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Home / New Zealand

Bob Jones: Today's immorality just a crime of the times

NZ Herald
14 Jul, 2014 05:00 PM4 mins to read

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Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris.

Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris.

Opinion by

Amania has gripped Britain. Ever since the first Jimmy Savile revelation, dozens of elderly former television, radio and political celebrities have been accusedof long past sexual offences against minors.

Periodically, fresh suspects, some now dead, are announced. There have been false accusations resulting in substantial damage payments and also acquittals, nevertheless a growing number of successful prosecutions have eventuated, most recently Rolf Harris.

Some interesting questions arise.

First and most puzzling: why only Britain? When the revelations came to light three decades back of paedophiliac crimes by Catholic clergy, a flood-tide of prosecutions arose worldwide numbering many thousands, mainly involving now elderly men. In fairness these amounted to a small percentage of the priesthood, nevertheless the Church has been irrevocably tainted by this pattern of activity, as has the Boy Scout movement for the same reason.

The Catholic Church and Scout movement are global organisations and no country, including ours, has been immune from priestly and scoutmaster offending. Yet this latest outbreak of prosecutions seems, with only a couple of exceptions, strictly a British phenomenon.

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That seems improbable, so perhaps we will see similar prosecutions arise here and elsewhere of now ageing television and radio stars, plus politicians of yesteryear.

Second: why are entertainers and politicians the culprit group? The answer tendered with Savile and Harris is their stardom, plus their sense of invulnerability. But those factors apply even more to sportsmen in the modern era and, isolated incidents aside, we don't see these complaints with them.

Another interesting issue stems from the outcry protesting at Rolf Harris' sentence of nearly six years as grossly inadequate. The ghastly celebrity spin doctor Max Clifford copped eight years yet, unlike many of Harris' victims, with the exception of a 15-year-old girl, his targets were young women, rather than children.

The reason for these varying sentences relates to the time of offending - Harris' offending was a long time ago, Clifford's more recent - and the respectivejudges were obliged to consider the prevailing values when the offences occurred.

Maggie Barry would have been laughed at had she protested to the police in the early 1980s at Harris groping her. Harris might have been labelled a creep or, at worst, a dirty old man, but criminality - no way, just a bloke having a go in age-old fashion.

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But that was then. Thus, I suspect Clifford is bewildered at his fate, his offending largely amounting to what, to him, was traditional casting couch opportunism.

Many famous film stars, most recently Susan Sarandon, have either confessed to succumbing or been outed for "sleeping" their way to the top. If always frowned on, it was never viewed universally as criminal, but values have changed.

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Judges are fond of talking about offences against public morals, or immoral behaviour and suchlike. They're talking nonsense when they do. An accused may have committed a crime in terms of the law but that doesn't make his conduct immoral.

Morality is a personal judgment and so-called public morality is simply the coincidence of a commonality of values, which are forever changing, but are never right or wrong in any absolute sense.

For example, throughout the 1000-year Greek and Roman civilisations, the offences of Harris, Clifford and company were acceptable behaviour, so too was the priests' and scoutmasters' paedophilia.

I would pay very serious money for the pleasure of burning every child molester to death, indeed, given the numbers, it would become a fulltime career. To me it's the most heinous of crimes but had I been born 2000 years ago, I wouldn't have held that view.

Last week, Sydney judge Gary Neilson made these same observations and incurred the wrath of the mob, but he was right.

One can read libraries on the subject of morality. Don't. A delightfully funny, acclaimed 1997 novella called Gents will tell you all you need to know about ever-shifting morality. Its author, Warwick Collins, who died last year, never received due acknowledgment for the book despite its rave reviews and large sales. Most libraries will have a copy.

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Briefly, it recounts the changing morality regarding homosexual behaviour with three West Indian cleaners in charge of a London Underground men's public toilet which was a hot location for homosexual trysts.

Typically the West Indians were appalled by this, thus they leap to the task with gusto once the council awakened to what was happening and told them to do something about it.

Unfortunately, their amusing harassment campaign was so successful in driving away the homosexuals, the takings fell, leading to the council advising that one of them must go. The subsequent full circle denouement is hilarious. Read it for a true understanding of the elasticity of supposed moral absolutes, often to match one's changing self-interests. As the Times wrote, it's a modern day classic.

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