The Home Secretary, Mr Leon Brittan, yesterday called on chief constables to examine the whole question of investigations into serious assaults on children.
Mr Brittan’s statement came in the wake of an attack on a six-year-old boy in Brighton and several other recent assaults on children.
The Home Secretary said: “The police give the highest priority to these cases. But the public, quite understandably, are anxious that dangerous men should not remain at liberty for one day more than necessary.”
He found the views of the Paedophile Information Exchange “utterly repugnant,” but said it would not be proper for him to comment of PIE or on the adequacy of the present law when there was a possibility of prosecution against its individual members.
“A report is now being urgently considered by the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and I anticipate a decision will be reached shortly,” he said.
“The whole country is outraged and appalled by the brutal attack on a young boy at Brighton. Every possible effort must be and will be made to bring the perpetrators of this repulsive and loathsome act to justice.
“I have now studied the report of the chief constable of Sussex and I am satisfied the Sussex police are sparing no effort to do so.
“More generally there is great concern, which I fully share, about the number of serious assaults on children. There is no offence which attracts a greater feeling of repugnance, or rightly arouses anxieties among millions of parents.
“I am therefore asking chief constables to look at the whole question of the investigation of such offences and asking them to report to me their conclusions as the action that should be taken to share the experience and expertise of police forces throughout the country in investigating these cases, and also in securing maximum public cooperation.
He added that the Home Office would be working with the police in getting the message over to the public that a close eye must be kept on children particularly in the evenings, and how important it is to report any suspicious activities to police.
* A teacher who infiltrated PIE said yesterday the organisation is affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties. Mr Charles Oxley, headmaster of Hamilton College School in Lanarkshire, wants the group outlawed.
Speaking in Hamilton, Mr Oxley said PIE was formed in Edinburgh by a homosexual student and its inaugural meeting was held there in March 1975. Later that year its headquarters moved to London.
The affiliation was admitted by Ms Marie Staunton, legal officer of the NCCL.
Mr David Godwin, secretary of the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties, said: “We do not have an affiliation from PIE. We are, however, affiliated to the NCCL.”
…
The Open University yesterday dismissed Mr Tom O’Carroll, one of its press officers, because of his association with a controversial sex group.
It said his association with the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had damaged the interests of the university, and adversely affected the performance of his duties to the extent that he could no longer satisfactorily discharge them.
In a statement the university said Mr O’Carroll’s appointment was terminated under the terms and conditions of his employment with three months’ pay in lieu of notice. The decision was taken at a meeting of the university council on January 24.
PIE is a pressure group calling for the legalisation of sex between adults and consenting children.
The university said the council’s decision was reached after considering a confidential report by an independent assessor, Mr R. C. Southwell, QC. He was appointed to examine all the facts concerning Mr O’Carroll’s association with PIE in relation to his university employment.
Mr O’Carroll shot into the headlines last year through his activities as chairman of the sex group.
At one time he found himself under attack by an angry mother at a public house after being ejected from a conference on love and attraction at University College, Swansea. The mother drenched him with beer and hit him in the face.
The university has been considerably embarrassed by his activities even though Mr O’Carroll has tried to keep his private activities separate from his role as an official spokesman for the university.
He was given extended leave by the university, and then moved out of the press office as a temporary measure. The university later set up an independent authority to decide whether there was a case for dismissal.
Mr O’Carroll later said he would be talking to a representative of his union, the National Union of Journalists, as soon as possible, and he would advise on his next step.
He said the past two weeks during which he had been suspended were very useful. He had been able to do a lot of work in connection with PIE, and he would be able to work a good deal harder on PIE’s behalf until he found a job.
…
An Open University press officer, dismissed after publicity about his connection with the Paedophile Information Exchange which supports legalising sex with children, had “an unswerving desire to make a martyr of himself,” a barrister said yesterday at an industrial tribunal at Bedford.
Mr Tom O’Carroll, aged 33, was claiming unfair dismissal by the Open University.
For the university, Mr Anthony Grabiner said the substantial documentation in the case was quite interesting in parts and in parts it was quite disgusting.
Mr O’Carroll was hired by the university in September, 1974, but nobody there knew of his “sexual predilections.”
