The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) has been in the news a lot recently with particular emphasis on the politicians and higher establishment figures drawn into it. For instance, HERE and HERE. Another article in Spiked looks at the issue from a different perspective and examines the connection between PIE and children`s rights during the 1970s.
The nineteenth-century child-savers movement was driven by a powerful sense of humanitarianism, justice and altruism. It sought to protect children from the many inequities confronting them. Unfortunately, significant parts of this movement, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), sometimes expanded their remit from protecting children to claiming moral authority over childhood itself. As a result, child-saving entrepreneurs often started to perceive their main aim in terms of saving children from their parents. And this has been the main intellectual and political legacy of the child-saving movement: it popularised the assumption that the interests of parents and children are either potentially or actually contradictory.
The assumption that what is in the interest of the child is different to the interests of the parent creates a conflict that can only be mediated by those possessing the moral and expert authority to pronounce on the dispute; namely, the child-saver... the 1970s was also the decade when the idea of children’s rights was articulated and gained cultural influence.
Kelly is right to point out the ease with which PIE could slot into the confused sexual-liberationist agenda of the 1970s. But PIE was not simply the radical wing of the GLF. PIE also expressed newly invented ideas about the need to liberate children. Like other supporters of this misguided ideal, the question of whom children needed liberating from was rarely made explicit. Not that it had to be made explicit, since the only agency that children could be liberated from was that of their parents and family.
No doubt PIE was entirely opportunistic when choosing which arguments it would use to justify its predatory obsession with children. But that doesn’t disguise the fact that the arguments it voiced about children’s liberation were consistent with the emerging narrative of children’s rights...These are not rights demanded by children; they are rights invented by adults who claim to best understand the real needs of children...‘Regrettably, a leading characteristic of the children’s rights movement is the propensity to separate children’s interest from their parents’’, wrote Martin Guggenheim in his compelling study, What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights. Children’s rights do not empower children; rather, they disempower parents. They provide an ideological rationale for perceiving parent-child relations as fundamentally contradictory.
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