I have just learnt about Vanessa George; who worked in a nursery and has apparently sexually abused children in ways worse than various judges have ever heard and too badly for the BBC to possibly give any details even on the 10 o’clock news.
I was going to say: of course, I am not glad, in any way, that paedophilic child abuse, particularly such apparently terrible abuse, has occurred; but, given that child abuse has occurred, I’m – I don’t know that there’s an appropriate word – but the fact that it was a woman (in fact two women and one man) is, in an indirect way, almost a good thing, because it proves that paedophilia is not exclusively male, and that the cultural fear of the lone man alone with children versus the implicit trust of the lone woman, is an unjust and sexist view.
(The problem being that this means no one will trust anyone with their children; but society was heading in that direction anyway. If we can’t just accept that most people are trustworthy, whatever the news says, at the very least, we should mistrust equally.)
And I was about to comment that nobody on the news had mentioned the gender issue; which meant they were going to pretend it wasn’t something that everyone was highly conscious of because they’d realised it would look horribly sexist. When suddenly they decided to do an interview in which there was only one question. And that question was (to paraphrase) “Isn’t it particularly disgusting considering it’s a woman, and doesn’t it make the crime more depraved than ever?”
No.
It makes it equally as depraved as if it was committed by a man. It just makes it more of a shock, because we don’t hear about female paedophiles.
I don’t know why paedophilia happens, but strikes me it happens to people who are a bit fucked up. And women can be just as fucked up as men. And women can be just as guilty of sexual depravation as men. Sure.
The problem is the attitude that women aren’t paedophiles fucks everyone over. Because it means men are unfairly discriminated against when there’s no evidence that they’re going to turn into child sex offenders. Until women turn out to be just as bad, when they’re apparently judged to be even worse than men.
I hate paedophilia. But I also hate sexism.
