If you're an octogenarian Nazi war crimes suspect or Chilean dictator accused of atrocities, you can escape trial and jail in Britain by arguing you are too old and it was all a long time ago. But not if you are an 80-year-old Roman Catholic monk accused of touching some schoolboys more than 30 years ago.

William Manahan, former Abbot of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, has been jailed for 15 months after pleading guilty to eight charges of sexually assaulting boys at the Abbey prep school in the 1970s. He was said to have touched boys with “angelic faces” when they sat on his lap at the front of Latin class, and while he watched television with them or gave them piggy-backs. He also gave them sweets.

As a godless Marxist and a caring parent I hold no brief for the Catholic Church or any pervy priests. But the way this old man has been made an example of, imprisoned and branded “the Beast of Buckfast” decades later, for offences near the lowest point of the scale, suggests somebody is guilty of an unhealthy obsession with child abuse.

Monahan was caught by the new policing practice of trawling for victims of abuse. After an allegation of serious sexual abuse against another monk at the school — since jailed for ten years — the authorities sent out 700 questionnaires cold-calling former pupils about their experiences. Monahan's name was mentioned, and he ended up behind bars.

If the police have so much time on their hands, perhaps they will now ask all school pupils of the Seventies if any teacher ever touched them? The results could also give any underemployed judges and jailers something to do.

But who benefits from dredging up long-forgotten episodes for public display and titillation? The effect on the boys involved — now men in their forties — is questionable. The wider impact on society seems worse. The judge, John Neligan, said that he jailed Monahan because “the message must go out” to “those in a position of trust in schools” today that they face prison if they “prey sexually on the children in their care”. Leaving aside the issue of whether the courts should be used, showtrial style, to send “the message” to others, when that message raises the spectre of sexual predators in our schools it can only do harm.

The notion that our children may be menaced by groping teachers today is as far removed from reality as Buckfast Abbey. The real problem is that everybody is already so scared of allegations of abuse that almost no teacher, however well meaning, would dare to sit a child on his or her knee, let alone give them a piggy back. Such fear and mistrust of adults pose a far bigger risk to growing up in a civilised society.

Or do we want to lock 'em all up and throw away the key? The children, that is.

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