HERE ARE the news headlines. A 60-year old man has been released from prison, after serving three and a half years for having sex with some teenage boys between 20 and 30 years ago. Meanwhile in the United States, the trial continues of a 46-year-old man accused of putting his hand inside a teenager’s underpants. Coming up: more sleazy historical tales about Jonathan King, and every last tawdry detail from the Michael Jackson trial. Plus all the sport — and if there is time, a bit about an earthquake and a general election . . .

If there is one thing that our culture appears more obsessed with than football and celebrity, it is paedophilia. So there is no bigger story than celebrity child abuse. All of the gross salivating over the King and Jackson cases is a symptom of a deeper malaise. There are a few perverts with an unhealthy interest in our children. But many more normal people seem to have a morbid fascination with child abuse these days.

Why? There is nothing to suggest that paedophilia has become more commonplace. Instead, it is as if the spectre of the paedophile has been turned into a focus for all of our fears and anxieties.

Paedophile-hunting has also become a rare opportunity to claim a moral consensus. Perhaps we cannot agree about what is right or wrong on anything from abortion to drugs, but we can all accept that kiddie-fiddlers are evil. Celebrities can now get away with just about anything, except being accused of child abuse.

Only those on the repulsive King’s payroll could seriously suggest that he is an innocent man. Yet his case, and the reaction to it, raise some questions about where things are heading. King was sentenced to seven years in jail, after a large police operation over incidents alleged to have happened up to 30 years earlier — incidents which nobody had complained about or tried to cover up at the time. Now there are cries of outrage that he should have been released at all; at least one newspaper wants him locked up for life. Taking their lead from the Government’s catch-all sex offenders register, it seems that many would now put King’s offence of seducing star-struck teenagers on a par with the violent rape of a little girl in her own bed, reported in Essex last week. And the Jackson trial has repeatedly been compared to that of O. J. Simpson — as if allegedly fondling a teenager really was the same thing as allegedly hacking two people to death.

It is hard to see who benefits from this increasingly shrill paedophile panic. Like other journalists, I received prison letters from Jonathan King. I binned them. That is also what we should do with the leaflets and pamphlets we keep getting from child protection charities, poisoning the human well with warnings that our children should beware of grown-ups they trust, and that we should keep a suspicious eye out for any adults being friendly to our kids. It’s sick, and Something Should Be Done About It.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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