibly dangerous too.
Chris Coke, head of child protection awareness at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the UK said that parents should know that “stranger danger rules apply to the net too”.
This comment was made following the arrest in Canada of Mark Bedford, aged 21, who made friends with kids online, and then urged them to take their clothes off. They were then forced to have sex with him online (via these cameras kids have linked to their computer), and if they did not, he threatened to show the pictures to their relatives, or even to harm them. This man is unemployed and lives with his parents and he targeted at least a 100 children, 42 of them from the West Sussex area.
To catch this man, little more than a boy, required no less than nine months of investigation. His girl victims ranged in age from nine to 15 and he hacked into their supposedly protected email accounts or chat rooms. Which shows how you can’t be too careful or think Malta is safe.
The abuser could be living anywhere in the world, and destroy the minds of girls and boys whose minds are already numbed by too many lone, unprotected and unsupervised nights on the computer. The guidelines are obvious. Don’t have a computer in your child’s bedroom. Monitor who they are talking to. Do spot checks. Take nothing for granted. Stranger danger is all around us, thanks to the web.
Most of all, convicted paedophiles should never be allowed to be anywhere close to children, once they have served any punishment they are given for their crimes.
The sooner we have a public register of paedophiles, the better, and it should be accompanied by very, very strict rules over where paedophiles can and cannot work. In this small country paedophiles should have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
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