The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[Magda Hassan]

Barbara Kahan, Peter Righton, Louis Minster and Malta

Barbara Kahan pioneered the development of social work in UK with children and families, taking it on as a career from 1948 and its very inception. From the point at which she took her first post at Dudley in 1948 as Children's Officer where she created its first local authority children's home to spending 1951 1970 building Oxfordshire's cohesive approach to social services, working closely with her husband an Oxford based child psychiatrist, managing Louis Minster (9 years before he was to become Director of Social Services at Richmond), as County Care Child Officer for Oxfordshire in the mid 1960s to taking opinion from Peter Righton report on Staffordshire's Pin Down regime in the 1991 report and championing distance learning education particularly for residential children's care workers a special interest of Righton's.
Due to Kahan's pioneering role, she is a person around which others have pivoted in their roles within their remit of child welfare whether for the state or charities. Despite Kahan's formal retirement from civil service in 1980 her continued influence and kudos was demonstrated when she was asked to work on the Pin Down report 10 years post retirement, in her early 70s.
Her life's work in essence was the transferral of responsibility for children in care from the government to the local authority. I haven't yet read the Pin Down report in full but will need to. However, it's interesting to look at her life's work, where she spent her time and efforts and who she influenced, managed or sought opinion from during her career before looking further at the report.
As Ian Pace points out on his blog (featuring much detailed information on Peter Righton, some of which is featured in the chronology below): "In 1981, Righton published his most blatant article to date, The adult', in Brian Taylor (ed), Perspectives on Paedophilia (London: Batsford, 1981), pp. 24-40. Drawing upon an unholy canon of paedophile writers, Righton made the case for sex with children being unharmful, in his characteristically elegant manner. No-one who read this could have been in any doubt about Righton's inclinations (or the nature of the volume in general)."
Despite Righton's public clues to his private life Kahan still invited Righton's advice for the Pin Down report in 1991, speaking publicly In The Secret Life of a Pedophile (BBC's Inside Story documentary see below) about Righton's explanation to her for his conviction for child abuse images and the shield his homosexuality gave him from the suggestion that underage sex was underage sex no matter which underage gender he was interested in.

Kahan concludes at 42:50: "I feel that perhaps I should have made the connections earlier, but the difficulty is that first of all somebody presents themselves in the way that Peter presented himself. Secondly, he took enormous trouble, now in retrospect to keep his private life from his professional life and thirdly one would have hesitated to extend ideas beyond the fact that he was homosexual into other fields, but in many respects he must be seen as a conman. He certainly conned a wide range of people in the social work world who I'm sure feel as upset about is as I do."