“Mr O’Carroll is, and was at that time, sexually attracted to young boys,” Mr Grabiner said.
“He fervently and honestly believed that our laws relating to sex between adults and children are repressive and outmoded and he campaigned for a reform of the law.”
An incident with a young boy in Coventry had ended Mr O’Carroll’s teaching career after the boy’s parents complained that O’Carroll pestered the boy after becoming infatuated with him, Mr Grabiner said.
Mr O’Carroll’s connection with PIE began in March, 1975, when the organisation was formed.
In May, 1976, he joined the executive committee and then became secretary and in May 1977, he became chairman.
“From then on Mr O’Carroll set out on a course of conduct aimed at obtaining the widest possible publicity for PIE. This is conveniently summarised as ‘a coming out’ process,” Mr Grabiner said.
In the first of a series of incidents of such publicity, Mr O’Carroll was the Mr C in an interview published in the Observer, on May 22, 1977.
But after the interview was published, Mr O’Carroll wrote to the paper and signed his own name although there was no reference to the Open University.
On August 23, 1977, The Daily Telegraph published the fact that Mr O’Carroll was a publicity officer at the Open University.
“This was greeted by a fantastic national outcry and floods of offensive letters and phone calls to the Open University.”
Mr O’Carroll was suspended from his job on September 21 and asked to stay away from the campus.
“The university commissioned a leading QC to investigate and Mr O’Carroll was represented before him by the national organiser of the National Union of Journalists.
“The union still supports Mr O’Carroll and supports him in these proceedings,” Mr Grabiner said.
After the QC’s report, Mr O’Carroll was finally dismissed from the Open University with three months’ wages in lieu of notice on January 24 with effect from February 7.
By 1976, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) had also become embroiled in the debate. In 1976, Tom O’Carroll of PIE addressed the NCCL conference, deploring the use of chemical castration for paedophiles. And although the NCCL eventually rejected PIE affiliation, its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee nevertheless recommended a lowering of the age of heterosexual and homosexual consent to fourteen (and to the lower age of ten when it involved consenting partners under the age of fourteen – with a further leeway of two years on either side of these ages). It had come to the conclusion that the only reason for making sex illegal was if it harmed others. And it had come to accept the argument that there was often less lasting damage for children in paedophilia that there was in the current situation in which they were thrown into the jaws of the legal system and the press. (82)
Despite this support, by 1977, the year of the Swansea conference, the decision of PIE to engage in a high-profile campaign was beginning to backfire spectacularly. The age of consent debate led PIE into making a politically disastrous statement in support of lowering the age of consent to four years (below which consent was accepted as unfeasible). The statement was read as confirming people’s worst fears that this talk of sexual liberation was just a front for opening the floodgates on perverted desires for sex with the very youngest of children. Under the title ‘For adults only’, the Daily Mirror described PIE’s proposals as ‘totally repulsive’; it was a tolerant newspaper, but this tolerance had its limits, and this was it (though it was happy to run such pronouncements alongside pictures of a seventeen-year-old girl like ‘Feb’ baring her breasts to its readers). (83) Venues began to refuse to stage events involving PIE. And the proposed attendance of leading paedophiles at Swansea sparked heated debate in the run-up to the meeting. One of these speakers, Dr Edward Brongersma, a Dutch MP, did speak at the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference in Nottingham in August and received a standing ovation. (84) However, PIE had to cancel a planned meeting in a London hotel because of protests from the staff. Tom O’Carroll, the new Chair of PIE, now began to attract increasing press attention, and he was placed by his employers on extended leave from his position as Press Officer at the Open University. Within this context, critics of the proposal to lower the age of consent began to claim that the liberals who supported this, including the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, had been seduced by arguments that were, in fact, emerging out of the paedeophile movement.
82 ‘NCCL Wants Incest Made Legal’, Guardian (9 March 1976); ‘Make Age of Consent 14’, The Times (6 March 19760.
83 ‘For Adults Only’, Daily Mirror (24 August 1977). The image of ‘Feb’ ran alongside another item on PIE: ‘Child Sex Group Goes On’ (26 August 1977).
