Imagine this scenario:

You are shopping in one of the large shopping centres – Westfield’s at Bondi Junction for you Sydneysiders; Chadstone for those in Melbourne. Each city of any size in Australia has at least one. It is crowded and noisy: the sound of children’s voices form the shrill top note of the hubbub that can be almost overwhelming.

Then you distinguish the sound of a child sobbing. Around the next corner you find a child, very young, lost, frightened and distraught, separated somehow from parents. You talk to the child, squatting down and hugging the child to comfort and to try to get a description of the parents. Shattering sobs are the answer. You stand up, look around wildly and call out into the passing crowd and into the doorways of the nearby shops: “Has anyone here lost a child?” Only shaking of heads and negative answers.

So what do you do? You take the child by the hand, suggest that “we will go and find Mummy” and lead off to the Lost Children’s unit in the Managerial offices for the centre. Once there, a public address announcement can reunite the child with the parents as well as reassure them, who must have been frantically searching, that their child has been found and is safe and well.

On the way, because the alternating screams and sobs are attracting a lot of attention towards you, some sympathetic and some rebuking, you buy the child an ice-cream to try to induce calm or at least muffle the screams. You take the child by a now sticky paw, and you progress to the management office.

By the time the child has been reunited with parents, having spread melting ice cream all over your clothes and hands, and with the effusive thanks of the parents ringing in your ears, you are ready to sit down in a nearby cafe to have a restorative coffee (or stronger) and to feel the glow of a job well done. Right?

Wrong.

Beware: in the politically correct, tortuous and downright silly minds of some who have managed to convince the passive public at large as well as legislators, you have committed child abuse. What, I hear you ask? A hug and an ice cream and taking the child by the sticky hand to go to the Management Office? So the parents can be reunited with their child? And, incidentally taking up time to do all this out of a tight shopping schedule? Out of kindness and community spirit?

Yes.

Here in Australia at present (2014) the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Abuse is conducting hearings. The commissioners have been listening to, and the public reading, stomach-churning accounts of shocking abuse of children in religious and other institutionalised care in the evidence given by a parade of devastated men and women whose lives have been ruined not only by the activities of the paedophiles and sadists, but also by the way the institutions refused to respond appropriately to their complaints – whether as children at the time or later as adults. We have read about paedophiles systematically preying upon children, and others sending children elsewhere in Australia to ‘service’ paedophile rings; about men who have faked vocations to the priesthood, abusing their position in various Christian denominations in order to get access to the children. There have been horrific accounts of neglect, physical and sexual abuse, even torture.

So, as is the case in all human endeavours the pendulum has now swung so far in the opposite direction that actions are tagged abuse only because they are associated with some of the grooming behaviours of paedophiles. Like hugging a crying child. Teachers are banned from doing this. Like buying the child in our scenario an ice cream (or lollies or anything that could be interpreted as an ‘inducement’). Taking the child by the hand to walk to the Management offices likewise, and of course removing the child from the area where you found it in order to get there.

The fundamental importance of Intention and Consequencesto assessing whether actions are grooming and child abuse

It is very true that an unattended child could be lured away with lollies and ice-creams and abducted by a paedophile. This was one of the forms of behaviours that prevailed in the more innocent, or at least less suspicious times of the mid-20^th century. The difference between the actions in our scenario, and the actions of a paedophile lies in (a) the intention and (b) the consequences. The paedophile intended these actions to result in luring the child away, the consequences of which was an abduction and horrors to follow. In our scenario, the intention is to help the child to be reunited with its parents; the consequences are precisely that. For you to be reported to the Police for attempted child abduction or reported to the CCYP to prevent you working with children, in such circumstances, would be outrageous and common sense would be affronted.

But the only difference between you and the paedophile is the intention and the consequences.

A huge difference.

 In Part 2 of this article I ask the reader to imagine him or herself in a scenario not dissimilar from that of Drew’s, and I draw some conclusions about the misapplication of these principles to that case.

In Part 3 of this article I examine definitions of ‘grooming’ and ‘child and adult sex abuse’ and conclude that they most definitely do NOT apply to Drew’s case.I ask the question: ‘how could this have happened?’ and explore some answers.

Post filed under Anglican Church, Drew & Pippa.