84 year old child’s entertainer and superstar Rolf Harris was sentenced to five years in jail for “indecently assaulting young women and girls” – a life sentence more or less. In the wake of the Jimmy Saville devastation, Harris getting caught was part of the fall out. You can read about it here, but here is the essence of what happened:
“The statement from Nicholls’ former friend, now a woman in her 50s, explained that Harris’s assaults, from the age of 13 until her late 20s, devastated her life. The woman said she was left feeling “dirty, grubby and disgusting”. She became an alcoholic who suffered panic attacks and could not hold down a job or a loving relationship. “I have never had a meaningful relationship whilst sober. I have also never been able to hold down a job,” her statement said. “Rolf Harris had a hold over me that made me a quivering wreck. He made me feel like a sexual object.”
I’ve discussed child abuse with George Clinton and he made one certain point: if you feel that way, what do you do about it? The answer was provided years later: you do nothing about it, you don’t act upon it. In the same way there can be no freedom of speech except for for the freedom to dissent, there can be no moral good without the temptation to do bad. To put it another way, the person who finds children sexually attractive and never gives into it is morally superior to the person who doesn’t find children attractive. the very heart of good is evil, is temptation, without temptation there is no good action, good only functions as a contradiction.
To speak to child molestation: to claim it is an aberration is sophistication, it happens all the time because children are vulnerable and people are unscrupulous. To claim children are in a state of grace denies the reality of the world around them. And to claim most people don’t feel attracted to children may well be true but that doesn’t change that millions upon millions of people are attracted to children.
The truth is, Harris never had a moral responsibility not to find a 13 year old girl sexually attractive, his responsibility was to not act upon his attraction. Saville died and got away from it, Harris didn’t and didn’t.