84 In 1976, the Dutch National Centre for Public Mental Health report on Paedophilia and Society had recommended the abolition of all sections of the Penal Code dealing with non-violent sexual conduct with children. Leader of the campaign for legalisation, MP Edward Brongersma, questioned the evidence on long-term harm and suggested that the hidden scale of such behaviour indicated that the current stance of legal prohibition was not proving effective: Edward Brongersma, ‘The Meaning of “Indecency” with Respect to Moral Offences involving Children’, British Journal of Criminology, 20 (!(*)), 20-32. Brongersma was a lawyer by background and was a member of the Dutch Senate for the Labour Party 1945-50 and 1963-77. He had been arrested in 1950 for having sexual relations with a seventeen year old, when the age of consent was twenty-one, and spent eleven months in prison. As a result, he became an advocate of more liberal legislation and played a role in abolition of Article 248a of the Dutch Civil Code, which led to the lowering of the age of consent for homosexual sex from twenty-one to sixteen. He subsequently supported a further lowering. He resigned from the Senate in 1977 and devoted his energies to the work of a foundation bearing his name which collected books and papers on the subject of paedophilia. He also worked on a study of Loving Boys, published in 1987 and 1990. Controversy followed his death in 1998 when pornographic images of children were discovered in his collection. This material was removed by the authorities and the archive was deposited at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.
…
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19790505&id=aBc-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=GEoMAAAAIBAJ&pg=5495,1457890
Glasgow Herald – 5 May 1979
Mr Tom O’Carroll has lost his appeal against unfair dismissal from his job as press officer to the Open University, it was announced yesterday. Mr O’Carroll, aged 33, of Lovat Street, Newport Pagnall, Bucks, is chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange which is campaigning for legalised sex with children. The tribunal decided: “The applicant had put himself in a position whereby he could not properly do the job for which he was employed.”
***
spotlight 
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19830902&id=gPU9AAAAIBAJ&sjid=CUkMAAAAIBAJ&pg=1859,188138
The Glasgow Herald – Sep 2, 1983
Brittan wants probe into child attacks
The Home Secretary, Mr Leon Brittan, yesterday called on chief constables to examine the whole question of investigations into serious assaults on children.
Mr Brittan’s statement came in the wake of an attack on a six-year-old boy in Brighton and several other recent assaults on children.
The Home Secretary said: “The police give the highest priority to these cases. But the public, quite understandably, are anxious that dangerous men should not remain at liberty for one day more than necessary.”
He found the views of the Paedophile Information Exchange “utterly repugnant,” but said it would not be proper for him to comment of PIE or on the adequacy of the present law when there was a possibility of prosecution against its individual members.
“A report is now being urgently considered by the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and I anticipate a decision will be reached shortly,” he said.
“The whole country is outraged and appalled by the brutal attack on a young boy at Brighton. Every possible effort must be and will be made to bring the perpetrators of this repulsive and loathsome act to justice.
“I have now studied the report of the chief constable of Sussex and I am satisfied the Sussex police are sparing no effort to do so.
“More generally there is great concern, which I fully share, about the number of serious assaults on children. There is no offence which attracts a greater feeling of repugnance, or rightly arouses anxieties among millions of parents.
“I am therefore asking chief constables to look at the whole question of the investigation of such offences and asking them to report to me their conclusions as the action that should be taken to share the experience and expertise of police forces throughout the country in investigating these cases, and also in securing maximum public cooperation.
He added that the Home Office would be working with the police in getting the message over to the public that a close eye must be kept on children particularly in the evenings, and how important it is to report any suspicious activities to police.
* A teacher who infiltrated PIE said yesterday the organisation is affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties. Mr Charles Oxley, headmaster of Hamilton College School in Lanarkshire, wants the group outlawed.
Speaking in Hamilton, Mr Oxley said PIE was formed in Edinburgh by a homosexual student and its inaugural meeting was held there in March 1975. Later that year its headquarters moved to London.
The affiliation was admitted by Ms Marie Staunton, legal officer of the NCCL.
Mr David Godwin, secretary of the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties, said: “We do not have an affiliation from PIE. We are, however, affiliated to the NCCL.”
…
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19780208&id=cY5AAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2qQMAAAAIBAJ&pg=3302,1610630
The Glasgow Herald – Feb 8, 1978
Sex group man is sacked by university
The Open University yesterday dismissed Mr Tom O’Carroll, one of its press officers, because of his association with a controversial sex group.
