this is a post about paedophilia.
some days around here, it's squee about how The Dead Zone is supergay; other days, it's long (very very long, idek) post about the social construction of paedophilia as an identity category. Today is the latter kind of day.
You should assume that this post, as well as any posts that it links to, come with a trigger warning for issues of rape and child molestation.
so, all this talk about Roman Polanski have gotten me thinking about paedophilia, which is a subject on which my opinions are perhaps a little different than you might expect them to be. I want to say up front that I believe in lawful punishment of anyone who molests a child, as I believe in the lawful punishment of all other kinds of rapists. But I also think that the manner in which paedophilia is constructed and presented in North American culture is highly problematic, and tends to create more terror than it alleviates. I don't believe in the various national registries of sex offenders; I don't believe in laws that force people convicted of sex crimes to live X yards from schools or playgrounds or churches (and thus, in many cases, far away from family, friends, counselors, support networks, parole officers, grocery stores, and life); I don't believe in the kind of social punishment of such offenders that amounts to shunning or stoning. I do believe that the criminal justice system is weighted to forgive (male) sex offenders and disbelieve, blame, and castigate (female) victims, and that this is a problem that desperately needs solving, but.
So, that's where I stand.
I've been reading all these articles about Roman Polanski, and have been generally disgusted with the manner in which his apologists have claimed that he's not a rapist, or a paedophile, because he's all these other things - a nice, charming guy, a father, a brilliant filmmaker, and on and on. If you want to read some excellent articles talking about Polanski's case and decrying these apologists, I recommend this article by Amanda Hess, this article by Jeff Fecke, and this article by Kate Harding. But occasionally in my reading I saw the arguments for and against Polanski's arrest go like this:
against: "Polanski isn't a child rapist! He's an X!" (where X = brilliant filmmaker, father, husband, nice guy)
for: "Polanski IS a child rapist! He admitted to raping a child!"
It is obvious to me, in reading these articles, that to the people who are defending Roman Polanski, the phrase "child molester" means something other than "a person who has molested a child" - that's the crux of the problem, and that's what I want to talk about here.
The problem here is that - as Kate Harding says - Roman Polanski drugged and raped a child, admitted to it, and fled justice. Apologists are trying to prove that Roman Polanski didn't drug and rape a child (she was already a 13-year-old slut; her mother thrust her on Polanski; she consented; she was nearly the age of consent; she has since said that she doesn't want him prosecuted, etc.) because apologists are proceeding from the presumption that Roman Polanski isn't a child rapist.
Then I read a Shakesville article about another unconnected but related subject, namely this article about the Catholic leadership's attempt to denounce/mitigate/cover over its history of child abuse. And I totally agree with the substance of the article - the Church tends to create situations in which abuses of power and child molestation become possible or even common, and the leadership refuses to deal with that in any substantive way - but I was bothered by one particular sentence, and disagreed with the terms in which it presented paedophilia. The sentence was:
"The Catholic Church has been trying to blame its sex abuse problems on gay men since day one, in order to avoid its own responsibility for ordaining and protecting pedophiles"
And I thought - is the Catholic church to blame for ordaining paedophiles? For protecting child molesters or rapists, for creating situations in which such abuse can flourish, certainly, but - for ordaining them? The problem here is a problem of acts vs. identities: the Shakesville author is here assuming, as many people on both sides of the Polanski debate have been assuming, that paedophilia is an identity, rather than an act or a series of acts; that one IS a paedophile, even if one has never raped or sexually touched a child; that once someone HAS raped or sexually molested a child, they will be a paedophile for life.
Now, the idea of "acts vs identities" is something we talk about a lot in queer theory and gender theory, and I'm going to put a little summary of this concept here, in a blockquote so that you can skip it if you're familiar with the idea.
acts vs identities:
so, the law under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted was a sodomy law, not unlike the laws that still exist in some places in the US. The (heterosexist, damaging, malicious) logic that allows you to prosecute someone for sodomy is a logic that assumes that homosexuality is an act, rather than an identity; that, like stealing a sheep or killing a friend, it's something that anyone is theoretically capable of, and something that everyone is expected to resist as via moral fortitude. It doesn't really make sense to prosecute someone for BEING something - for having an identity called "homosexual" that is assumed to be consistent over time - but it does make sense to prosecute someone for DOING something - for doing an act called sodomy. In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of psychology, the idea of sodomy as an act began to give way to the idea of homosexuality as an identity - that's when the word "homosexuality" was invented, in fact, and the word "heterosexuality" a few years later.
