The journalist and survivor Alex Renton is used to receiving emails about child sexual abuse. In 2022 his Radio 4 series In Dark Corners exposed the predatory teachers who operated with virtual impunity in some of Britain’s most elite private schools, ignored and even protected by the institutions they worked at. Since then, his inbox has been full of messages from fellow survivors reaching out with their stories, with thousands of allegations flooding in.
The email Renton received in spring 2024 was different. It’s a document from the 1980s, written on a typewriter and covered with annotations, full of names and addresses. It was “like being handed a loaded gun”, he admits as he and his producer look through its pages. The document claims to list members of the “Paedophile Information Exchange”, known as “Pie”, a pro-paedophile lobbying group that campaigned throughout the 1970s and 1980s for the UK to make it legal for adults to have sex with children as young as four. He shows the list to Private Eye’s Francis Wheen, himself a survivor from his school days. Some of the names are familiar. Others have listed schools as their addresses.
Renton wants to know: did the police have access to this list? The notes would suggest they did – if so, what did they do about it to ensure children were not being harmed? And what happened to all these members? How many of them are still out there, in positions of authority that could enable abuse?
Thus begins the second season of In Dark Corners, a series which, it feels, no one wanted to have to make. Renton goes back in time to trace the history of Pie – its tactics, infiltrating youth groups and civil rights movements dedicated to social change, and efforts to push its agenda into the political mainstream. In the present, he’s still investigating the mysterious list. His tone is measured, devoid of emotion, as the grimmest details emerge. There is no sensationalism. It’s a bleak, bitter way to kick off the new year. But it’s also impossible not to listen.
[See also: The truth about the grooming scandal]
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap