Just as the mobs of medieval villages meted out rough justice to social deviants, many of them perfectly innocent, so the contemporary media mob adopts a form of lynch law in the global village. Paedophilia becomes the modern equivalent of witchcraft, a subject on which it becomes legitimate to abandon all rational thought, all respect for legal process, all human empathy, all belief in redemption, all sense of proportion. The undoubted prevalence of abuse in some children's homes causes the police to regard almost any residential care-worker as an object of suspicion, and almost any child who has lived in a home as a likely victim. The terrible murder of an eight-year-old girl prompts the News of the World to "name and shame" any old fool who has ever been convicted of flashing at a 14-year-old on the local common. Other press commentators renew calls for castration, hanging (and, one would guess, drawing and quartering, if it were necessary to spin out another few hundred words on a quiet Monday morning) and incarceration on remote, uninhabited islands.
Much nonsense is talked and written about paedophilia, not least in the use of the term itself. The definition is "the condition of being sexually attracted to children", which is not in itself a crime. What the NoW and others are really campaigning against is child sexual abuse. We are told that offenders are peculiarly devious and calculating (they go to great lengths to establish contact with children and to win their trust), unusually morally defective (in that they see nothing wrong with what they do) and uniquely incapable of rehabilitation. These are at best half-truths: given that child abuse is based on a sexual compulsion, it can be more difficult to control than other forms of offending (and is as likely to be committed by old men as by young men), but to suggest that other criminals are not devious, calculating and morally defective is absurd. Child abuse, like any other crime, occurs on a continuum, from the Scout leader who fondles a small boy in a momentary aberration (and will be rightly punished for it) to the kind of monster who murdered Sarah Payne. To regard them both as beyond redemption or understanding, to list them together in a gallery of "beasts" is foolish. Child abuse arouses special revulsion, but it is not as unlike other crimes as people (particularly professional criminals) like to pretend. For example, just as prison often acts as a finishing school for potential burglars or bank robbers, by throwing small-time first offenders together with hardened villains, so it may perform the same function for "nonces", as they are known, drawing the one-off abuser into a paedophile ring. (Indeed, the NoW's own naming and shaming could as well serve as a contact list for the abusers themselves as a safeguard for parents.)
In other words, the uniqueness of the child abuser as a criminal type lies not so much in him as in our reactions to him. Parents naturally want to protect their children. The much-quoted statistic that far more children are murdered in their own homes than are murdered by strangers is not likely to impress the majority of parents, who do not expect to commit murder and therefore reasonably regard this threat to their offspring as precisely nil. Nor is it very reassuring to be told that children are 30 times more likely to be killed by a car than by a paedophile, since abduction and assault at the hands of a deranged stranger is, in most parents' imaginations, a nastier way to die. But the vast majority of child abusers do not kill. Indeed, until very recently, most such offenders, although subject to severe criminal penalties, were regarded as pathetic rather than as evil (see innumerable memoirs about public school teachers), and, in most Continental countries, they still are. Only a greater understanding of how much degradation is involved in some abuse and of the long-term psychological damage done to children (including the way that the abused of one generation often become the abusers of the next) has changed our attitudes.
In its policies towards child abuse, therefore, society will now regard prevention as paramount. The normal rule - that, once a man has taken his punishment, he has discharged his debt to society and the crime can be forgotten - cannot always apply. It may well be right to imprison some abusers for life on the sole grounds that they may offend again; it may also be right to insist on "tagging" or other surveillance for some of those released. But to put anybody ever convicted of such abuse into a special category of unrelieved evil, deserving blanket public opprobrium, is itself a wicked thing to do.
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