By Lisa St Aubin de Terán
I came across the source for The Hobby by chance in an airport lounge, watching a satellite interview with a detective from Scotland Yard describing how he tracked down a gang of high-ranking British paedophiles by following his intuition and a handful of photographs. He told how, for over a year, none of his colleagues at the newly-formed Anti-Paedophile Unit believed there was actually a crime to uncover. And he told how a mother in Hackney had complained about an elderly peeping tom staring from afar at her 6-year-old when the little girl did handstands. But when 2 policemen went to ask the OAP to desist, the old man was terrified and wet himself. Intrigued by the dozens of photos of little blonde girls around the flat, one of the policemen felt something was off and wondered what, or who, the old soldier was afraid of.
Later, the policeman returned with a warrant for the photos. He continued to feel that the OAP was hiding something scary, but he didn’t know what, so he sent the photos to the new Anti-Paedophile Unit. In The Hobby, this triggers one man (D.I. Custer) to become a different sort of predator as he tracks down a trail of rape and murder. And along the way, he meets his match and is helped by D.S. Jolly Campbell.
While a great deal of research went into this novel, I found an intriguing absence of any trace of this case on the internet. And yet, long ago, I personally saw that TV interview and can still remember much of it verbatim. My next research will be to continue to search for how and why even the source material for The Hobby is missing. Is this ring, this gang, this investigation what was in that report on ‘high-ranking paedophile ring’ that was handed to Leon Britten back in the 1980s and then went missing? Is that what I stumbled on? Not only has that report never been published: it has never been found!
The Hobby and its array of abused children and child abusers, tackles a subject that has festered inside me ever since I was a child. And that is not because I was abused, but my mother worked with hundreds of child victims and, over the years, I got to know several of them. So, sex with children and the tangle of crimes that entails are things that have shocked, saddened and puzzled me for years. And perhaps one of the biggest question marks has always been ‘Why?’
Why do grown men feel lust for children and, sometimes, even for babies? And why do so many such men feel justified in satisfying that lust? And why do we ignore and allow it? I understand how we shy away from the very idea of it and prefer to pretend that it won’t happen to us or to our children because our friends and families are nice, decent people who wouldn’t dream of grooming our kids. But, alas, many of them would and do, and our collective refusal to delve into that particular taboo means that not only are literally hundreds of thousands of children sexually abused, but also that some of the predators literally get away with murder.
The Hobby shines some light onto the whole murky and often gruesome subject of paedphilia. And, while never condoning what each predator does, it seeks to unfold some of the reasons why they do it. And it looks at some of the victims and tries to uncover why each is so vulnerable: why each is such easy prey. And it also lifts the corner of the veil that transforms children into child stars, and shows (from the viewpoint of one such a celebrity) what can be yet another form of abuse.
I am on Instagram (lisa.staubindeteran) and also on Facebook, and once you have read The Hobby, if there are any armchair sleuths out there who can shine any light on the above, I would welcome all the help I can get.
Share this page