And make no mistake: homosexuality was conceived as an identity category in order to "other" the people who could be labelled as homosexuals, in the same way that other categories of mental illness (neurasthenics, hysterics) were being created to "other" people who were psychologically non-normative. This all happened in the same psychological treatises: homosexuality was just one of a variety of mental illnesses for which one could be diagnosed, and - like hysterics and neurasthenics and so forth - was assumed to be an identity, something you WERE by temperament. Paradoxically, it was assumed by some to be curable even though it was also assumed to be inherent or inherited - but that's getting off the topic.
So, and this is all totally from Foucault by the way, institutions of power (the medical profession, the psychologists, the guardians of moral right) create categories of people who are given identities as "sick" - partially in order to draw sharper definitions between these "sick" people and "normal" people. For if homosexuality is an illness or disease that's inherited (because your dad was an alcoholic and your mom was a hysteric, you might be a homosexual), then it's something from which society at large can believe itself to be safe; a poor man might commit theft, but a non-homosexual cannot commit homosexuality: you have to BE homosexual in order to fall prey to that. This is how othering works: you create a group of people, drawing distinctions between people where none exist, in order to reify (make real) the distinctions that you, the people in power, wish were there in the first place. You create a group called "homosexuals" in order to make real your identity as "heterosexuals" - the moral right. And, as Foucault says, this is why the word "heterosexual" is created AFTER the world "homosexual" - first you create the thing against which you want to define yourself, then you create yourself.
Interestingly, at the same time that homosexuality begins to become an identity rather than a criminal act, other criminal acts begin to be seen as identities as well - "the criminal" as an identity category gains a lot of weight in from the early 19thC onwards, and this is all bound up in class distinctions as well - people who are from threatening classes can be seen as somehow "inherently" amoral and therefore "inherently" criminal.
This is mostly just a history about England and some other places in the West, and these kinds of shifts go on at different times and different ways in different places, but the point is: both the idea of homosexuality as an act and homosexuality as an identity are SOCIALLY-CONSTRUCTED ideas, we made them up, they're not for reals - they're just different ways of conceptualizing things to ourselves. And just as the English conceived originally of homosexuality as an act in order to punish it under the law (act = crime = punishment), and then conceived of homosexuality as an identity to punish it under medical science (identity = illness = treatment = punishment), contemporary debates about "why are people gay, is it nature or nurture" tend to be creepily emergent from the dream of a world without gay people in it - ie, if it's genetic, we'll invent gene therapy to get rid of it, and if it's cultural, we'll send you to an anti-gay reconditioning camp to get rid of it. Eve Sedgwick covers this all really beautifully in Epistemology of the Closet, if you're interested, and says it in far prettier ways.
So, therefore, acts vs identities: two ways of conceiving of sexuality, both socially constructed, both socially constructed in order to other and punish the people who were seen to be doing/being those sex acts/sexual identities.
The problem that I see in the Shakesville article is that it assumes that paedophilia is something you are rather than something you've done: it's an identity, not an act. The Catholic Church is somehow guilty for "ordaining paedophiles" - even if the priests who were ordained had never committed child molestation or rape at the time they were ordained. This is a problem, because it shifts the locus of what the Church ought to be doing - I mean, should the Church just "not ordain" paedophiles? How would they go about doing that? Create some sort of paedophile-detecting test? Just imagine. Whereas, if you define paedophilia as an act to which people who are in a position of power, and who are taught to understand sex and sexuality in a certain way, are likely to fall prey to, you can put structures in place to attempt to prevent those acts (crimes) from happening. If you conceive of paedophilia as an act rather than identity, rather than attempting to exclude a non-existant, made-up group of people from the clergy, you can initiate education programs and other intervention programs, or do other things to stop the crimes and therefore the abuse.
Now, in the case of homosexuality, people who WERE IDENTIFIED as homosexuals were then able TO IDENTIFY as homosexuals and in that manner reclaim power and change laws - thus you still see people protesting for gay rights or queer rights holding banners that claim the same thing that 19th century sexologists claimed: that we're born gay, that we ARE gay, that this is who we are as people. And it's been a useful strategy for us, because as I said before, it doesn't really make sense to prosecute someone for an identity. A lot of twentieth century gay rights work in the west has been centered around claiming homosexuality AS an identity, and then divorcing that identity from its origin as a criminal, mentally ill, or immoral identity. (I'm with Judith Butler on this one: I don't really believe in an atemporal or acultural identity category called "lesbian" or "gay," but I'll march under that banner if it gets me, a lady who makes out with ladies, access to equal rights.)
