There is a scandal on at the moment in Stockholm about a 32-year-old man who went by “hotboy” online, and seems to have had sex with 130 young girls whom he met over the net. He had Aids, or at least HIV, and knew it: he had been infected for fifteen years. He took no precautions. The youngest victim was 12. At least two of the girls he had sex with are now HIV positive. Around 120 have not been tested yet.
The thing that really saddened me about the story was not so much his behaviour: there are psychopaths all over the world. It was the fact that 120 or more young teenage girls were prepared to meet him for sex in an F1 hotel on the outskirts of Stockholm. I can’t see this as anything but an expression of misery; yet by all the measures we have got of children’s happiness, there are far more miserable children in British cities. Incidentally, although the Swedish papers don’t print his name, as is their custom, they do reveal that he is a British citizen.
If a picture of hell is one of no hope, then this is a picture of hell. I have no future, then I’m going to make sure others, whose future is before them, are denied a time to flower and mature.
We have a local drug dealer who targets school kids, his drug dealing funds his own habit. While the outworkings are not necessarily as fatal, the dynamics are the same.
Aftonbladet has named him, and published his picture too: see today’s front page at http://www.aftonbladet.se
Oh. Thanks. Will update accordingly.
I know what you mean by “expression of misery,” yet my judgment of such things has recently been challenged. An exchange I had recently with Unfogged’s Jackmormon suggested a widespread desire on the part of young women to experiment with sex safely. Now obviously, as you and I understand it, this guy and the circumstances of meeting him could hardly be less “safe,” but what is meant is free from social consequences, relationship anxieties, etc. So the situation may simply look different to many very young women, looking for a sexual experience with the fewest possible strings attached. The appropriate guy for this is selected by criteria profoundly counter-intuitive, in other words.