Archbishop Says AIDS is God’s Will
The head of Belgium’s Catholic Church is in hot water for saying gay men deserve AIDS for the “travesty” that is homosexuality and that pedophile priests should go unpunished.
A gay rights lawyer is threatening legal action against Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard — a close friend of the pope — for saying AIDS is “justice” for gay men.
Leonard’s press spokesman, Juergen Mettepenningen, has quit over the remarks, saying, “Monsignor Leonard at times acts like a motorist driving on the wrong side of a motorway who thinks all the other motorists are wrong.”
The Archbishop is quoted by the Pink Paper as saying:
“When you mistreat the environment it ends up mistreating us in turn. And when you mistreat human love, perhaps it winds up taking vengeance.
“All I’m saying is that sometimes there are consequences linked to our actions,” the archbishop said, saying of AIDS, “this epidemic is a sort of intrinsic justice.”
It’s almost like he’s trying to divert our attention from something. I wonder what it could be?
Fortunately he’s had somewhat of a comeuppance (albeit a very small one):
The ISA is Insidious and Unfair and Must Be Abolished
Tim Gill argues the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) into oblivion:
All the fundamental questions remain. Questions about cost. About due process. About data protection. About checks giving a false sense of security. About malicious accusations and people being wrongly identified as paedophiles. And, most profoundly, about the wider implications of living in a society in which casual, freely given offers of help are met not with appreciation but with deep suspicion.
Common sense tells us that the ideal of a zero-risk childhood is untenable, if not impossible. Of course, children have a just claim for a degree of protection from harm. But when it comes to protecting them, our responsibility should surely be to tackle the most serious threats first and foremost.
So as a parent, my response to the question “how would I feel if it were my child?” is as follows. We would all want to feel that our collective efforts to keep children reasonably safe in an uncertain world were well thought through, proportionate to the risk, and effective. On all these counts, the vetting system is still wholly unfit for purpose.
It’s not just unfit for purpose, it’s unsuitable for purpose. The ISA by definition won’t be able to fulfil its remit, all the while distracting its 250 administrators’ attention from the real abuses which are committed behind closed doors, almost always by people who don’t appear on its bureucratised radar. When we rationalise the management of risk we can’t exactly be surprised when, at enormous cost, children and other ‘vulnerable’ groups continue to be abused and killed, and a culture of suspicion continues to grow. When the most likely outcome is a generation of children and young people unable to risk assess the world for themselves, we should really think again. Bureaucracy and databases are pernicious and ineffective tools with which to manage society.
To Save You We Have to Subjugate You
Professor Ian Walden suggests reasons why the government has succeeded in growing its surveillance society:
“Once happy to leave cyberspace ‘unregulated’, Governments, including that of the UK, seem increasingly willing to encroach on what we do, say and see over the Internet,” said Professor Walden, head of the Institute of Computer and Communications Law at Queen Mary, University of London.
He warned that increasing use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter will give the authorities access to information about individuals’ private lives.
”As we spend more of our lives online, concerns about the impact of surveillance on rights of expression and privacy are likely to increase,” he said.
Professor Walden, a former trustee on the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry self regulatory body, said that problems such as child pornography, illegal file sharing and terrorism are used to justify ‘Big Brother-like’ scrutiny of all internet activity, even though the vast majority of web users are law abiding.
“The police clearly took advantage of the terrorist bombing in London to get an agenda, which has been around for years, pushed to the forefront” he said.
“They would never have got Government support for data retention, which became a European issue, without the Madrid and London bombings.” The 2004 Madrid bombers used one shared web based email account to make plans, rather than exchanging messages that could be intercepted. Their actions killed 191 people and wounded over 1,000.
I think it’s a pretty accurate analysis of what’s going on right now, without necessarily explaining why. It’s clear paedophilia is ‘in vogue’ with the government – why else persist with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) when there is demonstrably no need for it? Ian Huntley killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, but it wasn’t because of an absence of government regulation of people working in the public sector or with children. Notice too how propaganda against digital piracy is being posed as an economic and creative threat to us all, when each has plenty of evidence not to be the case. And just look at how photographers are being harassed, under the ridiculous pretext of having to clamp down on terrorist reconnaissance.
