I think Langham will probably get a couple of years suspended. In the papers today there is talk of him being threatened already. Especially as he’s the double whammy of ’sex offender’ and celebrity.
I disagree wholly with what he’s done but it makes me mad that Prison Officers ‘turn a blind eye’ to violence inside. It’s for the state to punish, not some petty thug who’s a criminal himself who fancies a bit of violence.

Short of prying into every family’s private life - which is something our Government seems naively keen to do - I don’t know what the answer is. I do, however, believe these abusers know that what they feel the urge to do is totally wrong. So maybe there should be safe and anonymous services for those who feel they are being tempted down this path so that they can confront their own demons (without the fear of their own abuser being prosecuted - many of them don’t want that), and without the threat of instantly going on the sex offenders register - which I doubt helps anyone at all, victim or perpetrator. This wouldn’t help older ones much, of course, but it could help the potential abusers get through their youth and give them a chance of being normal.

The other issue is that of the jaded palate, so to speak. So far as I can see, pornography is a progressive addiction. People begin with fairly normal stuff, and that eventually palls, so they progress (easily via the Net) to images which horrify us - and probably them too, on an intellectual level.

I don’t think the death penalty is any sort of solution - it’s judicial murder. There’s enough dreadful violence in the world as it is, and if we will live in densely-packed societies and complicate our lives with religious superstition, poverty, bad education, and tabloid intolerance etc. then we must accept some very unpleasant consequences, and try to deal with them.

I don’t think there are many more active paedophiles now than when older contributors and I were playing happily outside, without an adult’s supervision, but with vague warnings about “strange men”. I do, however, think there are many more people being tempted to view unacceptable images - and they do certainly contribute to the dreadful ‘industry’ which produces them … so they have to be punished to stop the ‘jaded palate’ syndrome. 10 years for Chris Langham, though, is way too much. If he were Joe Soap he’d probably get 2 years.

Going back to the insurance question … have any of you realised how, in fact, you aren’t insured at all? You have to be young, totally blameless and healthy, and living in a fortified home to be sure of a payout. I couldn’t even get the cat insured recently. Insure your child against abduction? No real chance of a payout, far too many clauses in the small print, and what sort of person would take it out anyway?

BTW, I enjoyed your intelligent debate with Dogstar. I think the outcome was an honourable draw!?

It is of course quite correct to say that ‘locking them up and throwing away the key’ is a VERY expensive solution. As Dogstar rightly points out, our prisons are already overcrowded and successive Governments have seemed reluctant to build more, and Liz’s point that our tax £ is already stretched to it’s limits, with so many deserving sections of our society not receiving the support that they should be due, is well made.

I’m not a Death Penalty advocate in any circumstances, so that solution is a difficult one for me to consider… but it is an oft presented solution so consider it I must:

Would the Death Penalty put an end to paedophilia? Well no, of course not - what it WOULD do is ensure that any convicted paedophile was never again a risk to children, and at minimal cost to the state.

Would the Death Penalty act as a deterrent? Maybe, in some cases, although it would probably only be a deterrent to those hovering on the fringes - the CP downloaders for example. However even the threat of death in the event of being caught is unlikely to squash sexual drive for a lifetime. The sex drive is such a powerful and intrinsic part of being human that it is almost impossible to eradicate…

Just for the sake of de-emoting the argument, and so reaching a more logical conclusion, let us consider the sexual drive in terms of normal sexuality: If having sex, with a consenting adult, was punishable by death - would it deter people from doing so?

Most women are capable of ’switching off’ sexual thoughts and feelings quite effectively, and diverting those energies into alternative avenues … if the feelings are overwhelming, then masturbation is always an option and, because women are not as reliant on visual stimulation as men, porn can be removed from the equation.

Men however work in a completely different way, both psychologically and pysiologically. The sex drive is foremost, powerful and frequent (what is that old statistic - men think about sex every 3 minutes?). Faced with attractive adults all around them, the frustration would inevitably build to monumental proportions, overriding all reason in some cases. Masturbation is again an option - but men are very visually driven and illegal porn would undoubtedly be an issue. Whether or not they succumbed to seeking out ‘underground’ porn and sex would depend entirely on Free Will and Self Control - and with the best will in the world, even otherwise ‘good’ and law abiding people are subject to, and victims of, personal weakness. One only has to look at Priests, who’s vow of celibacy is often tested to it’s limits, and broken to appreciate how difficult it is to eradicate that basic human urge regardless of any good intentions.

So - I would conclude that the Death Penalty MAY deter a proportion of paedophiles but it would certainly not eradicate the problem (and nor would life imprisonment).

