Irredeemably Useful

Despite the best efforts of the major churches to protect and indulge the ones who really matter, public understanding of paedophiles has progressed very little over the last few decades, according to the Canadian Mennonite founder of a charity dedicated to social reintegration of convicted child sex offenders. Even in Britain, with its free and fearless media lynch mob and its legislature divided between the hang-and-flog moralists and the corporate empty suits of profitable penitentiarism, it seems there are few signs of a more rehabilitative attitude emerging. From the smallest to the largest, every social group needs its outcasts and scapegoats, who for best results should reflect the less praiseworthy aspects of the collective psyche and thereby deflect the rabble's wrath away from its lords and masters. Followers of a Palestinian magician hunted down witches; the first country in the world to declare itself a people's republic spent a century in paranoid terror of communism; and the first generation in many to leave its children worse off than itself has also found an appropriate pariah.