Apologists for paedophilia: As the Mail exposes more links between
senior Labour figures and a vile paedophile group, one man who was
abused as a child asks them: why won't you admit you were wrong?
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Demetrious Panton suffered terrible abuse at a children's home in Islington in the late 1970s
The childhood of Demetrious Panton
ended one night in July 1978, a few days before his 11th birthday. That
was when a man called Bernie Bain, who ran a care home in North London
where Panton lived, knocked on the door of his dormitory.
‘Hey, little fella — can’t you sleep again?’ whispered Bain. ‘Why don’t you come and watch telly in my room?’
Panton,
now a 46-year-old successful lawyer who once advised John Prescott on
race relations, will never forget how Bain, then 29, grabbed his tiny
hand, pressed a finger to his lips to ensure that he kept quiet and led
him to a dimly-lit bedroom, with beige soft furnishings, piles of filthy
clothes on the floor and ashtrays overflowing with Marlboro cigarettes.
He
will never forget the studied nonchalance with which this man pulled
back the duvet, patted his mattress and told him to join him in bed to
keep warm while they watched a cowboy movie together on his
black-and-white TV set.
And,
of course, Panton will never forget how Bain then slowly put an arm
around his shoulder, stroked his hair and told him that he had a tummy
ache.
‘He asked me to rub his tummy,’ Panton has recalled. ‘I started rubbing it, and he kept pushing me further down the bed.’
An
appalling sexual assault ensued. Immediately afterwards, Bain told the
child never to talk about the events that had taken place that night.
‘We have a secret,’ Demetrious remembers thinking. ‘He’ll get me; he’ll hurt me if I ever tell anyone.’
So began an appalling cycle of abuse. Within weeks, the assaults had escalated to rape. And they continued for more than a year.
‘He moved me into a bedroom of my own and would come in whenever he could,’ Panton has recalled. ‘I began to hate him.’
Demetrious
Panton was just one of hundreds of vulnerable children who were
systematically raped and sexually abused in care homes run by the London
borough of Islington in the Seventies and Eighties.
'I thought: "He'll hurt me if I ever tell anyone'- Demetrious Panton
He was targeted by a now notorious paedophile ring, whose members at some point ran every one of the council’s 12 care homes.
For
more than a decade, the group was able to prey on children with virtual
impunity, convincing Labour-run Islington’s political elite that anyone
who attempted to blow the whistle on their crimes was motivated by
homophobia.
Complaints were
systematically brushed under the carpet by officials who appeared to
give more weight to the so-called human rights of paedophiles than those
of children.
Though many
of Bain’s co-workers were aware of the abuse, they turned a blind eye,
Mr Panton says today. It wasn’t until he confided in his health worker
in 1979 that any steps were taken to investigate.
Even then, Bain was allowed to simply resign from the care home — without facing prosecution — and continue with his life.
He
told Islington Social Services that his sexual activity with the child
was ‘consensual’, and they chose to believe him. Panton was never
interviewed and the police were not contacted.
Bain
later moved to Morocco, where he was subsequently jailed for child
pornography offences in the Nineties. He killed himself in Thailand in
2000.
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Demetrious Panton, pictured as a child, endured a year of horrific abuse at the hands of Bernie Bain, who ran the home
Appallingly, Bain’s departure
from the home was not the end of Demetrious Panton’s ordeal. Not long
afterwards, Islington appointed another predatory paedophile to run the
care home at 1 Elwood Street.
His
name was Martin Ashley Saville. And for six months from January 1981,
he conducted a series of sexual assaults against Panton.
This
time police were called and Saville confessed to the abuse. But in
court, he argued that the then 13-year-old Panton had led him on — and
escaped with a three-month suspended prison sentence.
Even after that second crime, Islington Council appears to have taken a disturbingly relaxed view of Panton’s ordeal.
‘In a letter to my dad, on my
file, they wrote that I’d had a relationship with a man,’ Panton has
recalled. ‘How can a 13-year-old have a “relationship” with a grown-up?
Why didn’t they do anything?’
It would take more than 20 years for the scandal to be properly recognised and apologised for.
'How can they now talk about children's rights?'
- Mr Panton
Today, Mr Panton and the
hundreds of other survivors (he does not like to call himself a
‘victim’) of the Islington scandal are rightly recognised as having
suffered terrible injustice.
There
have been a string of public inquiries, and formal apologies, for the
systematic abuse that took place in the borough’s care homes and the
subsequent cover-ups. Many of those who were abused have received
compensation payments.
But there has been no proper police inquiry into several of the men involved.
Mr
Panton, an intelligent, highly-articulate man with an IQ of 137, is
today a respected professional with a PhD in philosophy. But he
continues to live under the shadow of abuse. He has never married, and
for most of his adult life has struggled to form romantic relationships.
And, with the clarity of a true survivor, he now knows exactly who to blame.