Either option would also have another effect - that of making the General Public feel safer. Would it be a false sense of safety though? Well yes, because there would still be paedophiles living amongst us - only people would be even LESS inclined to be on their guard around those they know and like ( you have NO idea how difficult it is to make people understand that someone they like is a danger to their children - 12 years down the line there are still people who will not speak to me because I have told them things they do not want to hear about my ex… unconvicted, because the mother of the child involved would not put her daughter through a court case)

However - SOMETHING has to be done about this … obviously keeping known and convicted paedophiles off the streets (in one way or another) for the rest of their lives is essential, but what else can we do?

Educating our children, from a very early age, is one way to help keep them safe… not just about ’stranger danger’, but about good secrets (Mummy’s birthday present) and bad secrets… about innapropriate touching, about feeling uncomfortable with a situation or act… Making sure that children have a list of at least 5 adults whom they trust to tell is anything makes them feel bad (I had mine draw around their hand and write a name in each finger… it was updated periodically as they grew up).

Social Services departments have an excellent program to make even very young children aware of innapropriate behaviour without scaring them - this should be part of essential teaching in nurseries and schools. ALL children should be given this opportunity to protect themselves, not just those considered to be at risk. If we can reduce the opportunities for paedophiles to target a victim without risk of being caught, and at the same time make the penalty lifelong then maybe we will suceed in reducing the number of children scarred by these people.

OK - off my soap box now… thanks for letting me ramble on!

Prior to the net (or the expansion of it) it would have been so mcuh harder to have access to all the images that can fuel the ‘urges’. Going into a sex shop and trying to get paedophile literature was v.dodgy and to join a paedophile group meant letting people know who you were. Now its all anonymous….
So along with easy access has come a huge rise in offending.

One case that has always stuck in my mind was of the high flying London Insurance broker who had everything going for him. Successful, smartly dressed, good looking, huge house.
He was actually abusing both his small children (boy and girl) but no-one suspected. Respected member of the community etc He had a vast stock of truly gross paedophile video footage he had downloaded onto Cd’s and even had some at work.

I look on it as zero tolerance and maybe seeing high profile characters getting caught will make others think twice?

I know I wasn’t going to say any more but there you go!!!

Solutions? For me, the second-best solution is life in prison without parole. They should live out their days and die there among their own kind. Like lepers used to. But then I think of the fortune it will cost us to keep them alive to live out their natural lifetimes when that money could be spent on our old-age pensioners who contributed so much to our country and who now cannot afford to heat their homes or put food on their table; I think of our soldiers wounded in wars whose lives have been irreparably changed by disfigurement and who cannot get treatment in specialised military hospitals which is the very least they deserve because we “can’t afford it” (no matter whether you agree or disagree with war, they were sent out there in our names and we owe them everything); and of course, our future, the children and their education - and the huge tax breaks their mothers should get to enable them to stay at home and raise them. That would solve some problems of some young people at least.

So, for me personally, the best solution is to bring back the death penalty. We can so easily put down animals who have “turned bad” when in 99% of cases they only did so because of the treatment they received by human beings. They didn’t have any choices. Paedophiles are worse. They are human and they had free will.

I don’t agree that Chris Langham’s career or fame should excuse him in any way because if Chris Langham’s deviant sexual preferences had been known to the viewing public BEFORE he became famous, he never would have. What corporation would have given him a job? Who would have wanted to watch him knowing he was a paedophile? Who will watch him now? He will never be able to resurrect himself. Just like Barrymore.

Like all of us, these men had choices to make in their lives between - very simple - right and wrong and they made the wrong choices this time. Big time.

I guess the only real issue I have with everything you’ve said is in your conclusion. ‘Lock ‘em up and throw away the key’. It just seems so reductive.

I know many around here would probably agree with your conclusion - but back in the real world it’s just not a viable answer. UK prisons are already overflowing thanks, in part, to all those ’sex offenders’ who’ve been banged-up since Ore (and still counting). The government’s answer is to build more ‘prison places’ (although they seem a bit more reluctant to actually build more prisons) into the system, but all the experts seem to agree that on present projections in another decade the UK will be no better off in terms of prison places provision - in fact, much worse. And let’s not even mention the astronomical cost of housing, feeding and maintaining all those prisoners - to the taxpayer and to the essential services tasked with doing so.