Now, I cannot see (and obv wouldn't want to see) the same thing happening with paedophilia: it's not the same kind of identity, and no one is going to start agitating for paedophiles' rights to have sex with children and not be prosecuted or punished for it. BUT, the problem I have is that I think that this process - creating an identity category in order to other it, define ourselves against it - is bad for everyone, including the people who are defined as "not-paedophiles" as well as the people who are defined as paedophiles. Because it reinforces the process by which one group can minoritize and shame another in order to prove its own supposed moral superiority, and this I think is dangerous. Not in the least because, when someone doesn't fit the profile of what we think of as the identity - the profile of "the child molester" - people will refuse to believe that that person could have committed an act called child molestation. It's hard to admit that such an awful crime is something that anyone - not just members of a castigated and othered identity category - could commit, that the person guilty of child molestation could be our fathers, uncles, old friends of the family - but these are exactly the people who commit these crimes, and the cultural assumption that they aren't leads to sex offenders being found innocent all the time.
SIDEBAR: I also think that it works against the process of rehabilitation for people who have been convicted of sex crimes; I have a family friend (a man I call uncle) who was convicted of sexually touching a prepubescent girl (this happened when I was a young child, but I didn't know about it till I was much older and my dad told me about it). Now, there were reasons why this man I call uncle committed this terrible act: he was at the time being physically and mentally abused by his wife, for one thing - but obviously there are no excuses, and so this man I call uncle, who was a professor at a university, was convicted, served his time, did and does his mandatory counselling, and will never teach a student again in his life. These are his punishments, and I think they're just. For him, the combination of getting away from his wife and going through lifelong counselling was successful in rehabilitating him and making that one (horrible, criminal) incident something that he did once - an act - rather than something that he was compelled to repeat (making it into something society might consider an identity). I really have difficulty talking about this, because I firmly believe that the young girl in this situation is the one whose rights most need to be protected and I balk at the idea that I might be inadvertently saying "oh boo hoo poor poor child molesters," - and I do not want to be saying that!
But at the same time I do not think it does this young girl, or others like her, a service to decide that my uncle is a paedophile who cannot be rehabilitated, part of a group of people who we as a society can write off and enjoy a sense of moral superiority toward. Just the opposite: this kind of thinking is part of what produces the conditions in which people are driven to commit paedophilia, to commit the awful crimes of child rape and child molestation. And it's not like people who commit these crimes are outside of culture: just like everyone else, they get convinced over time that someone who has molested a child is a child molester, that someone who has committed rape is a rapist, that someone who sexually touched a little girl is and was and will always be a paedophile, and therefore that there is nothing they can do to stop or prevent it. They get interpellated - called into being by culture - and begin to believe it about themselves, to take it on as an identity.
And - this is where I come back around to Roman Polanski - this is why people are steadfastly refusing to believe, and seeking any excuse to be able to NOT believe, that Roman Polanski drugged and raped a thirteen year old girl. Because Roman Polanski "is not a rapist" "is not a child molester" - people who know him do not want to admit that he belongs to this irredeemable identity category. After all, he hasn't raped any thirteen year old girls since! (that we know of). If you assume that paedophilia is an identity rather than an act (a crime), then you make it possible to defend Roman Polanski on the grounds that he doesn't adhere to the definition of a child molester as we have socially agreed on it. He doesn't stalk playgrounds, he hasn't (to our knowledge) left a string of molested children in his wake - he isn't the thing we have created, the thing called "child molester," and therefore he cannot have raped a child.
Roman Polanski raped a child; he is guilty of an act that is socially agreed upon to be a crime; he used his privilege as a man of means and power and influence to escape punishment for that crime; it is right and just that he be punished to the full extent of the law.
