Peter Townshend has been put on Britain's official sex offender registry for five years - even though Scotland Yard established he never possessed child porn, and he has not been charged with child porn or pedophilia. This after a controversy when it was learned in January that Townshend had visited a child porn site in 1999 while trying to learn more about what he still calls "the shocking material readily available on the Internet."
"The police have unconditionally accepted that these were my motives in looking at this site and that there was no other nefarious purpose, and as a result they have decided not to charge me," Townshend said in a May 6 statement. "I accept that I was wrong to access this site, and that by doing so, I broke the law, and I have accepted the caution that the police have given me."
The 57-year-old rock legend - much of whose earlier music for and with the Who dealt with child abuse - was handed a "caution" by Kingston station police, over his having the child porn site with his own credit card. Townshend has insisted his purpose was nothing more than researching child porn for a book he was writing that planned to deal with child abuse.
Kingston police said that that was not an acceptable defense, and Townshend was put on the sex offenders' registry for a five-year period. However, Scotland Yard in a statement acknowledged Townshend never actually downloaded or possessed child porn imagery and had cooperated completely with the Operation Ore investigation, despite the flogging his public image took when it was revealed he was under the project's investigation.
"From the very beginning, I acknowledged that I did access this site and that I had given the police full access to all of my computers," Townshend said in a statement. "As I made clear at the outset, I accessed the site because of my concerns at the shocking material readily available on the Internet to children as well as adults, and as part of my research toward the campaign I had been putting together since 1995 to counter damage done by all kinds of pornography on the internet, but especially any involving child abuse."
As the co-founder and chief songwriter for the Who, Townshend's early songs dealt with child abuse, from a small boy abused into being a transvestite by his mother and sisters ("I'm A Boy") to Tommy, the rock opera whose deaf, dumb, and blind protagonist suffers sexual abuse from his uncle.
On his own Website, Townshend said British police work closely with Internet Watch Foundation to monitor child porn and pedophilia, "and any member of the public accidentally discovering such images should notify the IWF."
Townshend and lead vocalist Roger Daltrey are the only surviving original members of the Who. Drummer Keith Moon died in 1976, and bassist John Entwistle died in 2002.
