Last Sunday, the Scotsman posted an article accusing Fortuyn of being a powerful advocate or(sic) paedophilia. Several weblogs like e.g. Privateer and Atrios immediately followed up to this article and expressed their outrage at this vile, vile behaviour. Even going so far as to draw, in Privateer’s case totally unfounded conclusions about the Dutch media.
In reality he argued in a column he wrote for the Dutch opinion magazine Elsevier for just a little bit more common sense in dealing with paedophiles. He did that at a time, in late 1999 when paedofilia was very much in the news as a result of various (unrelated) sexual abuse cases coming to the light in a short period and there was a lot of free floating angst about it.
He started his article by reminiscing about how he himself used to “play doctor” when he was young and how that was dealt with sensible by his mother, without too much fuzz. He then contrasted this with the current denial of any sort of sexuality for children. As an example of the dangers of this, he offers that case in the US where a small boy rubbed himself against his little sister and got treated as a sex offender.
In his view paedophilia is like homosexuality or heterosexuality: a sexual preference you’re born with and cannot change. This means of course that a paedophile’s sexual urges will not disappear. He or she will always be sexually attracked to children. Therefore, there will always be the danger that a paedophile will act on their instincts; even prison may not deter them.
Fortuyn then tells how the US handles this problem of recidivism. In the US when a convicted paedophile is released from prison he has to register with the police where he lives and this information is made known to the public. This, he argues leads to mob justice: in the US (suspected) paedophiles are chased out of their homes, beaten up or worse because they cannot hide and start a new life. He warns that this could also happen in the Netherlands, if the same sort of legislation becomes law.
Pim Fortuyn then recalls the late seventies and early eighties, when paedophilia was no longer a taboo subject, but openly discussed as something that may not always be wrong, depending on circumstance. This was largely due to the efforts of then PvdA senator and paedophile Brongersma, who for years had fought for acceptance of paedophilia as not always being automatically wrong or harmful. In the sexual climate of the seventies, after the liberation of sex by the Pill and the growing acceptance of homosexuality as something normal, the existence of children as sexual beings gradually won terrain and this combined with Brongersma efforts led to paedophiles being treated more sympathetically. Less emphasis on the paedophile as a child raping monster and more on paedophilia as a sort of mental illness, as a condition which in itself was no reason for condemnation, but as something a paedophile must learn to live with within the boundaries of the law. This model was largely abandoned in the late eighties for again the paedophile as monster. Fortuyn laments this and pleads for more open discussion, for rebreaking of the taboo.
This does not make Pim Fortuyn a advocate of child molesters. It makes him somebody concerned with the black and white, emotional way the subject of paedophilia is treated in public discourse. You can disagree with him on this, but that’s not a good reason to subject him to a posthumous smear campaign. Yes, quotes from this article taken out iof context do sound bad, but do not show the whole picture. It is clear to me that Fortuyn is not advocating paedophilia, let alone actual sex with children, as well as a return to the more enlightened viewpoints of the seventies.
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