But when we agree to the logic that forces us to say "Roman Polanski IS a paedophile," we admit to the terms of a debate that actually allow for Roman Polanski's defense. As with all crimes, I'm sure there are reasons behind his actions - as there were reasons behind my uncle's actions. But that does not make either of them innocent, or either of them eligible to escape justice.
click to comment at dw || there are
comments right now
You should assume that this post, as well as any posts that it links to, come with a trigger warning for issues of rape and child molestation.
so, all this talk about Roman Polanski have gotten me thinking about paedophilia, which is a subject on which my opinions are perhaps a little different than you might expect them to be. I want to say up front that I believe in lawful punishment of anyone who molests a child, as I believe in the lawful punishment of all other kinds of rapists. But I also think that the manner in which paedophilia is constructed and presented in North American culture is highly problematic, and tends to create more terror than it alleviates. I don't believe in the various national registries of sex offenders; I don't believe in laws that force people convicted of sex crimes to live X yards from schools or playgrounds or churches (and thus, in many cases, far away from family, friends, counselors, support networks, parole officers, grocery stores, and life); I don't believe in the kind of social punishment of such offenders that amounts to shunning or stoning. I do believe that the criminal justice system is weighted to forgive (male) sex offenders and disbelieve, blame, and castigate (female) victims, and that this is a problem that desperately needs solving, but.
So, that's where I stand.
I've been reading all these articles about Roman Polanski, and have been generally disgusted with the manner in which his apologists have claimed that he's not a rapist, or a paedophile, because he's all these other things - a nice, charming guy, a father, a brilliant filmmaker, and on and on. If you want to read some excellent articles talking about Polanski's case and decrying these apologists, I recommend this article by Amanda Hess, this article by Jeff Fecke, and this article by Kate Harding. But occasionally in my reading I saw the arguments for and against Polanski's arrest go like this:
against: "Polanski isn't a child rapist! He's an X!" (where X = brilliant filmmaker, father, husband, nice guy)
for: "Polanski IS a child rapist! He admitted to raping a child!"
It is obvious to me, in reading these articles, that to the people who are defending Roman Polanski, the phrase "child molester" means something other than "a person who has molested a child" - that's the crux of the problem, and that's what I want to talk about here.
The problem here is that - as Kate Harding says - Roman Polanski drugged and raped a child, admitted to it, and fled justice. Apologists are trying to prove that Roman Polanski didn't drug and rape a child (she was already a 13-year-old slut; her mother thrust her on Polanski; she consented; she was nearly the age of consent; she has since said that she doesn't want him prosecuted, etc.) because apologists are proceeding from the presumption that Roman Polanski isn't a child rapist.
Then I read a Shakesville article about another unconnected but related subject, namely this article about the Catholic leadership's attempt to denounce/mitigate/cover over its history of child abuse. And I totally agree with the substance of the article - the Church tends to create situations in which abuses of power and child molestation become possible or even common, and the leadership refuses to deal with that in any substantive way - but I was bothered by one particular sentence, and disagreed with the terms in which it presented paedophilia. The sentence was:
"The Catholic Church has been trying to blame its sex abuse problems on gay men since day one, in order to avoid its own responsibility for ordaining and protecting pedophiles"
And I thought - is the Catholic church to blame for ordaining paedophiles? For protecting child molesters or rapists, for creating situations in which such abuse can flourish, certainly, but - for ordaining them? The problem here is a problem of acts vs. identities: the Shakesville author is here assuming, as many people on both sides of the Polanski debate have been assuming, that paedophilia is an identity, rather than an act or a series of acts; that one IS a paedophile, even if one has never raped or sexually touched a child; that once someone HAS raped or sexually molested a child, they will be a paedophile for life.
Now, the idea of "acts vs identities" is something we talk about a lot in queer theory and gender theory, and I'm going to put a little summary of this concept here, in a blockquote so that you can skip it if you're familiar with the idea.
acts vs identities:
so, the law under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted was a sodomy law, not unlike the laws that still exist in some places in the US. The (heterosexist, damaging, malicious) logic that allows you to prosecute someone for sodomy is a logic that assumes that homosexuality is an act, rather than an identity; that, like stealing a sheep or killing a friend, it's something that anyone is theoretically capable of, and something that everyone is expected to resist as via moral fortitude. It doesn't really make sense to prosecute someone for BEING something - for having an identity called "homosexual" that is assumed to be consistent over time - but it does make sense to prosecute someone for DOING something - for doing an act called sodomy. In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of psychology, the idea of sodomy as an act began to give way to the idea of homosexuality as an identity - that's when the word "homosexuality" was invented, in fact, and the word "heterosexuality" a few years later.