It said his association with the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had damaged the interests of the university, and adversely affected the performance of his duties to the extent that he could no longer satisfactorily discharge them.
In a statement the university said Mr O’Carroll’s appointment was terminated under the terms and conditions of his employment with three months’ pay in lieu of notice. The decision was taken at a meeting of the university council on January 24.
PIE is a pressure group calling for the legalisation of sex between adults and consenting children.
The university said the council’s decision was reached after considering a confidential report by an independent assessor, Mr R. C. Southwell, QC. He was appointed to examine all the facts concerning Mr O’Carroll’s association with PIE in relation to his university employment.
Mr O’Carroll shot into the headlines last year through his activities as chairman of the sex group.
At one time he found himself under attack by an angry mother at a public house after being ejected from a conference on love and attraction at University College, Swansea. The mother drenched him with beer and hit him in the face.
The university has been considerably embarrassed by his activities even though Mr O’Carroll has tried to keep his private activities separate from his role as an official spokesman for the university.
He was given extended leave by the university, and then moved out of the press office as a temporary measure. The university later set up an independent authority to decide whether there was a case for dismissal.
Mr O’Carroll later said he would be talking to a representative of his union, the National Union of Journalists, as soon as possible, and he would advise on his next step.
He said the past two weeks during which he had been suspended were very useful. He had been able to do a lot of work in connection with PIE, and he would be able to work a good deal harder on PIE’s behalf until he found a job.
…
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19790313&id=be89AAAAIBAJ&sjid=zEgMAAAAIBAJ&pg=3764,2872423
The Glasgow Herald – Mar 13, 1979
‘Martyr’ claim over sacking of university press officer
An Open University press officer, dismissed after publicity about his connection with the Paedophile Information Exchange which supports legalising sex with children, had “an unswerving desire to make a martyr of himself,” a barrister said yesterday at an industrial tribunal at Bedford.
Mr Tom O’Carroll, aged 33, was claiming unfair dismissal by the Open University.
For the university, Mr Anthony Grabiner said the substantial documentation in the case was quite interesting in parts and in parts it was quite disgusting.
Mr O’Carroll was hired by the university in September, 1974, but nobody there knew of his “sexual predilections.”
“Mr O’Carroll is, and was at that time, sexually attracted to young boys,” Mr Grabiner said.
“He fervently and honestly believed that our laws relating to sex between adults and children are repressive and outmoded and he campaigned for a reform of the law.”
An incident with a young boy in Coventry had ended Mr O’Carroll’s teaching career after the boy’s parents complained that O’Carroll pestered the boy after becoming infatuated with him, Mr Grabiner said.
Mr O’Carroll’s connection with PIE began in March, 1975, when the organisation was formed.
In May, 1976, he joined the executive committee and then became secretary and in May 1977, he became chairman.
“From then on Mr O’Carroll set out on a course of conduct aimed at obtaining the widest possible publicity for PIE. This is conveniently summarised as ‘a coming out’ process,” Mr Grabiner said.
In the first of a series of incidents of such publicity, Mr O’Carroll was the Mr C in an interview published in the Observer, on May 22, 1977.
But after the interview was published, Mr O’Carroll wrote to the paper and signed his own name although there was no reference to the Open University.
On August 23, 1977, The Daily Telegraph published the fact that Mr O’Carroll was a publicity officer at the Open University.
“This was greeted by a fantastic national outcry and floods of offensive letters and phone calls to the Open University.”
Mr O’Carroll was suspended from his job on September 21 and asked to stay away from the campus.
“The university commissioned a leading QC to investigate and Mr O’Carroll was represented before him by the national organiser of the National Union of Journalists.
“The union still supports Mr O’Carroll and supports him in these proceedings,” Mr Grabiner said.
After the QC’s report, Mr O’Carroll was finally dismissed from the Open University with three months’ wages in lieu of notice on January 24 with effect from February 7.
The tribunal continues today.
