Freedom of thought - An anthology of creative works by prisoners

Perhaps we were the victims of new laws that forbade the persecution of those old favourites, gays, blacks and Jews; we boy-lovers, bunched together with child rapist and murderers, had become society's new scapegoats. Perhaps it was because we were seen to be attacking society at its very roots, for the dominant ideology saw children as the world's future, to be protected at any cost; we were accused of undermining the power of state and parent over their most prized possession. These were dangerous times. Reactionary right-wingers had been 'screaming like banshees' in the USA, calling for a pogrom on all of us. Experts in child abuse came out of the woodwork as governments began to set up agencies across the world with millions of dollars to finance their campaigns. Those desperately fierce laws, passed unanimously against us in outraged and incensed parliaments, sent men to prison for decades. And who in their right mind would have dared to stand and contradict them? [...]

Grooming, they call it. I was introduced to that word only after I went to prison and discovered the wonderful world of Sex Offender Treatment Programmes. I needed to be resocialised; that was another one of those words they used on me. I had been grooming the boy to be my victim, they told me, with a confidence born of textbook evangelism. I was labelled cunning and manipulative for keeping our relationship covert. As if they had given us any alternative. The ironies abounded; if I had beaten him regularly the law would have paid scant attention, but the fact that I had been kind to him and treated him well, especially when we were at our most passionate, condemned me as unutterably dangerous; for what could possibly be worse than a man who loves a boy?

source: 'Legend' by 'an Australian prisoner'; Taken from 'Freedom of Thought - an anthology of creative works by prisoners'; Wallace Hamilton Press New York; 2007