A Corrupter of Youth

The Huw Edwards "scandal" has a number of layers to it. Beyond the facts of the case there's the usual Murdoch press attempt to embarrass the BBC, the Sun's instinctive homophobia, and the hypocrisy of fellow journalists trying to erect firewalls. But there's another layer to this sorry tale that interests me and that's the prominence given to "parental concerns". From the outside, it appears to be a tale of parents disapproving of an estranged young adult's lifestyle. That would obviously not be news but for the tangential involvement of the celebrity, but it's also the case that it has to be presented as an anxiety that the audience can empathise with, hence the exaggeration that has led conspiricists to accuse Edwards of being a "groomer". This charge has been extended to the Corporation, reviving the claims of connivance and cover-up that have been routinely levelled since the scandals over Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. Whether you think the BBC are at fault or not, the point is that a specific incident has not only been blown out of proportion but is being held up as evidence of a wider corruption.

From the trial of Socrates onwards, the corruption of youth has been seen as an attack on society, undermining it by inculcating a nihilistic, amoral attitude among the next generation. While the formal charge against Socrates was "failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges" and "introducing new deities", this was largely a pretext for a more political struggle between democrats and oligarchs in which the corruption of youth overlapped with the encouragement of the latter. In other words, this was a narrow segment of the Athenian young (those rich enough to have Socrates as a teacher) within a narrow oligarchic class that stood in opposition to a less narrow, but by no mean expansive, democracy. This idea of the corruption of youth being a narrow concern of the elite - i.e. nobody imagined the youthful poor could be any more corrupted than they already were - would continue until the Early Modern period, when rigid hierarchies began to break down under the impact of commerce, nascent industry and empire. 

A common feature of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was the concern with the religious instruction of the young, both rich and poor, which reflected a wider anxiety about socialisation. At its extreme, this manifested in the witch craze and the belief that Satan was suborning the weaker vessels of society: women, adolescents and servants. Interestingly, the appearance of youth on the political stage as a discernible cohort in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was in the guise of a conservative aesthetic, for example the Muscadin (aka jeunesse dorée) of the Thermidorean Reaction and the Romantic movement's rejection of industrial modernity and distaste for the demands of vulgar democracy that it gave rise to. As industrialisation spread and the sanitary concerns of society came to the fore (natalism, the "national stock", eugenics), childhood was sentimentalised by the Victorians (The Water-Babies etc) while adolescence was framed as both destabilising (the anarchic schoolboy) and vulnerable, particularly to sexual corruption, culminating in the anxieties of Decadence (Oscar Wilde taking on the role of Socrates). 

This ambiguity continued into the early twentieth century with the contradictory tropes of the nobility of Doomed Youth and the moral dissolution of the Jazz Age. But one thing that was constant was the growing prominence of sex as the salience of religion declined. Up until the Lavender Scare in the US in the 1940s and 50s, which proceeded in tandem with the McCarthyite anti-communist panic, homosexuality was presented as a national security threat, and echoes of that anxiety were evident in the later British media treatment of the Cambridge Spy Ring. Following the public unmasking of Anthony Blunt in 1979, there was a coincidental turn in popular culture towards an obsession with child sexual abuse. This was partly inflamed by the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic that originated in the US and then spread globally, echoing the earlier witch craze, but there was also a strong and more persistent theme of establishment cover-up in the UK (reflecting the actual cover-up of Blunt after he was identified as a spy in 1964). This long outlasted the Satanic Panic and continues down to today.

A current locus of this moral panic is the debate around support for trans kids. The parallels between the media treatment of the Tavistock Centre and various social work departments in local councils in the 1980s and 90s should be obvious, and likewise the transphobic attempts to connect contemporary charities like Mermaids with the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange of the 1970s. What's worth mentioning in passing is that other newspapers deploring the way the Sun has handled the Huw Edwards story are often the same ones who think that trans rights have gone too far and threaten women, hence a determination to limit the scope of the "questions that must be asked" to the behaviour of one newspaper and the BBC. But the question we really should be asking is what is behind this heightened concern with the safeguarding of the young, coming as it does in an era when they are routinely denigrated as feckless spendthrifts and "woke" idiots whose turn to the left prompts all sorts of daft explanations in the desire to avoid mentioning the failures of capitalism. 

In the case in question we can see two impulses in play. On the one hand we have the traditional search for the corrupters of youth, despite the known facts suggesting that no crime has been committed (that lockdown breaches are now being suggested indicates that the barrel is being well and truly scraped). It's notable that the allegations against Edwards have multiplied but that they have also led to allegations against a number of other media names, emphasising that this is societal matter not simply the bad behaviour of one man. On the other hand we have the suggestion that the youth in question has made bad life choices, with the potent mix of drugs, sex-work and the Internet enough to terrify most parents into imaginative sympathy. The youth's charge that their parents' claims are "rubbish" can, I think, be legitimately extended beyond the facts in dispute to this characterisation of their lifestyle. And I think it is this estrangement that has caught the public imagination as much as the prurient interest in the private lives of the famous. It's another example of the creeping fear that the young are going to turn on their elders, and that reflects a guilt at the mess those elders have made of the world.