Paranoid About Paedophiles

 

I can look back to my childhood just after the Second World War in the leafy suburbs of North London. I won’t say that paedophiles were everywhere, but all of us had stories of little shops, woods and places, where we warned each other not to go. We of course didn’t tell our parents, but we made sure that all the other kids knew.

I’ve discussed this with my now adult children and the man in the woods seemed to have disappeared when they were young. But like us, they knew of teachers who you never went near.

The fact is that child abuse was probably worse in the 1940s, 1950s and early-1960s, than it is now, but no statistics can prove this. What we can say is that murders of young children outside of the family have remained at a pretty low and similar level since records began. In fact in one year recently, there were no murders of this class.

But this level of murder is much less than those murdered by family members.

I collect and analyse spam and get about 6,000 messages a day. Only the odd one has anything to do with child porn and I report it immediately to the Internet Watch Foundation. But what worries me is that spammers are using deliberate methods to get people to view their unwanted web-sites. Despite all the high-grade protection I have, I’ve been duped to view sites that I don’t want to see.

What worries me is that someone inadvertently views a child porn site, gets it thoroughly infected in his computer, a virus starts rebroadcasting it to others and then the innocent party gets hauled before a court of law. I may be a little paranoid, but it will happen.

Try defending that one.

We need to be agile in our thinking, so that the evil of paedophilia is removed from our society.

Punishing everybody severely may appeal to the baser instincts of a large proportion of the population, but is this the right method in all cases?