to take some major action to deal with the perpetrators, protect children and compensate those who have suffered. Nick Davies, whose investigations into care home abuse and the activities of paedophiles have won awards, noted that ‘The political reality is that the Home Office continues to steer police resources into dealing with reported crime. In its major 1996 inquiry, Childhood Matters, the NSPCC concluded: “The legal system, designed to provide justice and redress for the victims of abuse, is failing to do so consistently.”’43
Nick Davies wrote about the work of Rob Jones, who, as a young detective sergeant, moved to Avon and Somerset’s Child Protection Team, where he developed a way of working which resulted in the successful prosecution of many of the members of a paedophile ring who preyed on teenage boys. In 2000, wrote Nick Davies, ‘Rob Jones devised his own package of proactive child protection to safeguard children from abuse, particularly in the world of sport. He called it Child Safe. His chief constable supported him. It was the only such scheme in the country and he set out to spread it to other forces and recruited footballing stars, including Gary Lineker and Kevin Keegan, to help him. Some forces have adopted it. Others are not so keen. They say it’s women’s work.’44
‘Women’s work’ is something such men belittle and scorn because what men call women’s work involves caring for others. Caring for others calls for the tender emotions which many men in the course of their upbringing are forced to learn to deny. For the majority of women feelings of affection, kindness, sympathy and tenderness are linked to sexual feelings, but when men deny these feelings and their link to sexual feelings, sex becomes an activity no different from driving a fast car or winning a game of golf. Sexual feeling becomes no more than the sensation of excitement and power that can confirm the man’s sense of existing as a person. To get this feeling he acts upon someone’s body, or on his own, and uses it as an object, in the same way he uses a car or a golf club. Just what a man does with a sexual object is often bizarre - it is men, rarely women, who develop fetishes and perversions - and often inhuman - it is men, extremely rarely women, who commit rape.
If this attitude towards sex is the result of what is an ordinary upbringing for a boy, what happens to a boy who experiences not just the usual indoctrination about maleness but also the experience of being treated as a sexual object?
Jack and his wife Joy agreed to my recording his story, in the hope that it might be of use to other people in a similar predicament. All that Jack asked was that I should not give the name of the orphanage he lived in as a child. ‘Things are different now,’ he said, ‘or at least I hope they are.’
We had met twelve years previously when their son Mark had been in trouble at school. He was a very bright lad, but he stayed away from school a lot, and when he was there he would not work. His headmaster wanted to expel him, but before this could be done the Education Department needed a psychologist’s advice. Mark and his parents came to see me, and eventually Mark went to a boarding school. His parents came a few more times to discuss their marriage. It had become clear that much of Mark’s difficult behaviour stemmed from the strain in their relationship.
Joy found it hard to criticize Jack because she knew he was a devoted, caring father. She wanted to make their relationship better and wanted to talk to me about it. Jack was not so keen, but he came back with her for several meetings. After a while they stopped coming, saying that things were better, and I lost touch with them. Over the years I often wondered what had happened to Mark. I was relieved, as we sat down in my office, when Joy said, ‘Mark said that we ought to get in touch with you.’ She went on, ‘It’s very good of you to see us, and at such short notice too.’ She told me that Mark was married with two children and had his own business. Alice, their eldest, was married, their second daughter, Jenny, was working in Edinburgh, Ray was a research scientist, and Louise, the youngest, was at university.
Joy paused and looked at Jack. He looked dreadfully upset. He said, ‘I’ve been very stupid. It’s about the children… when they were young… what I did to them. I… interfered… with them… not all of them. I didn’t think -’
His voice broke. Joy, gently, took over, and went on talking, taking responsibility for telling me what had happened. She spoke very simply and directly, explaining carefully and laying no blame, trying to be fair to everyone concerned. She described how their eldest daughter, Alice, had three children and lived a hundred miles away. Joy had noticed how infrequently Alice visited them, and how when they visited Alice the atmosphere was very strained. She knew that Alice and her husband were having difficulties and that Alice was consulting a counsellor about this. One day Alice phoned to say that she would be calling to see them. She made a special point of arranging to arrive at a time when Jack would be home from work. When she came she asked both of them to sit down so that she could tell them something very important. Joy thought Alice was going to tell them she had left her husband, and was puzzled when Alice said that she was going to leave the problem with them.
Then she told Joy, and reminded her father, how when she was twelve her father had interfered with her sexually. He had asked her to undress for him and he had fondled her breasts. She had been very frightened by this. Over the years she had tried to forget what had happened to her. She had begun to wonder whether it had really happened, especially when at college she had confided in a friend, only to be told that Freud had said that girls often had these kinds of fantasies about their fathers. She was sure that this was not a fantasy. When her marriage ran into difficulties she went to a counsellor, and her counsellor had helped her see how what her father had done to her had undermined her trust in men and so had affected her relationship with her husband.
She had asked Mark whether anything had happened to him. Mark had said that it had, and that it had gone on for a long time. She wrote to Jenny about it, but not to Louise. Alice had always been very close to her little sister, and she was sure that nothing had happened to Louise. Her counsellor had advised her that the problem was not hers but her parents’, and that the only way she could rid herself of its effects was to return it to her parents. This she was doing, and, having done so, she left.
Joy did not attempt to describe the pain and confusion Alice left behind. Coming to see me was her way of trying to sort out her confusion. As to most introverts, it was important to her to see things clearly, no matter how painful they might be. She had always been like that. I found in the notes I had made twelve years earlier that I had written of Joy: ‘She would puzzle over the problems our discussions raised, remember them to the next session, and try to find a solution.’ I had noted, ‘She said that she had a constant, nagging anxiety and a sense of imminent disaster from some unknown quarter.’ I had also noted Jack’s ‘reluctance to enquire deeply into personal matters’.
Joy said she could not understand how it was that she had never noticed anything. Alice and Jack were always getting angry with one another, but Alice had always been an angry child, ever since she was little. Joy had spoken to Mark, and he had told her how Jack had engaged him in sexual acts for quite some while, stopping only when he thought there was a danger that she would find out. Jack defended himself. ‘It was just mutual masturbation, nothing else. Just like boys playing together.’
Joy said, ‘What about Ray? He told me there were times with him too.’
Jack shook his head. ‘I can’t remember.’
Joy said to me, ‘This is what’s so terrible, he can’t remember. If he doesn’t remember what he did, what other things has he forgotten? Will he do it again? Can we trust him? You can see why Mark and Alice worry he might with our grandchildren.’
Jack found it hard to speak. ‘I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I know Mark and Alice don’t trust me. But I wouldn’t, not with my grandchildren.’
Joy pressed him, reminding him of what he had done to Mark.
Jack said, ‘It started when Mark asked me about sex. I never thought much about it. Just two males together. At the orphanage, everyone did it.’
Jack went on to tell me about his life in the orphanage. After his father died his mother