This week’s hero is a 33-year-old hedge-fund manager from Luxembourg. Don’t back off: however nuanced your view of what Mirko Fischer did, it’s worth taking off your hat to him. This doughty young European businessman has lit a candle in the gathering darkness of our fearful superstition. I salute him.
The story is this. Mr Fischer was on a British Airways flight — London to Luxembourg — with his pregnant wife. He had the window seat, she the middle one; she asked to swap, so he did. This, however, put him next to an unaccompanied boy by the aisle: a youth of about 12. So the cabin staff ordered him to move back to the window, because company policy is that no man may sit next to a lone child.
Not being a cowed, guilt-tripped British male, our hero demurred. He was frankly puzzled. The crew insisted, saying the plane would not take off otherwise. Surrounding passengers were staring. Mr Fischer moved back to the window but later on, embarrassed and offended, wrote in protest to the airline and was fobbed off. So he took it to court, pleading sex discrimination on the ground that women passengers are not treated like this. Last week BA settled, paying £2,161 in costs and £750 in damages. Mr Fischer, keen to make it clear that it wasn’t about money, donated his damages and a further £2,250 of his own money to children’s charities, including Kidscape.
He felt, he said to the BBC, that quite apart from the implied insult to him and to all men, the wrong message is being sent to children. He resented the idea, so widely embedded now in British law and culture, that all males are likely molesters. BA attempted to defend itself by saying that it didn’t know his wife was there, as the policy applied only to men alone — though how it squares that with histories such as Brady, West and Huntley is hard to see. Besides, his wife was next to him, pregnant, and he had swapped seats for her comfort. They could have checked before moving the poor devil away from the (presumably equally embarrassed) schoolboy.
The reason it feels so impressive is that Mr Fischer, as a sensible European, was not afraid or reluctant to fight. I doubt that many British men would have the nerve: our men, because of the hysterical media and governmental response to paedophile incidents, are cowed. Hideously embarrassed, shamed as a gender, they are scared to smile at a passing child or help a lost one. I suspect that most of our compatriots would have changed seats without a murmur, and then spent the rest of the journey hidden behind a newspaper, refusing even to answer if, with the woman asleep, the child ventured to ask a question or get help adjusting his tray table.
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Paedophilia is sickening, criminal, predatory and deserves every severity. When it happens. But it is not the only risk in life, or the greatest. Of course reasonable care should be taken in employing those who take responsibility for children, but molestation is not a universal male trait, any more than a female one. To make all men into suspects is unfair, horrible and alienating: it tears a rift between the generations. And in a society where too many children have no father figure, it destroys an important and ancient relationship between the adult man — protector, provider, role model — and the rising generation.
Yet because of the prurient interest and the terror of stigma, rarely do British men rebel. Philip Pullman and his fellow authors did so over the last Government’s absurd demand that they get criminal checks before visiting schools: but that was a group action. For an individual to stand up for principle and innocence as Mr Fischer did would be embarrassingly tricky in the culture we have allowed to grow up. Most of our men wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves, or have idiots on messageboards murmuring “no smoke without fire” or “looks a bit gay to me” or “eyes too close together, know what I mean?”. Or, of course: “Why was he so keen to sit next to the boy, eh?”
The gallant Luxembourgeois was having none of this nonsense. In a radio interview he made it clear that as a father and a normal sociable man he quite enjoys children’s company. He objects to being regarded — on no evidence whatsoever — as being so dangerous that it would be impermissibly rash to let him spend ninety minutes in proximity to a 12-year-old, in public, patrolled by stewardesses with trolleyfuls of duty free. He stated the obvious and the system had to agree.
BA is going to look again at the policy, it seems: the least it could do is grade it by age. Frankly, any 12-year-old fit to be put on a plane all alone should already have been sufficiently educated to know what constitutes inappropriate behaviour in a strange adult. And even (oh, shocking!) to converse with one about the workings of the in-seat entertainment or the weirdness of the BA pudding. It’s part of growing up.
Sadly, too many parents collude with the authoritarian view that all men are dodgy. One woman on the radio said she was not paranoid but felt “relieved” that her 14-year-old daughter would never have to sit next to a strange man on a plane.
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Huh! As a 14-year-old diplo-brat travelling alone to Switzerland, I once sat next to a man with long tatty hair and a bizarre catsick-yellow paisley-print corduroy suit (aah, the Sixties . . . !). We got into conversation, and he turned out to be a rock-band roadie for The Who, checking venues. When, still deep in conversation, we strolled out of the baggage reclaim together, my sober-suited father flinched slightly at the sight of my new friend, but greeted him politely.
Later on, in the car, I lightly observed that as a Beatles girl I didn’t actually much like The Who; only then did dad show the first sign of alarm. “I hope,” he said sternly, “that you were civil to the man?”
That’s the way to do it. And before you shudder at my potentially narrow escape, let me hasten to assure you that even in the Sixties, a girl didn’t get put on a plane alone without knowing all about flashers, gropers, creeps and when to push the call button. Parents weren’t stupid; but they weren’t paranoid either.