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The Evening Standard
January 29, 2004
False complaints
Letter to
the Editor
by Bevan Berg, Mt
Wellington
You as an editor were a voice of social values, and
a guardian of journalistic responsibility.
Now you must be feeling somewhat empty having sold your soul to write
"Tracking down the sexually violent" (editorial, January 23).
Such an eloquent diatribe masks the conspiracy against your conscience --
your integrity ever hopeful that deception would be its saviour. Quietly at
the end you whisper your betrayal of society, your condemnation of men:
"The possibility of some complaints turning out to be false is surely a
small price to pay for ensuring that the sexually violent among us are
detected and put behind bars."
If irony has its way, your shame is yet to haunt you. Cry from behind the
bars, "I thought I was innocent until proven guilty."
You have traded the standards of personal responsibility and moral
accountability for the human inevitability of corruption and apathy.
The assumption that the protection of every last possible victim allows you
the incontestable occupation of the moral high ground is an ignorant belief
that offers nothing more than certain disaster.
You have made your choice and I have made mine. They are two views that could
never be further apart, but my mind is free and yours is not.
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