Sex and Power

It's been a while since I last posted a blog. The northern summer's tendrils of a busy social calendar have intervened. And this one's going to be a bit of a heavy one - warning you now.

Nearly 15 years ago the Sydney where I lived was gripped by the Wood Royal Commission. At first it focussed on corruption in the NSW Police. It segued into paedophilia, or, more accurately, child sexual assault. It would probably be more accurate to say they began investigating the existence of paedophile rings involving adult males abusing child or adolescent males.

To anyone not familiar with NSW politics that might seem a bit odd. What could the link be between some detectives in a few squads who might have taken a few bribes and were exploring more unusual methods of crime control (as it turned out, a chap called Roger Rogerson (then a Detective Sergeant) was using a notorious two-bit crim called Neddy Smith to dob in crooks while being allowed to do his own robberies just so long as Rogerson and his mates got a cut) and Satanic cult style parties with appalling orgies involving assaults on young boys?

Actually, not much. Some state politicians at the time had got it into their heads that the police were involved in and protecting these paedophile rings. High level cops, as well as members of the judiciary.

This was in the early-to-mid 1990s and I remember at the time saying that there ought to be two separate Commissions. That's not an opinion I've changed. Both issues needed investigating, but both needed separate enquiries to do them both justice.

One of the many problems with the segue was that the Royal Commission decided to define child as someone under 18 years old. Most jurisdictions define a child as pre-pubescent. Given that the focus of the hysteria was on male homosexual acts, the age of consent laws in NSW at the time (18 for male homosexuals) are important. Young men were caught up - a man of 18 having completely consensual sex with another man even just a day before his 18th birthday would've been branded a paedophile by the Commission. It also looked at cases that occurred before 1984, which was when NSW de-criminalised male homosexuality. All that clouded the issues, serious issues, and the distractions of what are or were normal relationships meant the abusers - those who needed to be found and stopped - who were using their powerful positions against those susceptible to their power escaped.

There was another dimension, too, which I wrote about in a fanzine in about 1996 or 1997. The media were obsessed with male homosexual behaviour. Men abusing girls, women abusing girls and/or boys rarely entered the discussion. It was as though, as I wrote back then, there was a hierarchy of sexual abuse. I argued against that: all sexual assault/abuse is bad. Aside from the physical and mental damages usually caused, it's an abuse of power.

The reason why I'm drawn to this topic again is a podcast I listened to a few weeks ago now from ABC Radio National's Late Night Live. Phillip Adams was talking to the maker of a documentary about Australian artist Donald Friend, and also about the bizarre double standards at play. It seems large sections of the Australian arts community dismiss any hint that the relationships Donald Friend had with young Balinese boys (usually when they were about 10 years old) was a sexual one let alone an abusively sexual one. Donald Friend himself wrote about it in his diaries - the passages read out were incredibly and physically written - and Adams said he hadn't shied away from the subject when Adams visited him in Bali in the 1970s. The documentarist had tracked down the boys mentioned by name in the diary and in talking to them any doubts of a mistake in interpretation or other form of misunderstanding vanished. They had been assaulted; they talked about it in terms familiar to anyone who has either suffered such abuse or workers in the area of trying to ease that suffering.

As the discussion progressed, it became clear that there is a double standard applied to those of an artistic nature. It was something frivolous. Not serious. Acceptable, somehow, in a dismissive way. And far from the only example even in recent times. In this case, the fact that the boys concerned were Balinese and not white added that racist dimension. Fascinatingly, that racism extended to the fact that the diaries (recently published) include the boys' names and the editors never asked them for permission.

2009. What have we learned?