One problem from which I am confident I don’t suffer is paedophilia. I have always liked picking up babies and hugging them, especially my own children or grandchildren, but never in the ‘Rolfie deserves a cuddle’ kind of way. The idea of sexually lusting after children seems to me not only abhorrent but almost unimaginable. If anything is against nature, it must be to regard children as sexual objects.
I have always known of course, that paedophiles exist. I was aware of it when, as an eight-year-old, I went to a prep school in Berkshire where the headmaster would snog the prettiest boys (alas, not me) in their dormitory beds and where the violin teacher had a habit of placing his hand on my thigh. But this was fairly innocuous stuff, and only later did I learn that some paedophiles have urges so strong that they will not or cannot keep them within tolerable bounds.
Accordingly, parental panic about paedophilia has sometimes brought about controversial responses such as ‘Megan’s Law’ in the United States, which decreed that the identities of convicted sexual offenders should be made known to their neighbours, and such as Rebekah Brooks’s copycat campaign in the News of the World for the ‘naming and shaming’ of such people in Britain.
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