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If I had children at the Hewett School in Norwich I am not sure how I would react to the news that a PE teacher, Paul Reeve, had worked there in spite of appearing on the Sex Offenders' Register. But I hope I would be a little more philosophical than the tabloid headline-writers, who took great delight in branding Mr Reeve a "pervert" and "paedophile".
There is no suggestion that Mr Reeve has ever abused a child. What he has done is to accept a police caution for purchasing child porn over the internet with his credit card. That he did so may be an indication that he harbours unhealthy, Socratean fantasies - or it may be, as he himself maintains, that he bought the pornography by accident, without realising the true nature of its content.
All I know is that I trust the Department of Health's psychologists to make a judgement
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A demented paedophile witch hunt alarms
ross clark |
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on the suitability of Mr Reeve to work with children better than I trust the mob. The public's fear of paedophiles under, and indeed in, the bed has reached such demented proportions that it makes Senator McCarthy look reasonable. It was summed up by the attack on the house of a female paediatrician in South Wales, her attackers mixing up her job title with the word "paedophile".
One wonders whether it is not a case of that old wisdom: we hate in others what we dislike in ourselves. Some 40 per cent of all traffic on the internet is pornography. It is hard to believe that among Mr Reeve's snarling accusers are not a fair number of people who also have a habit of surfing the web behind closed curtains in the small hours - and who in their search for titillation have not themselves strayed onto illegal websites featuring rape and under-age sex. 
FIRST POSTED JANUARY 13
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