Hmmm. I think the single best option - for the moment - for ‘containing’ the problem of paedophilia (and you are quite right - it is a sexuality, not a learned behaviour, as much as idiots would like to think otherwise) is probably what is happening at the moment. Fear. Fear of getting caught. The personal, social and material consequences of being convicted are now so great, so cataclysmic, here in the UK and USA that I think the message is probably getting through loud and clear. And if it isn’t - it certainly cannot be for the want of broadcasting that warning. But using fear alone to maintain a status quo, inevitably becomes a problem in and of itself.

As much as I snipe at CEOP (and that’s mainly in relation to their handling of Ore), I cannot deny they have appear to have had a major impact on the spread of CP in the UK and around the world. They work with international police forces and use some of the best experts and most advanced technology in world to try and stay one step ahead. It’s a difficult area to work in and I guess it takes a hell of a toll on those who do it, day in, day out. It can’t be very pleasant at all having to peer into some of the world’s darkest corners.

Where I have a problem with CEOP is only in some of their methods. Their use of fear to alarm just about everyone is sometimes, imo, wholly disproportionate to the actual problem - the UK, for instance, in a recent report by the IWF, is statistically almost completely free of CP hosted in this country, which means the threats - in terms of supply - come from abroad. Of course, there are domestic cases - there always have been and always will be (we are dealing with a form of human sexuality here) - but these are isolated instances, far from the ‘networks’ we hear continually about from the likes of CEOP. These cases are no less horrific or painful for all involved, but it’s important to maintain at least a measure of perspective.

To be fair to CEOP - they are by no means the only ones playing the fear factor at every possible opportunity. Sadly, it’s become a bit of national sport for almost every child advocacy organisation (it’s one way to raise next year’s budget, I guess), Member of Parliament (popular with the voters, I guess) and reporter (the readers, inexplicably, seem to like it).

Hysterical reportage compounds an already misinformed level of public knowledge, serving only to heighten predjudices and silence just about all rational discussion. It is profoundly counter-productive. All we end up with is an ever-expanding prison population (600,000 sex offenders in the USA - and many of them are mere teenagers themselves). Hand on heart - do any of you feel the local park is any safer for your kids? Have we ended up with a safer environment for our kids, whether the boogeyman ever existed or not - or have we got precisely the opposite? All I can see is that everyone is scared. The parents are scared, the kids are scared and the paedophiles are scared.

When I was a kid of 12 I was down the local park all day. On my own (okay, with the dog) or with a few friends. We knew about ’stranger danger’ and all that, but we didn’t live in fear - we just enjoyed our evenings and school holidays going out and about, doing what kids do. It doesn’t happen now. Children today seem to live in hermetically sealed bubbles, screened off from the real world, mollycoddled, over-protected from some mythological boogeyman waiting on every street corner, in every public swimming pool, at every bus stop. When I was a 14 year old I was hopping on my bike and cycling around the countryside - for a whole day! On my own! It’s shocking.

Anyway (and I know I’m going on a bit - hey it’s late and I feel like rambling), to return to the, erm, ‘thrust’ of this dissertation: all dissent from popular wisdom (i.e. the gutter press and tabloid broadcast media) now seems to be under embargo. We may not engage in speculation, investigation or curiosity. We must accept what we are told or risk the consequences of being publicly shamed for our temerity in daring to ask impertinent questions of a sensitive issue.

I’ve been accused here of siding with Chris Langham - of seeing him as some sort of ‘innocent unfortunate’. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was in possession of CP he paid for. There is no question of his guilt, none at all. He can be said, correctly, to have contributed directly to the suffering of children and he should face the necessary consequences. In such cases - and CEOP are, of course, right to highlight them where appropriate - there are no excuses for such behaviour. The sexual exploitation of children is totally unacceptable.

But I despair of the half-arsed reporting, the loaded pre-prepared statements from Police and prosecution in such cases and the way the tabloid media seem to roll about in this swill with gleeful abandon. It doesn’t bring any of us any nearer to solutions, let alone a proper, clear understanding of the problems.

Just once, I’d like to witness a level-headed, balanced, informed and bi-partisan discussion of the whole sorry business - Police, child advocates, experts, victims and perpetrators, every possible point of view expressed in an intelligent, informative manner. Real statistics, demonstrable facts and a total absence of moral preaching.

Not likely, eh?

And there, you will be grateful to know, I shall leave it and this whole troublesome subject. I think I just unloaded all I ever really had to say on the matter. Now I’m off to bed to read the latest edition of Private Eye and have a chuckle at Colemanballs.

Goodnight, everyone.

Of course I do not believe that paedophilia and being gay are in any way either related or comparable in terms of morals, act, acceptability … etc etc. That is not what I was trying to say at all - God Forbid, I’m not some kind of religious throwback or mental case!

