Tower and Town, May 2018 (view the full edition)Sexual AwakeningAt last we can declare the Swinging Sixties to be over - well almost. For this, I suppose, the main vote of thanks goes to Harvey Weinstein, who has succeeded in reminding us that all revolutions have their casualties. Then there was Oxfam and other aid charities and now the private schools and football and even Parliament. There seemed to be an historic common pattern for institutions dealing with sexual incidents. The perpetrator of the offence was too valuable to lose and was profuse in his apologies, swearing never to reoffend. Of course, if the issue became public, that would result in bad publicity, so the behaviour was quietly overlooked. The victim tended to maintain silence, often for precisely the reason that the predator was able to operate; that the complainant would not be believed and would be likely to be discriminated against as a result of the complaint. All this has changed because following Weinstein: an awakening has occurred. People have been coming forward with their painful memories - and some of them are memories from decades ago, so the pain must have endured. A moral consensus has begun to emerge - that it is wrong that people should use power and influence to sexually subjugate others. Not all have caught the tenor of the times. To the horror of many feminists, the once-admirable organisation, Amnesty International, which was founded to campaign for the release of prisoners of conscience, is now campaigning for the decriminalisation of prostitution. If ever there was an area of life that involved sexual exploitation and coercion, this it. The recent spate of prosecutions for the grooming of young girls shows that protection of the vulnerable is desperately needed. In fact, prostitution is not illegal in the UK, but there are a number of offences associated with it. These would include pimping, trafficking, living off immoral earnings and underage sex. That anyone should desire to abolish laws which, at least in theory, seek to curtail the exploitation of human beings for personal gain is nothing less than amazing. Nichola Fogg |