‘You shood [sic] be dead.’
‘Why u not locked up?’
‘Death penalty would be too good.’
‘Nonse [sic] pedo [sic] c*nt.’
‘F*ck off sicko child rapist.’
No, these are not headlines from the British press. This is a random selection of comments received over the past month. All from people who don’t have the courage or honesty to identify themselves.
In some ways, these messages are an accurate indicator of the quality of public discourse in today’s UK. More significant is what they tell us about people’s capacity and willingness to pause, listen and try to work out if their reflex hatred is justified.
For the record, and for the benefit of our friends in the media, I am not a child rapist. It is, however, possible that some people have formed that impression when they read various press reports, along with unhinged comments placing me in the same category as Jimmy Savile, a serial rapist and defiler of corpses.
Child sex offences are serious crimes. Honestly, I don’t need professional do-gooders or witless columnists to point that out. Those crimes cover a broad spectrum of criminality. All child sex crimes are appalling, and some are worse than others. A person clicking on a file — the content of which may be unclear — is committing an offence if that file contains illegal imagery. That offence is not the same as a case involving someone who has, often over a long period, deliberately searched for, collected and even traded unlawful images with others.
In my case, a three-month forensic examination of my mobiles, computers and storage devices found not a single illegal image. A survey of my internet searches found nothing unlawful. My crime was to click on files sent to me by someone else.
The misleading legal term for the offence — ‘making an indecent image’ — is also problematic. People assume, quite reasonably, that the accused has been involved in taking photographs: in fact, ‘making’ includes downloading, receiving an image in an email attachment, or accessing a website where images can appear. ‘Accessing an image’ might well be a more accurate — and more reliable — definition, less prone to widespread misunderstanding.
Society — heavily influenced by the media — makes no appropriate distinctions. All child sex offenders are evil people who deserve to die. That’s the spirit. Some press reporting is barely-concealed incitement to hatred and violence. This spills over on social media platforms where the projection of hate and ignorance is enabled with zeal.
It is perfectly normal to hate a crime which involves the abuse of children. I have written previously about the sense of abhorrence I feel about these crimes. It is the failure to separate the crime from the perpetrator which fuels mindless hatred — a hatred which impedes society’s ability to understand why some people behave in ways that are destructive and shameful.
The criminal justice system — whatever police or prosecutors say — tends not to make meaningful allowances for people whose crimes were committed when they were mentally impaired. I will explain in a future post — after my conviction becomes spent on 16 September — my reasons for pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity, and the searing experience of dealing with the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
I had never given too much thought to the concept of hatred until my life fell apart with catastrophic results. Exploring the ways in which philosophers, ancient and modern, have grappled with the feeling of hatred has been illuminating.
Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, asserts that hatred (misos) does not merely demand the suffering of the hated object, but wishes that object not to exist at all. Aristotle judges hatred to be more radical than anger because it aims at annihilation. We can detect the truth of this assertion in modern discourse — witness my inbox.
Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, had attempted to supply the psychological framework within which hatred might be identified. For him, hatred represents a corruption of the human drive (thumos) when it is disconnected from reason, being diverted towards destruction rather than justice. Again, my inbox and much press reporting make sense in this context.
The Roman statesman Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, considers hatred to be a more entrenched and dangerous form of anger. He asserts that hatred, untreated, becomes a disease of judgment. The treatment he proposes is defined as the ‘discipline of right reason’. If that discipline was uncommon in Seneca’s day, imagine his take on twenty-first century life.
Even more illuminating for me has been reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German thinker. He categorises hatred as a readiness to injure others when self-interest, consciously or subconsciously, dictates it. He suggests that hatred is revelatory, identifying an underlying egoism in the personality of the hater. This reading makes sense when we see the overt self-righteousness and moralist posturing of some commentators.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, draws on the works of both Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche to formulate his own theory of hatred. Of all the modern thinkers, Jung is the one to whom I am constantly drawn. For Jung, hatred directed externally is often the projection of the ‘shadow’, the portion of the personality which is denied or unacknowledged or even disowned. Jung declares, crucially, that what we hate most intensely in another person is often what we cannot bear to acknowledge in ourselves. Hatred, then, is based on a misjudgment — not about the object of our hate, but about ourselves.
That’s enough philosophy for a sunny Sunday.
What interests me is why people can develop and express hate for people they have never met, know little about, and have no awareness of the circumstances of their lives. What is it that motivates them to post hate-filled content online? What accounts for their lack of curiosity, their refusal to explore context, and their rush to pronounce judgment?
And why, if they are so confident in their judgment, do they hide behind the handy wall of anonymity?
Jung’s analysis is not difficult to imagine. All that hatred: might they have something to hide?