How our fear of perverts is damaging more children than the perverts themselves

How’s that for a title? ‘Our fear of perverts is damaging more children than the perverts themselves’. The word ‘perverts’ is one I rarely use. But since it jumped out of the front page of the Metro this week, I thought, ‘Okay, if that’s what gets people to read articles, then I’m willing to try it.’

Everywhere in the news these days are stories of child sexual abuse. Its not just the UK. It’s the US and Italy and Australia, for starters. You get the sense that ‘perverts’ are everywhere: hiding behind bushes, in Parliamentary offices, in nurseries, in children’s homes, in schools, in Catholic churches, in hospitals, brazenly parading across telly screens. ‘Perverts’ could be anybody: people we liked, people we looked up to, people who made us laugh, people we trusted.

This morning’s front page of The Times informed me and everybody else who read it that police have tracked down 10,000 suspected paedophiles. The sub-header drives home the fear: ‘Teachers, doctors, and care workers arrested’. Precisely my point. These are roles that we instinctively wish to trust. It is genuinely unnerving when the pivotal people in a culture seem no longer trustworthy.

So society is going through a rocky patch: waking up to the discovery of just how many children have been hurt by adults and the life-long consequences of that trauma. We don’t want that pain for our children.

I think, though, that this rocky patch stems from an additional fear.