The point that I was trying to make is that, whether or not a paedophile chooses to act on his impulses, he will always be attracted to children. It is the way that his inbuilt sexuality drives him, and an individual’s sexuality is such a subconcious and inbuilt drive that it is virtually impossible to change - to re-educate a paedophile into finding adult women attractive is akin to asking a heterosexual to never find someone of the opposite sex attractive again, or to ask a gay person to find only the opposite sex attractive for the rest of his life.

So therein lies the depth of the problem … of course we cannot, and *should* not ignore it - and the depth of the problem is far greater, and more entwined with our daily lives, than most people ever realise. But what we do have to realise is that no amount of re-habilitation, counselling, castration or beating to a pulp is going to ‘cure’ these people, and that no prospective long prison sentence is going to deter them. Free will only goes so far, and sooner or later they will come into contact with a child that they cannot resist - that risk is too great to take.

So what is the answer? How do we ensure that, once these people are caught (and the tragedy is that only a tiny proportion ARE ever caught), they never, ever have the opportunity to ruin another child’s life, memories and mental stability? For me, the only answer is life without parole - lock them away and throw away the key, regardless of the ‘level’ of the offence.

But what we also need to do is to recognise that these are REAL people …for years Chris Langham was a respected member of the community - he was recognised for his work, raised 5 children and took his place in society. By instantly switching from our accepted view of him to the view that he is ‘monster’ we are effectively denying that paedophiles can, and do, live amongst us whilst being fully accepted into our lives, families and homes.

It is the elephant in the living room … if we can only see paedophiles as ‘monster’ then we are effectively denying that our brother, our son, our uncle, teacher, scout leader, priest, neighbour, work colleague, friend, nephew, son in law, grandson…may be a paedophile. By labelling the person (rather than the act) we can then feel comfortable about not looking too closely at those we know and trust…. and in 80% of cases it is those very people who abuse our children.

I just feel so strongly about it that i guess I can pontificate a tad!!

*bangs head repeatedly against wall*

Okay. I surrender. LOL.

Actually I AM an expert. I worked in child protection for many years so I KNOW the damage these men (and occasionally women) connected to the child-porn movie industry can cause both pschologically and physically. Hundreds of children are raped to death every year for paedo snuff movies….
is it okay to watch them because you didn’t do it yourself? There really is no difference you know. The man in front of his PC watching that movie can very easily take the next step. (and they often do. it’s an evolving process)

However I also know that when someone is as entrenched as you there’s no point…… maybe you should talk to someone from the investigating task force and watch a few movies…..

See? There’s the problem. Right there.

Moderations wrote: ‘…Yes my views are set in stone. Its an offence to even open a file which contains images of child abuse and the perpetrators should instantly receive a custodial. End of.’

And there’s another one. Ridiculous.

Tell you what - how about we actually hear from an accredited expert in the field of working with paedophiles? It might make a refreshing change. This is from BBC News Online today:

‘…Ray Wyre, an independent consultant who specialises in the prevention of sex crime and abuse who is treating Langham, said he did not think the actor was a paedophile.

He said: “He has an obsession with his own abuse and the whole imagery relating to abuse.

“In a sense, he feels the same way a juror would when viewing these images, including anger. You don’t have to have a paedophile motive when viewing abusive images.”

He added: “Often offenders see themselves as the child in the pictures, which is what he does.”…’

Ray Wyre is very respected within child protection circles, with years of experience at the sharp end of dealing with paedophiles. He’s worked with many police forces over the years.

But people like you, ‘Moderation’, never care to listen to the experts. You blindly obey your basest instincts and go for the jugular each and every time. ‘Kill them all,’ is your mantra. You are not interested in reason, in research or academic examination of the issues. You just want to strike out and damn anyone you don’t like the look of.

In short, you are The Mob. Never mind that Langham, like a great majority of those convicted of downloading CP, has never laid a finger on a child in a sexual way (remember? he was cleared of all allegations of indecent assault?), you still want his guts ripped out - just in case. It makes no sense. The man will go to jail. He will receive the statutory counselling and he will attempt to rehabilitate - and I’ll bet he does that pretty well, despite being chained to the Sex Offender Register for many years to come. I suspect Langham is intelligent enough to have learned his lesson very well. But thanks to a sensible legal system, he won’t have his balls cut off, he won’t be lynched by you and your slavering cronies and he may just manage to contribute something worthwhile back to society in time.

By your standards, Pete Townsend (who has made a very successful recovery from his horrendous experience at the hands of Operation Ore) would be rotting in ditch somewhere by now. Thankfully, both the Police and the Courts took a very different view.