![]() While he documents in considerable detail the intellectual movement in the 1970s towards greater sexual freedom, including that of children, the arc of his narrative bends, in line with that of more recent history, towards public concerns over child protection. He explores the language used, notably the emergence of the word “paedophilia” into public debate and popular consciousness. However, it is precisely the news coverage of the day that is Basannavar’s main focus: his project delves into the changing ways in which “sexual violence” has been conceived and presented in the media and wider society. To the author’s credit, I should say at once that barring a few quibbles over small errors of fact, I have no quarrel with the quality of his research, which is impressively rich and wide-ranging.Īs regards the Moors Murders, I was certainly not involved as either a perpetrator, victim (obviously), or in any other capacity than following events in the news. In marked contrast, I have strong recollections of all three, especially as an active player in the case of PIE. Basannavar tells us he was born in 1986, so plainly he has no more personal memory of these events than he has of the Roman Empire. These are: the notorious 1960s Moors Murders the impact of PIE in the 1970s and finally the Cleveland scandal of 1987. The same three case studies form the core material of both the PhD and the book. As may be surmised, the latter is a reference to my own book Paedophilia: The Radical Case. I have a PDF of this and have read most of it, including a chunky 48-page chapter on PIE, the contents of which are split into two chapters for the book, one titled “Speaking About PIE, Speaking About Paedophilia”, the other called “PIE and the ‘Radical Case’”. This is because it is clear from the publisher’s description and the table of contents that the book, which came out late last year, is a tweaked version of the author’s PhD thesis of a couple of years earlier. I say “apparently”, rather than being more definite, because I have not had access to this prohibitively expensive volume. ![]() For Basannavar, apparently, the essence of the matter is that any paedophilic act is violent and must be denounced as such, regardless of the obvious injustice and defamatory potential of any such claim. But this author then takes a monstrously huge step further by in effect equating loving, de facto consensual, relationships with the grotesque acts of sadistic child murderers. It is simply assumed, in lock-step with the rest of the mighty CSA industry, that any child-adult sexual act constitutes abuse of the younger party. The book, by Nicholas Basannavar, who has taught history at Birkbeck, University of London, is ostensibly about sexual violence but the term is never defined. Well, yes, but the title is Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse, so you will not be surprised to hear that the kind of noisiness called for is not so much a triumphant fanfare as an agonised scream of protest. It is not every day a prestigious, scholarly book mentions Heretic TOC and names its humble host literally scores of times, but a recent tome from publishers Palgrave Macmillan, yours for a princely £89.99, does just that, so it might be thought worth shouting about.
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