And make no mistake: homosexuality was conceived as an identity category in order to "other" the people who could be labelled as homosexuals, in the same way that other categories of mental illness (neurasthenics, hysterics) were being created to "other" people who were psychologically non-normative. This all happened in the same psychological treatises: homosexuality was just one of a variety of mental illnesses for which one could be diagnosed, and - like hysterics and neurasthenics and so forth - was assumed to be an identity, something you WERE by temperament. Paradoxically, it was assumed by some to be curable even though it was also assumed to be inherent or inherited - but that's getting off the topic.
So, and this is all totally from Foucault by the way, institutions of power (the medical profession, the psychologists, the guardians of moral right) create categories of people who are given identities as "sick" - partially in order to draw sharper definitions between these "sick" people and "normal" people. For if homosexuality is an illness or disease that's inherited (because your dad was an alcoholic and your mom was a hysteric, you might be a homosexual), then it's something from which society at large can believe itself to be safe; a poor man might commit theft, but a non-homosexual cannot commit homosexuality: you have to BE homosexual in order to fall prey to that. This is how othering works: you create a group of people, drawing distinctions between people where none exist, in order to reify (make real) the distinctions that you, the people in power, wish were there in the first place. You create a group called "homosexuals" in order to make real your identity as "heterosexuals" - the moral right. And, as Foucault says, this is why the word "heterosexual" is created AFTER the world "homosexual" - first you create the thing against which you want to define yourself, then you create yourself.
Interestingly, at the same time that homosexuality begins to become an identity rather than a criminal act, other criminal acts begin to be seen as identities as well - "the criminal" as an identity category gains a lot of weight in from the early 19thC onwards, and this is all bound up in class distinctions as well - people who are from threatening classes can be seen as somehow "inherently" amoral and therefore "inherently" criminal.
This is mostly just a history about England and some other places in the West, and these kinds of shifts go on at different times and different ways in different places, but the point is: both the idea of homosexuality as an act and homosexuality as an identity are SOCIALLY-CONSTRUCTED ideas, we made them up, they're not for reals - they're just different ways of conceptualizing things to ourselves. And just as the English conceived originally of homosexuality as an act in order to punish it under the law (act = crime = punishment), and then conceived of homosexuality as an identity to punish it under medical science (identity = illness = treatment = punishment), contemporary debates about "why are people gay, is it nature or nurture" tend to be creepily emergent from the dream of a world without gay people in it - ie, if it's genetic, we'll invent gene therapy to get rid of it, and if it's cultural, we'll send you to an anti-gay reconditioning camp to get rid of it. Eve Sedgwick covers this all really beautifully in Epistemology of the Closet, if you're interested, and says it in far prettier ways.
So, therefore, acts vs identities: two ways of conceiving of sexuality, both socially constructed, both socially constructed in order to other and punish the people who were seen to be doing/being those sex acts/sexual identities.
The problem that I see in the Shakesville article is that it assumes that paedophilia is something you are rather than something you've done: it's an identity, not an act. The Catholic Church is somehow guilty for "ordaining paedophiles" - even if the priests who were ordained had never committed child molestation or rape at the time they were ordained. This is a problem, because it shifts the locus of what the Church ought to be doing - I mean, should the Church just "not ordain" paedophiles? How would they go about doing that? Create some sort of paedophile-detecting test? Just imagine. Whereas, if you define paedophilia as an act to which people who are in a position of power, and who are taught to understand sex and sexuality in a certain way, are likely to fall prey to, you can put structures in place to attempt to prevent those acts (crimes) from happening. If you conceive of paedophilia as an act rather than identity, rather than attempting to exclude a non-existant, made-up group of people from the clergy, you can initiate education programs and other intervention programs, or do other things to stop the crimes and therefore the abuse.
Now, in the case of homosexuality, people who WERE IDENTIFIED as homosexuals were then able TO IDENTIFY as homosexuals and in that manner reclaim power and change laws - thus you still see people protesting for gay rights or queer rights holding banners that claim the same thing that 19th century sexologists claimed: that we're born gay, that we ARE gay, that this is who we are as people. And it's been a useful strategy for us, because as I said before, it doesn't really make sense to prosecute someone for an identity. A lot of twentieth century gay rights work in the west has been centered around claiming homosexuality AS an identity, and then divorcing that identity from its origin as a criminal, mentally ill, or immoral identity. (I'm with Judith Butler on this one: I don't really believe in an atemporal or acultural identity category called "lesbian" or "gay," but I'll march under that banner if it gets me, a lady who makes out with ladies, access to equal rights.)
