Listening and learning

It was the summer of 2000, and the then largest circulation Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, was in the middle of a high-profile ‘name and shame’ campaign against alleged paedophiles.

Over successive weekends, the newspaper published row after row of pictures of men convicted of child sexual abuse offences. If parents were aware of the paedophiles in their midst, the paper reasoned, they would be better able to protect their children.

The prompt for the News of the World’s campaign was the awful abduction and murder of a young girl, Sarah Payne, from a country lane in West Sussex. It later came out that Sarah Payne’s murderer, Roy Whiting, had a previous conviction for the abduction and assault of a child.

The newspaper’s campaign was highly controversial in criminal justice circles. It appeared to lead to what some, including me (more on this in a moment) dubbed ‘mob’ justice.

In one case, a paediatrician in south Wales fled her home, after she was targeted by locals who misunderstood her job title. In another case, a man was confronted by his neighbours, who mistakenly believed he was one of the individuals featured on the front page of that weekend’s newspaper.

I helped to establish a coalition of police, probation and child protection specialists, which successfully persuaded the News of the World to end its campaign.

But during those febrile weeks over the summer of 2000, I found myself going in and out of TV and radio studios, arguing why the News of the World’s campaign was irresponsible, and that there were better ways to protect children from those who would harm them than ‘mob rule’.

As a result, some campaigners, broadly supportive of the newspaper’s campaign, took to describing me as a paedophile apologist.

Back to that moment in the green room. I was debating the issue with a representative of a campaign group composed largely of concerned mothers, which was supportive of what the newspaper was trying to do, if not entirely comfortable with their approach.

While waiting to go on air, I took my chance. “I’d really appreciate it”, I said to her, “if you and your fellow campaigners would stop calling me a paedophile apologist. I’m not. I want to protect children as much as anyone else”.

“OK Richard”, she said. “I’ll stop calling you a paedophile apologist if you stop calling us a mob. We’re not a mob. We’re concerned mothers who want to protect our children”.

I stopped, right then, calling her and those she worked with a mob. And she stopped calling me a paedophile apologist.

It was an important learning moment for me; one that I have thought about a lot over the years.

Campaigning and advocacy work is often sustained by a belief in the essential rightness of our own positions, and the essential wrongness of those standing for things we oppose. It is then a small step to conclude that those offering opposing viewpoints are merely ignorant and foolish, or acting out of bad faith, or all of these things and more.

The language we use, about ourselves and about those we oppose, often tends to reflect this binary mindset: often simplistic, sometimes downright abusive.

Yet achieving meaningful change, more often than not, relies on building bridges and fostering solidarity, not laying down trenches and emphasising what are often relatively superficial divisions. 

And this means listening as much as telling, and being open to learning from those we seek to influence, rather than assuming we have the monopoly of wisdom.