Peter Wilby Quotes

If it had been known at the time that he'd got 'previous convictions' the context of the case would have been very different.

The New Statesman has now completed an internal review of all articles related to child sexual abuse that were published during Wilby’s editorship, or subsequently contributed by Wilby as a writer.
Approximately 19,000 articles were published during Wilby's seven years as editor, of which 126 have a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 126 articles, 12 contain comments or arguments that could reasonably be interpreted as either minimising the seriousness of child sexual abuse, or as questioning the integrity of victims, whistle-blowers, police or journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse of children. Four of the 12 remained available on newstatesman.com as of 18 August, and they have now been taken down.
Subsequent to his time as editor, Wilby contributed 659 columns or pieces to the New Statesman from 2006 to 2022, of which 37 contain a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 37 articles, four contain arguments that the degree of public concern around child sexual abuse is out of proportion to the actual scope and scale of the horrendous crime. Those four articles have been taken down.

Some of these thoughts, expressed more clumsily than I later wished, found their way into the New Statesman leader that, as editor, I wrote barely 24 hours after the attacks.

[Editorial on the September 11 attacks published shortly afterwards] American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the United States often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.

[T]he US government and media (along with their British cheerleaders) themselves raise the ideological stakes when they claim that we have seen attacks on freedom and democracy. That is one way of putting it: another is to say that these attacks, using deeply symbolic targets, have hit a civilisation that has grown complacent, selfish and in some respects decadent.

Wilby argued for "nuance" in these matters, while denigrating those who dared complain of abuse. There was nothing nuanced in the material Wilby collected and created over his career – they were crime scene photographs of our most vulnerable children being raped for his pleasure.

Almost anybody should be thankful that the US, not the Soviet Union, won the cold war. But a dominant or imperial power, however benign or enlightened, will be resented. The violent 9/11 attacks were not right - they were a criminal atrocity - but they were hardly surprising.

[W]hile those who allege abuse should be heard, accepting what they say as self-evidently true is not better than dismissing it as childish fantasy. It is just another form of not listening, and relying instead on prejudices and preconceptions. It also leads to a new set of victims. Abused children may suffer mental illness and suicidal thoughts. But so may those falsely accused.

When I read last week that the Press Complaints Commission had censured FHM magazine for printing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old girl, I looked to the press for coverage and comment. Surely, I thought, newspapers that are so determined to root out "evil" paedophiles and to denounce "pervs" who view child pornography would have something to say. ... There was not a word, for example, in the Sun, whose editor, Rebekah Wade, has always been such a sturdy opponent of paedophilia. That wouldn't be - would it? - because the red-tops fear they might themselves be caught out one day.

As New Statesman editor, he published articles denigrating the north Wales victims as "damaged" and manipulated by journalists such as me, all part of a modern witch-hunt in which the real victims were those accused of abuse.

Some "victims" will make false allegations, often prompted by lawyers, in the hope of substantial payments.

The death of the Soviet Union also deprived the global poor of something more intangible: not exactly hope, perhaps, but the sense of an alternative, of possibility.

His vision of the Statesman was as a totally independent, and therefore fearless, mischief-maker. Sometimes this worked - the magazine's anti-Iraq war campaign was prescient and much copied; sometimes it did not - New Statesman covers could take on the wrong taboos, viz its Zionist conspiracy or its Blair as Stalin covers, or more recently the issue marking John Paul II's death, in which the late Pope's impact on Africa's Aids epidemic was compared with that of prostitutes and truck drivers.

[A]buse is deeply distressing and highly damaging to the victim. It is not made significantly more so because the perpetrator holds a powerful political position or wears black robes. Such claims excite journalists and attract more public attention; they do not help victims.

To wide indignation on Fleet Street, Sir Ian suggested newspapers' blanket and emotive coverage of such cases, compared with the cursory treatment of black children who go missing in the inner cities, betrayed institutional racism. Was he right? Perhaps it's not racism exactly but, if we are honest, the story is enhanced if the child is blonde, blue-eyed and nicely dressed, though no paper would dare to spell out the awful subtext: that a child who looks attractive to readers will also attract a potential abuser.