Stuart Wolfendale

There are an awful lot of very valid and useful arguments being brought into play against the sexual offenders register being proposed by the Hong Kong Law Commission. They are meant to appeal to that quite large audience who are in a sexual minority of one sort or another or dallied for a moment in the past on the wrong side of a demarcation line or got plain kinky after a bottle of vino tinto on a Friday night.

The hope is that enough people will realize that because they once had a shag when they were fifteen or peed in public or kissed another man in the street at New Year or did a silly thing with their little brother’s  winky when they were eight or simply moved into a flat that was occupied by a child molester who had slipped away, they could find themselves on this sexual offenders register.

Once a crowd of now respectable people understand that they will no longer be employable , will be sneered at and abused in public, will have their windows broken and shit left on their door nobs, they will, it is hoped, rise up against the register.

It is a jolly good tactic and I wish it well. If the register goes ahead with the Government’s usual handling standards on socio-sexual issues and IT record keeping, we will all be on the list eventually.

Regrettably, showing up unfairness and absurdity does not go to the dark, sad heart of this matter. The register, a prosaic instrument of fear , does.

In the Deep South, they used to lynch black people but they don’t any more. Or not that we’ve heard of, anyway. In later medieval Europe they burned women as witches but they don’t do that any more, either. Not even in Serbia.  Until very recently, they used to beat the living daylights out of homosexuals and they may well still do in Zverdlovsk and Zimbabwe but that’s going out quickly too.

In civil, libertarian societies mostly well lit by reason and enlightenment, there remains one precious persecution that is pursued in the town hall and the street outside with fire in the chest and a catch in the throat. Paedophiles and rapists may be harried and hurt to the ends of the earth and the ends of their lives. Sexual offenders registers are a handy device for the state, casually, carelessy, looking over its shoulder, to assist the scared and the venegeful, to do just that.

Official surveys on recidivism amongst released sexual offenders have the greatest difficulty coming up with definitions let alone results. Nobody has proved that letting everyone for miles around know exactly where a convicted paedophile lives after he has served his time stops him doing it again.

What this offenders address list does do is to sew the person into a pocket of fear. They are frightened to go out. They are frightened to stay in. The cat-calls and the bricks get through the walls. So do the stares and the thoughts. The paedophile is driven mentally and physically to the perimeter of society. I am told that without work, friends, safety or support, the mild offenders who never contemplates a repeat, descend into deep sorrow. The more volatile, sensing a certain nihilism in all this, go and do it again.

What do you, a middle aged man with no kids, know about how a parent worries over their kid being molested by a pervert. Sound a bit weird yourself, come to think of it.

I can hear that objection quite clearly and in some small towns in England I can imagine the odd brick and turd being laid on my place if I wrote a piece in the press against a sex register.

That does not alter a greater truth, which arches over the facts about the unfairness of a list, the doubts over its use as a deterrent or the dangers it poses to those on it from vigilantes. That truth is that the register in itself is an offence.

What the register does is to judge and punish the offender perpetually, even unto death. Any one who looks at it is invited to join in.

If there is any right to judgment on that scale, it is held elsewhere and it will happen out of our sight and time. To attempt to pre-empt that for our own satisfaction is an abuse of human responsibility to the point of sin. The register is wrong in principle as profoundly as you can dig.

But its for society’s protection, I hear you say and it’s a moment like that when I tempted to enjoy Mrs Thatcher’s cold observation that there is no such thing as society. The register is not really for our protection. It is for our satisfaction and a chilli ingredient of satisfaction is retribution. The townspeople, led by the mayor, will charge through the night streets with torches aloft and an odd man will be found hanging from the bough of a tree at dawn

When I was a little boy, we lived next door to a convicted paedophile, a disgraced Methodist primary school headmaster. I was not allowed to know this but my parents did and still let me visit him occasionally. It would explain Mr. H’s almost tearful pleasure in talking to me. Nobody ever called there. He must have been utterly fallen. I can’t imagine what prison time must have been like for him. His death went unnoticed and his wife was taken into an old folk’s home and went mad.

Mr. H did not need the world to know he lived at number 9 Cranfield St. It had all been quite enough, already

Posted in All, Hong Kong Politics, law and order