Children no safer for 'Sarah's law'

A.n. Wilson12 April 2012

Click here for previous columns by A N Wilson

Yesteday's News of the World bore a dedication: " For Sarah". Among its many lurid pages devoted to the murder of Sarah Payne was one which carried the headline: Q: "Would you want to be told if a predatory paedophile lived next door to you?" A: "If you say Yes, then you back Sarah's law. If you say No, then you are a LIAR."

Unfortunately, there are many things logically wrong with this apparently elementary syllogism. As the Evening Standard was the first to reveal last week, the police do not support Sarah's law on the simple grounds that it would not work. If those who had offended the law by paedophile activity were all "named and shamed", and if their addresses were published, the most dangerous and ingenious of them would go underground.

Telling me their names and addresses would not make the lives of my children or grandchildren safer: quite the opposite.

Nor, of course, could the existence of something called Sarah's law distinguish between the tiny numbers of potential murderers from those who are a menace to themselves and society, but not a threat to life. Nor could degrees of menace be distinguished: for example, between the piano teacher who can't stop fondling a child's legs to someone who is capable of raping a two-year-old. Those of us who want to protect our children can, therefore, truthfully answer the News of the World that we do not insist on knowing the addresses of all sexual offenders.

There was a brave and moving interview on Radio Four's Broadcasting House programme yesterday morning with a man who is an offender against children. He said that his actions had absolutely no justification, and he longs to be healed and cured of his compulsion. He is undergoing treatment and believes it is working.

If the News of the World were in control, such unfortunate, flawed individuals, struggling back to a normal life, would undoubtedly be isolated, lonely and, because he was unsupported, the victim of his appalling desires - far more likely to reoffend.

The final objection to the News of the World campaign is that it demeans society itself. It inflames all that is vindictive, destructive and stupid in the mob mentality. Why don't they simply suggest the public hanging of all scoutmasters, curates and swimming-pool attendants?

That would be more humane than to flatter the millions of readers who supposedly support their campaign into mistaking a witch-hunt for a serious legislative proposal.

Don't shy away from a hat

One of the most tragic things to have happened in my lifetime is the decline of the hat. Look at a photograph of London during my boyhood in the 1950s - every single person is wearing a hat.

If you were a hatter or a milliner, you must have supposed that you were in business for life. Of course, hats were then affordable. When the Western world made the crazy (and

historically unprecedented) decision to stop wearing anything on its head, then those who made hats had to charge the earth in order to avoid starvation.

The other day, I was talking to a shoemaker, whose father and grandfather had run the same business for generations. Keeping his eyes down on the pavement one morning as he walked to open up the shop, he saw that almost everyone was wearing trainers.

In his late fifties, he has decided to take early retirement, convinced that the leather shoe is fast going the way of the hat. In another generation, only billionaire film stars will be able to afford shoes.

Only one way to tackle terror

One wonders what this language was. English? Perhaps it was cockney rhyming slang (Pint o' Flowers: Twin Towers; Walthamstow and Leyton: Great Satan; Hatton Garden: Bin Laden).

There must have been lunatics planning to blow up the City of London since the time of the first Fenian outrages of the mid-Victorian period. One hopes and imagines that our security forces and police are perpetually vigilant. The trouble is that the madder and more desperate the terrorist, the harder it is to stop them, as some of the recent Irish bombs have shown, and every suicide bomb in Jerusalem.

Undercover work must be the only way to do it - infiltrating the terrorist cell; disarming them when possible; keeping up constant vigilance. That is how terrorism is held in check, not by wars on civilians who may or may not sympathise with the fanatics.

Those of us who questioned the wisdom or morality of bombing Afghanistan are not convinced that London is a safer place as a result of the recent victories by the enemies of the Taliban.

If anything, we are slightly more vulnerable. The world has an endless supply of nutters. They aren't to be overthrown by conventional warfare.

Faith, hope and clarity

It seems odd that with so many bishops, cardinals, rabbis and mullahs in our land, Mr Blair wanted a faith tsar as well - and it also seems uncharacteristically modest that he did not appoint himself to the role. No doubt, as with most of his ministerial appointments, it will be only a matter of time before Blair takes over the "faith initiative".

One of Mr Battle's first tasks was to inform the PM that Sikhs wear turbans and beards. It must have needed real theological expertise to have worked that one out. How did we manage in those bleak days before there was a faith tsar?

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