Now, I cannot see (and obv wouldn't want to see) the same thing happening with paedophilia: it's not the same kind of identity, and no one is going to start agitating for paedophiles' rights to have sex with children and not be prosecuted or punished for it. BUT, the problem I have is that I think that this process - creating an identity category in order to other it, define ourselves against it - is bad for everyone, including the people who are defined as "not-paedophiles" as well as the people who are defined as paedophiles. Because it reinforces the process by which one group can minoritize and shame another in order to prove its own supposed moral superiority, and this I think is dangerous. Not in the least because, when someone doesn't fit the profile of what we think of as the identity - the profile of "the child molester" - people will refuse to believe that that person could have committed an act called child molestation. It's hard to admit that such an awful crime is something that anyone - not just members of a castigated and othered identity category - could commit, that the person guilty of child molestation could be our fathers, uncles, old friends of the family - but these are exactly the people who commit these crimes, and the cultural assumption that they aren't leads to sex offenders being found innocent all the time.
SIDEBAR: I also think that it works against the process of rehabilitation for people who have been convicted of sex crimes; I have a family friend (a man I call uncle) who was convicted of sexually touching a prepubescent girl (this happened when I was a young child, but I didn't know about it till I was much older and my dad told me about it). Now, there were reasons why this man I call uncle committed this terrible act: he was at the time being physically and mentally abused by his wife, for one thing - but obviously there are no excuses, and so this man I call uncle, who was a professor at a university, was convicted, served his time, did and does his mandatory counselling, and will never teach a student again in his life. These are his punishments, and I think they're just. For him, the combination of getting away from his wife and going through lifelong counselling was successful in rehabilitating him and making that one (horrible, criminal) incident something that he did once - an act - rather than something that he was compelled to repeat (making it into something society might consider an identity). I really have difficulty talking about this, because I firmly believe that the young girl in this situation is the one whose rights most need to be protected and I balk at the idea that I might be inadvertently saying "oh boo hoo poor poor child molesters," - and I do not want to be saying that!
But at the same time I do not think it does this young girl, or others like her, a service to decide that my uncle is a paedophile who cannot be rehabilitated, part of a group of people who we as a society can write off and enjoy a sense of moral superiority toward. Just the opposite: this kind of thinking is part of what produces the conditions in which people are driven to commit paedophilia, to commit the awful crimes of child rape and child molestation. And it's not like people who commit these crimes are outside of culture: just like everyone else, they get convinced over time that someone who has molested a child is a child molester, that someone who has committed rape is a rapist, that someone who sexually touched a little girl is and was and will always be a paedophile, and therefore that there is nothing they can do to stop or prevent it. They get interpellated - called into being by culture - and begin to believe it about themselves, to take it on as an identity.
And - this is where I come back around to Roman Polanski - this is why people are steadfastly refusing to believe, and seeking any excuse to be able to NOT believe, that Roman Polanski drugged and raped a thirteen year old girl. Because Roman Polanski "is not a rapist" "is not a child molester" - people who know him do not want to admit that he belongs to this irredeemable identity category. After all, he hasn't raped any thirteen year old girls since! (that we know of). If you assume that paedophilia is an identity rather than an act (a crime), then you make it possible to defend Roman Polanski on the grounds that he doesn't adhere to the definition of a child molester as we have socially agreed on it. He doesn't stalk playgrounds, he hasn't (to our knowledge) left a string of molested children in his wake - he isn't the thing we have created, the thing called "child molester," and therefore he cannot have raped a child.
Roman Polanski raped a child; he is guilty of an act that is socially agreed upon to be a crime; he used his privilege as a man of means and power and influence to escape punishment for that crime; it is right and just that he be punished to the full extent of the law.
But when we agree to the logic that forces us to say "Roman Polanski IS a paedophile," we admit to the terms of a debate that actually allow for Roman Polanski's defense. As with all crimes, I'm sure there are reasons behind his actions - as there were reasons behind my uncle's actions. But that does not make either of them innocent, or either of them eligible to escape justice.
click to comment at dw || there are
comments right now