Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle (born April 1st, 1960) is an English journalist and an associate editor of the politically conservative magazine The Spectator. He was an editor of BBC Radio 4's Today, and published works include Too Beautiful for You (2003), Love Will Destroy Everything (2007), The Best of Liddle Britain (co-author, 2007) and the semi-autobiographical Selfish Whining Monkeys (2014). He has presented television programmes, including The New Fundamentalists, The Trouble with Atheism, and Immigration Is A Time Bomb.

Regarding MAPs, AAMs, and related issues, Liddle has criticized UK law around child pornography. In his 2002 article for The Guardian titled "Should it really be a crime to look at child pornography?," Liddle wrote:

The law prohibits, in theory, even an accidental visit to a child-porn website. But we are told that prosecution would be unlikely to occur if it could be proved that the visit was, indeed, accidental. How do you prove that? No, really, officer, it was all a ghastly mistake. Will that wash? [...]

How absurd the law is. But at least it is an appropriate reflection of our collective neurosis and confusion about paedophilia generally. The one laudable and necessary aim - to protect children from abuse - has become warped by our consuming, obsessive hatred for those who find children sexually attractive. There is no causal link between viewing child porn and abusing children. And even if there were, it would not be sufficient, within the philosophy of our judicial system, to simply assume that an unpleasant penchant for the former presupposes guilt of the latter.

No matter how vile we may consider the sexual predilections of paedophiles, we should not be in the business of putting people in prison for simply looking at things. The law should be above the blind, howling, rage of Rebekah Wade's moronic vigilantes. But there is the whiff of Salem about it all.

Later, in 2012, Liddle penned the article "A teenage girl, a maths teacher and a righteous tabloid fury" for The Spectator. In it, he is critical of moral panic around mutually willing relations between highschool students and school staff, with Liddle joking that "the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids." "It seemed to me virtually impossible not to," Liddle explained, "and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one." Similar to Dr. Pat Sikes who looked back to her own schooldays to provided positive testimony of a consensual student-teacher relationship, Liddle wrote that

At my old comprehensive school a few teachers were known to be schtupping the pupils; one of them, a female teacher who was extremely foxy [...] copped off with some fifth-form lad, and another teacher (a man with a guitar and a faux rebellious attitude) gained the affections of an extremely attractive fourth-form girl. As pupils, we didn't remotely mind about this and both teachers were very popular. But I knew, when I was considering my career options, that this sort of behaviour was definitely frowned upon by the authorities and that I would not last the week in my new job. Frowned upon, although not much more, I ought to say — certainly not the deranged howling that is kicked up these days[.]