But I don’t think any of them will remain successful factors which push indefinitely towards ever greater surveillance. The resistance against the ISA is considerable, from teachers to writers and parents. The resistance against the presumption that all photographers are terrorists led to an unbelievable turnout at the Mass Gathering in Trafalgar Square last Saturday, and there are complicated groupings beginning to ally against Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill. There’s a tipping point in this process, and I think we’re fast approaching it. I’ll be interested to see what else Prof Walden has to say at his lecture at Queen Mary, University of London next week.
Photographing the Sunset? Paedophile!
From the British Journal of Photography:
One day after Malcolm Dike took pictures of a sunset from his window, two Community Support Officers questioned him over claims that he could be a paedophile.
A member of the public reported Dike’s actions to the police, as his flat overlooks a youth centre, and it was feared that Dike was taking pictures of kids. ‘It was absolutely outrageous – I have been taking photos for years and never had any problems before,’ Dike told the Daily Mail. ‘My home overlooks the Oasis Youth Centre and apparently whoever complained was afraid I might have been taking photos of the children. That was completely untrue, of course, but the police have no right to come round here asking questions anyway.’
I’m floored. This paranoid, busybody behaviour is setting us against one another in ways we’ve never previously conceived. In the last 10 years many of us have come to the opinion that photographers are either terrorists or paedophiles, and that photography should be tightly controlled (or prohibited) – all without a shred of evidence to back such attitudes up. We prohibit photography on public land, we assume that anyone photographing a building wants to blow it up (and terrorist photography scouts are an as-yet undiscovered phenomenon), and anyone with a camera near children wants to take sexually objectifying pictures of them. I’m fed up with said ‘member of the public’ and sickened by the tin-pot police substitutes who actually gave this more than a second’s thought.
The ISA Will Always Fail
What Vanessa George, Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen did to those children is so heinous I can barely grasp it:
Nursery worker Vanessa George and her accomplices Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen face lengthy jail terms after admitting a string of sex offences yesterday.
The three – who had started a bizarre relationship online – met for the first time in the dock at Bristol crown court, where they pleaded guilty to abusing young children and sharing the images of that abuse with each other.
It also emerged there had been online discussion between the three about abducting a child. Officers believe this may have been nothing more than a fantasy but expressed relief that finding and catching them had halted any nascent plots.
A serious case review has been launched to look at how George, previously considered a stalwart of her community in Devon, was able to abuse children. There have been calls for the use of camera phones in nurseries to be looked at again and for more checks to make sure workers do not get such easy and private one-to-one access with children.
(via ScoobsChris)
This isn’t a post about how unusual child abuse conducted by women is. I want it to be abundantly clear that Vanessa George passed her Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check and she almost certainly would have passed the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). This whole case makes a mockery of the Home Office’s strategy of child protection – expecting a database or a bureaucracy to detect an abuser who doesn’t have a criminal record, and who has probably become skilful at concealing their behaviour is lunacy. Instead these three were able to commit their horrific crimes against children because:
“The nursery was not run properly. The problem was there were about 10 staff and they are all good friends – so standards got really slack.”
Parents knew standards were slack, the nursery was run poorly and then there’s Ofsted, which said after George’s arrest:
“Ofsted was unaware of the recent allegations about a member of staff at Little Ted’s Nursery in Plymouth which we understand has led to its immediate closure.
“We have had one recent complaint relating to the nursery. This complaint was not of a level that would require police involvement and did not relate to the content of the allegations made public today.
“Ofsted is investigating this matter in line with our normal procedures and it would not be appropriate to comment further until the outcomes of that investigation are complete.”
Could children’s services or the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board have stopped this? Maybe not, but it’s an indication of just how many services are out there tasked with safeguarding children, who actually have involvement with children, and even they weren’t able to detect this abuse until it was too late. Expect the ISA, with its starting presumption that everyone‘s a paedophile, to do any better will end in disaster for the genuinely vulnerable.