For
Mr Panton believes that the events that tarnished his childhood, and
hurt so many young children in Islington, were the inevitable fall-out
from a PR and lobbying campaign waged by a sinister organisation called
the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
Formed
in the early Seventies and boasting almost 1,000 members at its height,
it waged a long-running campaign for paedophiles to be seen as ‘child
lovers’ and abolish the age of consent.
It
cynically allied itself to the gay rights movement to gain credibility
in Left-wing political circles, arguing that paedophiles were an
oppressed minority whose human rights were threatened by child
protection laws.
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MP Jack Dromey (left), Labour deputy leader
Harriet Harman (right) and former Cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt
(below), ran the National Council for Civil Liberties
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The organisation’s crowning
achievement was to secure formal ‘affiliate’ status, from 1975 until the
mid-Eighties, with the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) —
now the respected lobby group Liberty.
At the time, the NCCL was run by a trio of future Labour grandees.
From
1978-82, Harriet Harman, now Labour deputy leader, was its legal
officer. Her husband Jack Dromey, now a shadow Home Office spokesman,
served on the NCCL’s ruling executive from 1970 to 79. And Blair
government Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was General Secretary from
1974 to 83.
This week, the
Mail published an investigation into the full extent of links between
the trio’s work for the NCCL and the paedophile lobby. We revealed that
Hewitt described the paedophile lobby organisation in glowing terms as a
‘campaigning/counselling group for adults attracted to children’.
We
further told how the NCCL lobbied Parliament for the age of sexual
consent to be cut to ten — if the child consented and ‘understood the
nature of the act’.
Our
exposé also revealed how it called for incest to be legalised, in what
one MP described as a ‘Lolita’s charter’. What’s more, in 1975, NCCL
lawyers attempted to muzzle hostile Press coverage of PIE and helped its
members under investigation by the police.
We
also uncovered documents in the NCCL’s archives that showed how, in
1978, Harriet Harman wrote an NCCL submission to MPs attempting to water
down child pornography laws.
Pressure
is mounting on these senior Labour Party politicians to explain their
actions after it emerged that police are investigating PIE in the wake
of the Jimmy Savile scandal, following claims there was evidence that
its members were abusing children ‘on an industrial scale’.
'It shouldn't be too hard for them to say sorry'- Mr Panton
Looking back to those days,
Mr Panton believes the NCCL played a crucial role in helping the
paedophile lobby influence social values and the Establishment.
Indeed,
by the late Seventies, it’s no exaggeration to say that PIE, and its
twisted philosophy, had come to dominate the way that many radical
Left-wing councils — such as Islington — ran their social services.
By
the mid-Eighties, when Mr Panton bravely decided to try to get an
explanation from Islington Council, the Labour borough was being run
Margaret Hodge.
Of course, she was one of that
coterie of Labour friends who included Harman, Hewitt and Dromey. What’s
more, Hodge (who like the others also went on to become a Labour MP)
was married to the man who was chairman of the NCCL during the
Seventies.
Henry Hodge, a
Left-wing solicitor who went on to become a High Court judge, presided
over the NCCL during its affiliation with PIE when the latter published
an ‘information’ leaflet, Paedophilia: Some Questions And Answers, which
showed how it was allying its cause to the gay rights movement.
It
read: ‘Homosexuals are now widely regarded as ordinary, healthy people —
a minority, but no more “ill” than the minority who are left-handed.
There is no reason why paedophilia should not win similar acceptance.’
Many
were shocked years later when, despite what publicly emerged about the
mistreatment of children in Islington care homes and her failure to
acknowledge or address the matter, Tony Blair appointed Mrs Hodge, who
was previously the council leader, as his Children’s Minister.
Meanwhile,
in places such as Islington, the endorsement by these Labour figures of
the vile PIE continued to have its malign effects during subsequent
years.
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The letter from Margaret Hodge to Demetrious Panton
PIE’s founder Peter
Righton — a prominent social worker later prosecuted for importing child
pornography from Holland — was, for example, put in charge of training
courses on which council staff learned how to care for vulnerable
children. Righton, who had a flat in the borough (as did PIE’s one-time
key member, his friend Morris Fraser) once boasted: ‘Every Islington
care home manager I know likes boys from 12.’
Under
Islington Council’s then trendy equal opportunities rules, employees
who declared themselves gay were exempted from intrusive background
checks that were supposed to prevent paedophiles working with children.
That
explains how Michael Taylor, an Islington care home manager exposed in a
2000 court case as a PIE member, was put in charge of several homes in
which abuse occurred. He was later jailed for four years for abusing
vulnerable children.
Today,
no one knows exactly how many Islington officials actually belonged to
PIE, and Mr Panton will never be able to establish whether his abusers,
Bain and Saville, were among their number, since its membership lists
have never been published.
