Ed West writes:
The paedo-mania was an exercise in displacement by the British working-class, who had recently adopted wholesale fatherlessness and a consumer youth culture that glorified in child sexualisation. Mysterious nonces in dirty macs became suitable bogey figures, when sexual abuse of children was far, far more likely to happen in broken homes at the hands of a mother’s boyfriend.
At its worst this atmosphere makes people reluctant to discipline strangers’ children and puts men off becoming primary school teachers, but on an everyday level it burns out those invisible bonds that make a society.
***
Exactly: the same working class women who tutt-tuff the loudest and get the most obsessed over the latest child abduction are the same ones who rationalize picking a strange new man over their own children, because “they deserve happiness, too” and so forth.
I know: my mother did it. Commence tisking!
