Comprehension questions and tasks. 1. What did you learn about Danny’s attitude to a life of crime, and life in general?

1. What did you learn about Danny’s attitude to a life of crime, and life in general? Find the extracts in the text to prove your answers.

2. How can you explain the reference to Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham?

3. What makes people criminals? Is criminality an inborn feature of character? Can humans be innately violent?

4. Have you ever heard, read or seen any films about the people who purposefully committed crimes in order to help the poor?

What Can We Do to Beat the Menace of Child Sex Abusers?

By Theodore Dalrymple

Paedophilia is in the headlines again. Former pop star Gary Glitter, 64, real name Paul Francis Gadd, is returning to Britain and, more alarmingly, a man called Philip Thompson has just been convicted here of running an internet site with 241, 000 indecent images of children.

Two hundred and forty-one thousand! The worst kind of obscenity is obviously being produced on an industrial scale. Part of Thompson’s role was to vet the pictures to exclude incontrovertible photographic evidence of physical sexual abuse of children so perpetrators could avoid legal action. Vetted paedophiles were then led into hardcore areas of the website.

Thomson’s activities raise the question of whether the internet’s supply of child pornography creates the demand for it: in other words, whether people are being turned into paedophiles by what appears on the internet.

I was once briefly involved as a police witness in a case in which parents sexually tortured their children and sold the resulting videos on the internet for a lot of money. Although I had previously travelled to countries in the throes of civil war, in which scores of thousands of people had been killed often in the most horrific way, I still found it difficult to believe that people could behave like this to children.

I also couldn’t help wondering whether, if the internet hadn’t existed and given them opportunity to make a lot of money, they would have acted like this.

We can only pity the police who combat the kind of paedophile rings Thomson administered. They have to sift through all the evidence to ensure that they miss nothing.

In the case in which I was involved several police were so horrified they had to stop working in this field. And policemen, we should remember, are not usually the kind of people who buckle under the strain easily.

The methods used to trace and dismantle paedophile rings are similar to those used against terrorists. And just as there will be no final victory against terrorism but only temporary victories, so there will be no final elimination of paedophilia, least of all in an age when malefactors are often one step ahead in the technological cunning.

For most people the sentence handed down to Thompson – imprisonment with no parole before three years and nine months – will seem inadequate. When he comes out of prison he might be only 31 years old.

The nature of the internet means that child pornography can be produced in any country and distributed worldwide in the blink of an eye.

This makes the enemy a hydra-headed monster and it also makes it difficult to assess in any given country how much of a real danger to juveniles, statistically-speaking, child pornography actually represents.

However, we shouldn’t lose sight of other forms of sexual abuse of children, which are almost certainly much more common than child pornography. I mean the sexual abuse of children in the home.

The principal promoters of such abuse have not been the internet, or warped individuals such as Thompson but successive governments. They have done everything to promote it.

It has been established beyond all reasonable doubt that the sexual abuse of children occurs vastly more frequently in families in which there is a step-father – or in which there is no male adult except a succession of casual boyfriends of their mother – than in the traditional two-parent family.

It follows that social policies that have the effect of breaking up or preventing the formation of traditional families promote sexual abuse of children. And these are precisely the policies that successive governments have followed.

Easy, no-blame divorce has encouraged the break-up of marriages and even emptied the state of marriage of much real content. Government has deprived a large part of the population of any financial reason or incentive to bring up children in stable couples.

On the contrary, government has made it financially advantageous for many parents to live separately and has closed its eyes to the fact that by having done so it has encouraged the very social (or antisocial) conditions in which sexual and child abuse flourish.

Still, a government that was concerned about child abuse would strive to bring about domestic stability rather than encouraging its reverse.

The suppression of child pornography is a police matter and, like the suppression of terrorism, requires vigilant detective work. But the more common forms of sexual child abuse require changes in social policy that no recent government has been brave enough to contemplate. (Abridged)

From The Daily Mail, August, 2008