In the wake of Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall, Freddie Starr, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, barrister Barbara Hewson has stuck her foot in it just somewhat with a piece in Spiked magazine. According to the BBC, she called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13. About the prosecutions she wrote, "What we have here is the manipulation of the British criminal justice system to produce scapegoats on demand. It's a grotesque spectacle . . . It's time to end this prurient charade, which has nothing to do with justice or the public interest." You can read the story here.
Now I'm not about to defend Hewson's view of the age of consent, nor to waste much time attacking her Chambers, which described itself as "shocked by the views she expressed" (personally I find their failure to defend her freedom of speech distinctly more shocking). It seems to me that while the law banning sex under 16 is an arbitrary figure intended to protect the vulnerable (and some 16 year olds will be vulnerable, some 15 year olds not), there's little to be gained from exposing an even larger tranche of young people to the attention of those who want to groom them for their own gratification.
But I do have just the faintest sympathy for Hewson's sense of outrage. Here it is.
I'm old enough to remember the 70s, and what it was like to be attracted to women then. For those born in a more enlightened age, it was very different. That's not to say that groping a 9 year old, one of the accusations levelled at Stuart Hall, was widely regarded as alright. It wasn't (although I'll come back to that). It's more that the occasional remark about the size of a girl's breasts, a bottom pinch here, a wolf-whistle there, was considered (at least by men) as part of the rough and tumble of everyday interaction. I'm not defending it. But that's how things were.
That impinges on the current slew of celebrities and teachers undergoing trial by ordeal in this way: behaviour like fondling your students while they're playing the violin, getting them drunk on an awayday and having sex with them in your car, taking advantage of teenage (and perhaps underage) fans in your dressing room while your BBC minders look the other way, this all now seems a long way from today's mores. Thirty or forty years ago it was a lot closer to what most people took for granted as part of everyday life.
What seems like extraordinary behaviour now, was then not so far removed from everyday conduct. Remember, the pill had burst upon society, skirts were short, and the expression "free love" had not attracted overtones of naivety and cynicism, . For men (and particularly for men with authority or power) it was open season. That's why when one of the girls at the Menhuin School complained about a staff member, she was was told to make sure she wasn't alone with him; that's why girls in St James's Leeds were told by a nurse to feign sleep when Jimmy Savile did his loathsome ward rounds. The people who let the vulnerable down were not necessarily bad people, but they were certainly people from a society which had different attitudes.
I find the almost puritanical absence of sexual reference in the world of work or education now slightly strange, when our society fetishises, trivialises and monetises sex at every opportunity, when - apparently - young people copulate, usually while drunk, at the drop of a hat and pornography is freely available to every teenager. And pre-teenager. I wonder whether we are not the new Victorians, clamping down on sexualised behaviour in some contexts, while waving our knickers in the air in others.
And I guess this is my point. I wouldn't go back to the way things were, but I'm not totally sure our society is much better. Who can honestly say that in forty years we won't be horrified by some current celebrity's squalid and opportunistic behaviour? My money says we will.
And there's another thing. We make judgments about what people did thirty or forty years ago, smug in the assumption that the next generation will share the same values and congratulate us for our outrage. But they might not. Society's sense of what's right and wrong is constantly shifting, and our condemnation of Savile and Hall could just as well look smug and self-satisfied.
