The faults and foibles of a paedophile.(John Marsden)

THERE IS SOMETHING profoundly disturbing about High Court Judge Michael Kirby referring to the late Sydney lawyer John Marsden's paedophilia as "faults and foibles". This disturbance is further compounded by the fact that our legal system protected John Marsden's name, allowing him to continue to practise as a prominent Sydney lawyer after he was found guilty as a paedophile who had sexually abused an eight-year-old boy. The offence took place in the late 1960s and the conviction was recorded in 2001.

Marsden then sued Channel Seven, in Australia's longest-running defamation case, for $7 million, for labelling him a paedophile. New South Wales Labor frontbencher, Deirdre Grusovin, was censured for naming him as a paedophile in parliament. The victim, Paul Michael Frazer, however, was reduced to a victim's compensation payment made by the state of $53,078, after being manipulated and harassed by Marsden's money and knowledge of our legal system.

Paedophilia is the word used to describe the activity of fully conscious adults who seek to have sex with children. Paedophiles seem to be mostly "addicted" to sex. That is, sexual gratification is all they live for--it may be that this form of sexual gratification is the only form of pleasure that a paedophile can gain from life. Often, paedophiles seem to be intelligent and successful people holding down professional, highly paid positions. The law, education and the churches have all contained substantial numbers of paedophiles.

Paedophilia is about the closest and clearest human action to evil I can imagine. It is more clearly evil than most murders. Torture may be another human activity that is clearly evil. By "evil" I do not just mean very bad, one-off, behaviour, but also an activity which by its nature sets in train its own addiction and survival throughout many generations and vast numbers of innocent human beings. It is as conscious and deliberate an action as that of a heroin addict or alcoholic. It is an evil that almost all human beings do not countenance. That such profound selfishness or self-obsession is godless is of little concern to many, but that it is also sociopathological must concern any civilised society.

There are those who eulogise paedophilia, such as the ancient Greeks, who saw no harm in sexual indulgence with a young boy. In literary circles we may view paedophilia through Nabokov's Lolita, or thinly veiled pederast literature such as Germaine Greer's last book depicting the beauty of young boys throughout the history of art; during the filming of a documentary on the subject she was shown to be unable to restrain herself from groping a young nude male model.

How is it that this sort of literature should make one feel like a wowser, a killjoy or a prude for not giggling at the vulnerability of intelligent, sophisticated ageing icons making fools of themselves? Would a truly civilised society have nubile naked boys and girls with garlands in their hair pulling brightly coloured floats in a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras through the streets of Sydney?

A significant proportion of paedophile activity seems to be monosexual. That is, by far the greatest percentage of paedophiles seek same-sex victims. Psychiatry is at pains to point out that paedophilia and homosexuality are completely different conditions. Perhaps this is so; nevertheless it should not prevent the gay community from conducting as thorough a community education campaign as they have done with AIDS. Predatory homosexual sex with children and adolescent children who are "nearly" old enough is also not on.