He was a victim of child sexual abuse but Richard Dawkins refuses to condemn the behaviour
AFTER admitting to being sexually abused as a child, renowned evoluntionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins has refused to condemn the behaviour.
Dawkins told Britain's The Times magazine that a schoolmaster "pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts". But he described it as a "mild touching up" that he was convinced did not do him or any of his fellow classmates "any lasting harm".
This is not the first time the outspoken atheist has discussed child abuse. According to a report by RawStory.com he made claims in April this year that parents who forced their children to accept their religious beliefs were abusers, and has also compared being raised as a Catholic to sexual abuse.
"I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours," Dawkins told The Times magazine. "Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today"
Dawkin's comments have been strongly criticised by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) an organisation that works with survivors of abuse.
"Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way," NSPCC child protection director David Watt told RNS. "But we know that the victims of sexual abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or yesterday."
Founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, Peter Saunders has also spoken out against Dawkin's remarks.
"Abuse in all its forms has always been wrong. Evil is evil and we have to challenge it whenever and wherever it occurs," Sanders told reporters...
http://www.news.com.au/world/he-was-a-victim-of-child-sexual-abuse-but-richard-dawkins-refuses-to-condemn-the-behaviour/story-fndir2ev-1226717774514