Derek Scally has written a revealing article in today’s Irish Times about what he calls “a little-known detour in the 1968 student revolution”, a project to sexually “liberate” children. Incredibly, as late as 1980 the German Green Party debated a motion aiming to “liberalise sex between children and adults”.

The project of the ‘68ers’ was the initiative of a group called Kommune 2, which, as Scally puts it “eliminated social conventions like private property and monogamous relationships.”

Those in Kommune 2 promoted ideas like ‘free love’ and polygamy as to combat shame, “in their eyes the chief weapon of bourgeois societies to control citizens’ will, thoughts and sexuality,” Scally says.

He writes: “The children were raised jointly by all adults who made it their goal “not just to tolerate but to embrace child sexuality”. They documented their hands-on efforts in some detail, extracts of which surfaced recently in Der Spiegel magazine.

“On a typical day, April 4th, 1968, communard Eberhard Schultz reported in graphic detail how Grischa (a three year old girl) got into bed with him and began stroking him intimately, which he reciprocated.

“Unknowingly, the two children [Grischa and four year old Nessim, a boy] became stars of the progressive educational scene. A leading left-wing magazine printed a double-page photo spread of Grischa and Nessim romping naked in the commune.

“The sexualisation of children and child-rearing spread to the “Red Freedom” kindergarten in the Kreuzberg district.

“Teaching plans from 1969 include the “development of socialist personalities” and “Agitprop” about the Vietnam War. Playtime was devoted to “street battles”, in which the infants were divided into groups of students and police or “pigs”. The sexual education of the toddlers was promoted through group study of pornographic magazines and sexual pantomime.”

Scally also points out that this culture had become such an integral part of left wing culture that in the interests of “open debate” “the left-wing Tageszeitung newspaper regularly published articles on child sexuality”.

In one 1979 series, he says, “a male author praised the ‘liberating feeling’ of sex with children. A motion at the 1980 Green Party conference sought to “liberalise sex between children and adults”.

Apparantly leading left-wing figure Daniel Cohn-Bendit (pictured) now accepts that the sexualisation of children was “a step too far”, which is pretty convenient, considering that, in 1982, on a German talk show, he described watching two-year-old girls changing their clothes as “an incredibly erotic game”.

The radical left’s shock, horror and outrage at child sexual abuse would seem to be a relatively recent business, on the basis of these revelations.

For those who want to read more on this topic, German news magazine Der Speigel has an article which provides a fuller treatment of the issue.