In this post, I'm going to talk about someone I know. Someone who has done something that society considers very wrong. and has felt (and still feels) the consequences of what he has done. And yet....is what he did actually as bad as other things that people do to each other, that are not crimes but that are immensely damaging to innocent people and destructive to society as a whole?
It may shock you to discover that I count among my friends someone who has been convicted of a sex offence against a child. I'm not going to go into details of exactly what he did: suffice it to say that it was a minor offence against an adolescent boy. But my friend was his teacher.....not his school teacher, but a private music teacher. Lessons were held at my friend's house on a one-to-one basis. It is there that the offence took place - though it was not reported for another 4 years.
I teach singing privately myself - indeed I was my friend's teacher for a long time, and I also briefly taught the child concerned. So I know both of them. Private music teachers like me are vulnerable to accusations of abuse: we work one-to-one with students in small rooms, usually in the absence of parents or responsible adults. Distressed teenagers can make up stories to conceal other problems: angry teenagers can spread harmful lies by way of revenge for perceived unjust criticisms. And singing teachers are particularly vulnerable because of the nature of our job: with singing the entire body is the instrument and vocal support comes primarily from deep core muscles. It has been my experience that teenage boys, in particular, have absolutely no idea where those are or what they do, and on a couple of occasions I have physically had to show them - which involves fairly intimate touch. I am under no illusions about the risks of doing this, so I ALWAYS make sure someone else is present if I have to resort to physical contact to make a teaching point. It distresses me to say this, but even hugs are not acceptable in a one-to-one teacher-student relationship unless other adults are present.
But my friend was not a singing teacher. There should have been no physical contact between him and his student. And once he realised he found boys of that age attractive, he should have stopped teaching them. The same is true of ANY teacher who finds a student sexually attractive, regardless of their age or the situation. Even if it is perfectly legal (which obviously in my friend's case it was not), you are just not an effective teacher for someone to whom you are sexually attracted or who is making it clear regards you in that way. There are too many confusing emotions, too many mixed messages.... I speak from experience. I once referred an adult student of mine to another singing teacher because there was a growing sexual attraction between us which was making lessons very complicated. I couldn't teach properly, and he couldn't learn. The teacher I referred him to was my own singing teacher, who was completely bemused by the fact that I had referred to him someone with an exceptional voice and musical talent. He said to me, "I don't understand why you are doing this. That must be the best voice you teach!". I invented some story about communication difficulties and just not getting on.... I didn't tell him the truth for quite some time. Maybe I should have done, though: when I finally told him, he didn't turn a hair, just commented that he had always wondered what was really going on. I think I must be a bad liar.
My friend's conviction resulted in a suspended sentence (see, I told you it was a minor offence) and he is now on the sex offenders' register. And it is this last that is the real punishment. The suspended sentence is mild by comparison. You see, he cannot work in any capacity that means he might even accidentally come into contact with children. That rules out just about everything he has ever done in his life. Effectively, he has had to start again from scratch, retraining for new jobs completely unrelated to anything that went before and for which he has no experience, and with the stigma of a sex offence on his CV. He was not sent to prison, but his life was destroyed. And there was very little support. He actually would have had more counselling support and - bizarrely - more support from the Christian church of which he is a member had he committed a worse offence and been sent down. In fact the Christian church chose to place tougher restrictions on his movements and associations than the court did: he was not allowed to attend worship in his church, in fact he was not even allowed to ENTER a church, unless he was attended by someone who could vouch for his conduct. To enable him to worship at all, we created a group of people for him to call upon as chaperones, who were approved by the diocese as people who could vouch for him. Had this not been done, he would effectively have been rejected by the church, despite his considerable remorse and valiant efforts to change his ways, including attending voluntary psychotherapy even before his conviction. How is this consistent with the Christian message of repentance, reform of life and restoration of relationships with God and man? In its zeal to protect the innocent, the church in this case was in serious danger of creating a lost soul.
I do not in any way defend what my friend did. But I can't help feeling that the punishment that destroyed his life was more severe than the crime.....I do not know what happened to the child, though I am sure he too has paid a personal price for this. Two ruined lives.....
And yet it could have been much, much worse. Every day people do things that are much worse but are not crimes. Indeed I have done something much worse, for a self-proclaimed Christian. I broke no civil law, but I broke one of the Ten Commandments. Adultery is not a crime in the UK, but the damage to people's lives far exceeds anything that my friend did. My husband and I lived separate lives for months before we separated, with me sneaking out at night to meet my lover: although my children were small at the time, they knew something was very wrong, and it disturbed them both - my son in particular, whose school work and behaviour deteriorated considerably at this time. I finally left three days before my son's seventh birthday: even now, that memory is what he associates with his birthday. My affair, leading as it did to the breakup of two marriages, destroyed the homes of three children (two of mine and one of his): they became migrants shuffling between their mother's house and their father's house. And the emotional warfare and recriminations as divorce terms were sorted out and assets divided bounced back to them. Financially, too, they are much poorer than they would have been had our families stayed together: where there were two households there are now three, and that is a considerable cost. My children were as badly damaged by my behaviour as the child abused by my friend - but there is no redress for them in the criminal courts. Even though it happened a long time ago, I still live with this on my conscience. I'm telling my story now in the hope that others will avoid the same mistake.
Adultery is a socially harmful behaviour. It is every bit as bad as paedophilia - in fact arguably it causes even more damage. It is a fundamental betrayal of trust, and trust is the bedrock of our society. Yet we justify unfaithfulness on the grounds of "love": we glorify sexual attraction, using "it's only natural" to justify bad behaviour: we downplay the importance of security and stability in children's lives and assign greater importance to self-fulfilment and self-gratification. All of this carries no criminal penalty, and increasingly not much of a social stigma either. Yet when a paedophile does exactly the same thing, we throw the book at them. These are double standards: this is our questionable morality.
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