Benefit of the Doubt

Having recently seen and appreciated "Doubt", I could not help reflecting on how suspect much of the pedophile witch hunt in Britain has proved. Years ago an old joke ran: "In England you are innocent until proven guilty. In France you are guilty until proven innocent. In America you are innocent until the papers come out the next morning. In Russia you are guilty until proven guilty and then you are guilty all over again."

Some recent British cases combine these American and Soviet styles of jurisprudence. The most monstrous single case concerned two children's nurses in Newcastle, in the far north-east of England, who had their lives utterly ruined by baseless accusations of child abuse. They were forced to flee their homes, because any suspected pedophile can expect a lynch mob on his/her doorstep. And "suspected" means "proven beyond all possible doubt" as far as our moronic mobs are concerned. A resulting expensive enquiry, manned by "experts" in social work and childcare, was commissioned by Newcastle City Council. It demonstrated conclusively that the spirit of Lewis Carroll is alive and well in the land.

Among numerous bizarre matters, it considered an accusation that one of the nurses had been taking pornographic pictures of the little children in her care and selling them on the pedophile websites which abound on the internet. Why on earth would a reputable nurse be tempted into such iniquity? The chairman of the enquiry ( a professor of social work at one of our joke universities) surmised that she was short of money. "But a police investigation found no evidence that she was short of money." Well, explained the chairman, that's because she was selling child pornography......Lady, face it, you're definitely in a lose-lose-lose situation here.

It was not just the unfortunate nurses who were losers. When the court case which demonstrated their innocence finally came to an end, there were legal and other bills of 8 million pounds ($12 million) to be picked up by the luckless local taxpayers of Newcastle. But of course some people will never be convinced of their innocence and the smell will follow them around forever.

Once our indescribably evil tabloids get on the case, any hope of mercy or balanced judgment flies out the window. In 2000, the worst of them "The News of the World" (better known as the "News of the Screws") ran a witch hunt against pedophiles in the wake of the murder of 7 year old Sarah Payne. "Name and Shame" was the title of their campaign to name every convicted pedophile in Britain. The whole insane business was abandoned after a couple of weeks when it was obvious that it was causing serious public disorder in the underclass areas, most notoriously on the Paulsgrove estate on the north side of Portsmouth, our major naval base city. The local mob terrorized twenty suspected pedophiles out of their homes and it was near-miraculous that no one was killed. Even worse, we have had a never-ending campaign, headed by the Screws, since then to introduce "Sarah's Law", a British version of Megan's Law. The fact that Sarah's bereaved mother has been the public face of the campaign makes it no less deluded and dangerous.

The ever excellent Theodore Dalrymple suggested forcefully that much of the anti-pedophile rage in such underclass areas could be convincingly explained by guilty consciences. The appalling neglect of children on such estates provides wonderful opportunities for sexual predators - especially among women who invite a paramour into a home with young children.

A recent case in Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands off the west coast of Normandy, was equally baseless. For months newspapers ran sensational stories about fragments of bones being discovered in an abandoned children's home on the island. The smell of implicit pedophilia was guaranteed to attract every journalist in a 500 mile radius. But sadly it turned out to be another case of a wonderful story killed by ugly facts. The evidence had as much substance as the ghosts in the Nicole Kidman film "The Others", also set in Jersey. When it turned out that the bone fragments were either hundreds of years old or, er, bits of wood, an awful lot of senior policemen and journalists found themselves with egg on their faces. See the excellent www.richardwebster.net site for an enthralling set of documents on this and numerous other witch hunts in Britain and other countries.

With this level of intelligence displayed by the great and the good, perhaps we should not blame the cretinous tabloid-reading mob too much. "Doubt" displayed such a contrasting intelligence and ambiguity in its approach. I think that Father Flynn was plainly guilty, but that is based partly based on the past 40 years of 20/20 hindsight and accumulated evidence as to the ways in which corrupt and depraved priests have behaved around children. For example, dosing the victims with alcohol and/or drugs is one well-practised technique of the predator. The fact that Father Flynn was such a good and popular communicator with the parish children immediately raised suspicions in my mind. In so many cases, after the police and media have descended on a parish, the stunned parishioners have protested "Father Smith was such a great priest, so good with the children....". Having a genuine wholesome interest in children's welfare and a more sinister intent may well overlap in complex ways and in far more cases than we like to admit.

From the perspective of 1964, where "Doubt" is set, the issues would have been far more confused than they seem to a 2009 audience. The film is one of the extreme rarities in mainstream cinema which is willing to entertain uncertainty from beginning to end and make everyone's motives mixed and suspect. How much easier it would be if the dodgy priests all looked like extra-Satanic versions of Jack Nicholson and the accusing nuns looked like Doris Day...........