Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to ,
This is a really important question: Why?
At a guess: because children's awareness of right and wrong, and ability to control their own impulses, are far less developed than those of adults?
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Chris, I understand where you’re coming from, and should have made it clear that by “hairy smelly ‘old’” I was thinking in particular of Bert Potter, and more broadly of how children describe the adults who abuse them – as adults we might not consider them hairy, smelly or old. Of course abusers come in a wide range of ages, hirsuteness and odours.
Interesting that you say the “majority of people I have spoken to who were abused as children were abused by slightly older children”. That’s pretty much the opposite of my experience, where of all the people who have told me about being abused as children, only one of them was by a slightly older child (her older brother); the rest of the abusers were adults. Of course I accept that my knowledge is limited to those I’ve spoken to, so as I say, interesting to have it expanded.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
At 13 I wanted to experiment . But it was my choice. That difference is acceptable.
Also, I don't think I've ever yet come across a 13-year old who wanted to experiment with someone a whole lot older than themselves - let alone some hairy smelly "old" (by 13-year old standards) person. .
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to ,
Some of the Great Barrier land coopratives fell over, because democracy doesn’t always workout.
Indeed. My own commune had (has?) a long-term feud between different groups. Now being a shareholder, trying to maintain good relationships with all parties can be exhausting. But the land remains.
But that's a digression.
Having a benign leader can indeed be a good thing. The tricky part is working out whether or not someone is benign.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
FWIW…the impression I got of the “hippy movement” (with some peripheral family involvement) was that there were few or no ‘rules’ per se. Necessary decisions were supposed to be by general consensus. There was not supposed to be anyone ‘in charge’. Folk did their own thing…man.
No so with CP. Bert was the Boss…
I think that was usually true in NZ. But overseas I get the sense there were a good few hippy communes set up round a charismatic central individual. And I also think that in NZ although that was what was “supposed” to happen, there were still individuals around who liked to hope that their own charisma would just naturally make people follow them anyway.
As for Bert being the Boss. Yes, he was in practice, but (genuine question) was he also in theory? i.e. is that what people were told when they turned up? ETA, Oh, I see that has been answered while I was typing.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Anke Richter,
Hippies? No, CP wasn’t a hippie commune to start with – it was very middle-class, and its founding members were doctors, psychologists, lawyers.
Well, you would know better than I, but I wonder if your idea of what a hippy is is the same as mine? The people on my commune were pretty middle-class in origin too. The paedophile was a doctor. Other commune members were teachers, academics, as well as builders and so forth. But they were still hippies, because being a hippy was about outlook, attitude and aesthetics rather than profession or origin.
As far as I recall, some people on my commune knew people at Centrepoint - I think I visited there once, but possibly later, in the early 1980s. When I see photos from Centrepoint in the 1970s, and even the 1980s, I see people with a hippy aesthetic. There was acceptance of psychedelic drug use, encouragement of sexual experimentation and multiple partners, and "new agey therapies". And it was a commune at a time when, except for fundamentalist Christian communities, there was pretty much no such thing as a commune that wasn't a hippy commune by NZ definitions, because the decision to live communally is a hippy decision. That all says hippy pretty firmly to me.
Ultimately, though, the "hippy" label isn't really important. I could rephrase my earlier comment to just say "commune" rather than "hippy commune"; and "peace and love" or "escape and understanding" rather than "flowers and love" and the point would remain.
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Based on my experience of commune hippies, I would say that the parents were not necessarily "really" screwed up to begin with so much as really, really naive. They went to communes thinking it was all going to be flowers and love, and that everyone else there was also there for flowers and love. And many of them were. But sociopaths and paedophiles are good at recognising potential victims and ideal environments for acting on their paedophilia, so would have instantly recognised communes as easy pickings.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Oh. Yes. Good point.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Ross Francis,
I have no desire for guilty people to escape punishment.
I'm sure this is quite true. But I'm not convinced that Dr GS's view of what counts as guilty would accord with what most people in society, and indeed the justice system, would count as guilty.
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Curses, my edit took too long:
I say it's all part of the same story because it's related to the broader question of who gets to tell their stories, when, and what it means for victims and perpetrators when the case is put in the media again decades later. These sisters were abused at much the same time as the Centrepoint abuse was going on (1971-1978). The case went to court at a similar time (1994). Some of the sentence lengths at Centrepoint were of a similar short length. The survivors of Centrepoint can name their abusers, but because of a small judicial error way 20 years ago, these two women cannot.
One of the other reasons the judge gave was that the women took so long to bring the matter to court. That's about equivalent to saying that cases of sexual abuse shouldn't be pursued because the abused have waited until they're adults to report it: in this case, the women didn't know the man had suppression at all - they believed he did not.
The judge effectively ruled that publishing the offender's name now would mean he was punished again. He has failed to take into account that no publishing the offender's name means the two women are victimised again. Sexual assault is all about power, and the judge has again told this man's power over his life is more important than theirs. Angry, angry, angry.