UK: The ‘right’ to sleep with children was one ‘civil liberty’ that NCCL [National Council for Civil Liberties] supported. “The Seventies was an era of sudden sexual emancipation. To some on the Left, sex with children was just another boundary to be swept away.”
In 1980, O’Carroll and the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) – a body founded to openly lobby for child sex – were part of NCCL, now Liberty, Britain’s foremost mainstream civil rights organisation.
In 1975, NCCL had granted PIE official “affiliate” status. It put O’Carroll on one of its working groups, it made him a platform speaker at an NCCL conference in spring 1977, and it strongly defended paedophiles against “hysterical and inaccurate” newspaper attacks.
There was, to be fair, internal opposition to this. . . .
But such voices were a minority; for most of the Seventies and early Eighties, the “right” to sleep with children was one of the “civil liberties” that NCCL supported and the policy differences with PIE were ones only of degree. PIE favoured lowering the age of sexual consent broadly to four (as they generously allowed, a baby below that would “lack the verbal skill to communicate its consent”). The comparative moderates of NCCL backed a reduction merely to 10, so long as it could be demonstrated that consent “was genuinely given”.
NCCL vigorously opposed new cornerstone child abuse legislation. In a letter to the Home Office in April 1978, it argued fiercely that child pornography should not be banned as “indecent” unless it could be shown that the child depicted had been harmed. The NCCL official who wrote this letter was its legal officer, Harriet Harman.
Ms Harman is now, of course, deputy leader of the Labour Party.