Huw Edwards’s conviction on possession of indecent images of children is a lurid tale of exploitation, sexual and economic, and a pattern of exploitative behaviour, culminating in consumption of paedophile material, some of it of the most serious kind.
It leaves a trail of victims, names we will never know, deployed in the online underworld as objects of sick gratification, collateral damage in a squalid trade. There’s a trail of damage too towards a loyal wife and family. And it’s scorched earth at the BBC, where colleagues appeared frozen in indecision about how to deal with a famous face who they knew to be indulging in reckless behaviour. There were more red flags than on a Moscow May Day — an “investigations unit” contacted by relatives of a young man whom they claimed (rightly) was being paid for sexual images failed to pass on the information.
The benefit of the doubt was always given: the result was another three-year contract with automatic pay rises, even when managers had reason to worry. It continued in a defence (aimed, successfully, at keeping him out of jail) which claimed Edwards “did not gain any gratification” from the images and couldn’t remember viewing them.
A psychologist talked of a dominant father, the stress of growing up in a “puritanical” provincial milieu, frustration at not getting into Oxbridge, feeling resentment at senior colleagues who did and bouts of low self-esteem. It is a profile which would also fit a substantial portion of the professional workforce.
The victims are nameless and faceless, while Edwards has a crack defence team to tell us about his low self-esteem
The oldest moral conundrum is how much immoral behaviour can be excused by frustrations of one’s own. And yes, it is clear Edwards’s mental health has been grim and that the small ray of hope here is that he can be rehabilitated and prove as penitent as his defence claims — a small sign of that might be the return of the £200,000 pay the BBC gave him after his arrest.
Close friends might say that a degree of understanding for someone in extremis is justified. But exonerations and exceptions, even when clues of exploitative habits were in plain sight, have been a recurrent factor here. It is one thing to avoid rushing to judgment, quite another to accept that sexually motivated webcam relationships by a senior broadcaster were a minor HR hiccup, brushed aside when the next expensive contract was handed out.
This sense of exceptionalism persists: because fame, however tarnished, still grants the status of attention. Sadly less attention is paid to the fate of the anonymous victims — the children and young people who floated like uneasy ghosts through the court hearing as the content of files sent via Dropboxes (there were too many for WhatsApp) were revealed and cheery chats with a fellow paedophile about “naughty pics and vids” including 12 videos and 42 pics of one youngster alone.
Most of us wouldn’t want to see the images, which means it is too easy to skirt over what they entail — the robbing of innocence, the corruption of healthy sexuality. The victims are nameless and faceless, while Edwards has a crack defence team to tell us about his low self-esteem.
So it really is enough “poor Huw”, although the habit seems hard to break to judge by a final line in a BBC online summary: “He’s free from prison — but he is not free in the true sense of the word. His life choices will be watched … for years to come.”
Life choices? The people who are not “free” are the victims of sexual crime involving minors. Poor them.