…
http://books.google.com/books?id=e8doAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA175&sa=X&ei=sZcGU6_SBOa40QG8sIC4DQ&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement
By Mathew Thomson
[Page 175]
By 1976, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) had also become embroiled in the debate. In 1976, Tom O’Carroll of PIE addressed the NCCL conference, deploring the use of chemical castration for paedophiles. And although the NCCL eventually rejected PIE affiliation, its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee nevertheless recommended a lowering of the age of heterosexual and homosexual consent to fourteen (and to the lower age of ten when it involved consenting partners under the age of fourteen – with a further leeway of two years on either side of these ages). It had come to the conclusion that the only reason for making sex illegal was if it harmed others. And it had come to accept the argument that there was often less lasting damage for children in paedophilia that there was in the current situation in which they were thrown into the jaws of the legal system and the press. (82)
Despite this support, by 1977, the year of the Swansea conference, the decision of PIE to engage in a high-profile campaign was beginning to backfire spectacularly. The age of consent debate led PIE into making a politically disastrous statement in support of lowering the age of consent to four years (below which consent was accepted as unfeasible). The statement was read as confirming people’s worst fears that this talk of sexual liberation was just a front for opening the floodgates on perverted desires for sex with the very youngest of children. Under the title ‘For adults only’, the Daily Mirror described PIE’s proposals as ‘totally repulsive’; it was a tolerant newspaper, but this tolerance had its limits, and this was it (though it was happy to run such pronouncements alongside pictures of a seventeen-year-old girl like ‘Feb’ baring her breasts to its readers). (83) Venues began to refuse to stage events involving PIE. And the proposed attendance of leading paedophiles at Swansea sparked heated debate in the run-up to the meeting. One of these speakers, Dr Edward Brongersma, a Dutch MP, did speak at the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference in Nottingham in August and received a standing ovation. (84) However, PIE had to cancel a planned meeting in a London hotel because of protests from the staff. Tom O’Carroll, the new Chair of PIE, now began to attract increasing press attention, and he was placed by his employers on extended leave from his position as Press Officer at the Open University. Within this context, critics of the proposal to lower the age of consent began to claim that the liberals who supported this, including the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, had been seduced by arguments that were, in fact, emerging out of the paedeophile movement.
82 ‘NCCL Wants Incest Made Legal’, Guardian (9 March 1976); ‘Make Age of Consent 14’, The Times (6 March 19760.
83 ‘For Adults Only’, Daily Mirror (24 August 1977). The image of ‘Feb’ ran alongside another item on PIE: ‘Child Sex Group Goes On’ (26 August 1977).
84 In 1976, the Dutch National Centre for Public Mental Health report on Paedophilia and Society had recommended the abolition of all sections of the Penal Code dealing with non-violent sexual conduct with children. Leader of the campaign for legalisation, MP Edward Brongersma, questioned the evidence on long-term harm and suggested that the hidden scale of such behaviour indicated that the current stance of legal prohibition was not proving effective: Edward Brongersma, ‘The Meaning of “Indecency” with Respect to Moral Offences involving Children’, British Journal of Criminology, 20 (!(*)), 20-32. Brongersma was a lawyer by background and was a member of the Dutch Senate for the Labour Party 1945-50 and 1963-77. He had been arrested in 1950 for having sexual relations with a seventeen year old, when the age of consent was twenty-one, and spent eleven months in prison. As a result, he became an advocate of more liberal legislation and played a role in abolition of Article 248a of the Dutch Civil Code, which led to the lowering of the age of consent for homosexual sex from twenty-one to sixteen. He subsequently supported a further lowering. He resigned from the Senate in 1977 and devoted his energies to the work of a foundation bearing his name which collected books and papers on the subject of paedophilia. He also worked on a study of Loving Boys, published in 1987 and 1990. Controversy followed his death in 1998 when pornographic images of children were discovered in his collection. This material was removed by the authorities and the archive was deposited at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.
…
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http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19790505&id=aBc-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=GEoMAAAAIBAJ&pg=5495,1457890
Glasgow Herald – 5 May 1979
Mr Tom O’Carroll has lost his appeal against unfair dismissal from his job as press officer to the Open University, it was announced yesterday. Mr O’Carroll, aged 33, of Lovat Street, Newport Pagnall, Bucks, is chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange which is campaigning for legalised sex with children. The tribunal decided: “The applicant had put himself in a position whereby he could not properly do the job for which he was employed.”
***
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