But
he has little doubt that what he calls the ‘tentacles of the
organisation PIE’ and the ‘extreme political succour to paedophilia’
from figures who later became senior Labour politicians lay behind the
abuse he suffered.
QUESTIONS THEY WON'T ANSWER
The
Mail has posed a series of vital questions that Harriet Harman,
Particia Hewitt and Jack Dromey refuse to answer. They include:
To Harman, Hewitt and Dromey:
- During
your time with the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), it gave
significant support to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Do
you regret this support or feel inclined to apologise to the many
victims who suffered appalling abuse at the hands of this vile
organisation you helped legitimise?
To Hewitt and Dromey:
- The
NCCL granted formal ‘affiliate’ status to PIE. Why did you allow your
organisation to be associated with an outfit that advocated the
legalisation of paedophilia?
- PIE
submitted a report to MPs claiming that ‘girls as young as four months
can achieve orgasm’, and that four-year-old children can ‘communicate
verbally their consent to sex’.Given these utterly repellent views, why
did you let the organisation remain affiliated to your NCCL?
- The
NCCL made a written submission to Parliament’s Criminal Law Commission,
arguing: ‘Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an
adult result in no identifiable damage.’ On what basis, scientific or
otherwise, did you make this extraordinary claim?
- The
submission also called for the crime of incest to be abolished, arguing
that the suggestion that genetic damage may result from children born
of incestuous unions ‘is in direct contradiction to the practices of
successful animal breeders’. Do you still take this view?
To Harriet Harman:
- The
NCCL’s affiliation with PIE, its support for lowering (or even
abolishing) the age of consent, and its demand for the legalisation of
incest were all widely reported throughout the Seventies. Why, given
these morally offensive views, did you then take a job as legal adviser
to the NCCL?
He says: ‘The culture which PIE
articulated, and for which these politicians were standard-bearer, was
certainly something I came across.
‘The
view of PIE — that children can consent to sex, and that paedophiles
have rights — was exactly what I encountered when I tried to complain.
The tentacles of PIE’s philosophy had infiltrated the psyche of
Islington’s senior managers and politicians.’
Although
Harman, Hewitt and Dromey have refused to apologise for their links to
the paedophile organisation, many victims’ rights organisations have
called for them to do so for their ‘inexcusable’ support for the group.
Demetrious Panton agrees, saying the trio ought to publicly ‘acknowledge their mistakes’.
He
says: ‘Of course I don’t hold these politicians individually
responsible for the men who abused me. But I do believe they have a
responsibility to reflect and make comment about their actions during
that era.’
If Harman,
Hewitt and Dromey fail to address the issue, Panton believes they have
no moral justification to comment on any issue involving children.
‘There are serious credibility issues here,’ he says.
Panton
goes further — arguing that the NCCL’s support of paedophiles should be
considered as morally reprehensible as that of U.S. politicians who
opposed the cause of civil rights in the Sixties.
‘I’d
be lying if I said I was waiting for Patricia Hewitt to say sorry to
me. But I do feel that it would help bring a really shadowy part of
British public life to a close.’
Bitter experience, though, has taught Mr Panton not to be too hopeful of a speedy response from those in authority.
In 1985, when he was 18, he began writing letters to Islington Council seeking an explanation as to why he had been abused.
At
the time, the Council was run by Margaret Hodge. It took four years for
Islington to respond. And even then, it insisted that correct
procedures had been followed.
‘The
barriers I came across when I tried to report what had happened to me
was part of a culture where the rights of children were not taken
seriously,’ he recalls. ‘It was a culture where the viewpoints of PIE on
consent, and the rights of paedophiles, were given authority.’
The
full scale of the Islington scandal didn’t emerge until 1992, when the
London Evening Standard exposed the systematic abuse of children and the
failure of Margaret Hodge and colleagues to acknowledge or address the
matter.
It prompted a major
inquiry into the affair, which reported a string of failures by the
council to prevent abuse. But even then, Mr Panton did not receive an
adequate apology. Quite the reverse, in fact.
In
2003, Hodge, who was by then Children’s Minister in the Blair
government, learned that he was helping the BBC make a radio documentary
about the affair.
She
wrote to the BBC’s Labour-supporting chairman, Gavyn Davies, calling Mr
Panton an ‘extremely disturbed person’ and saying the programme should
be scrapped.
Not
surprisingly, Mr Panton sued. In November 2003, Ms Hodge agreed to issue
a formal apology, pay his legal costs, and contribute £10,000 to a
charity of his choice.
By then, it was more than 25 years since the night that Panton’s innocence had been first stolen.
For
him and other victims of the Paedophile Information Exchange, it is now
almost 40 years since Harman, Hewitt and Dromey worked to advance its
objectionable agenda.
‘Our politicians have apologised about slavery,’ says Mr Panton.
‘They have said sorry for countless events, on a whole range of issues, for which they weren’t personally responsible.
‘So on their one-time support for paedophiles, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to say sorry now
