Most of us are as baffled as we are disgusted by pedophilia. Why are certain individuals sexually attracted to children? How can they so grossly deform the boundaries between adult and child sexuality and be so indifferent to the harm and pain they cause?
At same time, the subject arouses potent fears. Evidence of the organized sadism of pedophile rings like the one uncovered in Belgium does more than fuel practical fears for the safety of our children. It arouses a deeper anxiety that the veneer of civilization may be thinner than we believed.Are pedophiles different from other people in some fundamental way, or are "normal" people themselves merely a few steps away from perpetrating similar abuses?
Concern is also growing that our highly eroticized consumer culture is playing some unquantifiable part in these horrific developments. Is a popular culture which churns out images of pubescent children in come-hither poses to sell Calvin Klein underwear, and which induces pre-pubescents to wear cosmetics, bare their midriffs and display sexual double-entendres on their T-shirts causing a confusion which encourages the sexual abuse of children?
And can pedophiles ever be treated so that the public know for certain they will never prey upon children again?
Attempts to answer such questions uncover a great deal of professional uncertainty. But certain myths can be laid to rest.
First is the myth that every man may be a potential pedophile. "I don't believe that every man is aroused by seeing a naked child run down a beach. They wouldn't even think about it," says Ray Wyre, principal adviser to Britain's Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which runs a residential unit for sex offenders.
The next, related myth is that only men are pedophiles. Therapists and probation officers report that women may abuse both male and female children.
"There are clearly women whose own experience of childhood damage can lead them to perpetrate abuse on children either with a man or by themselves," said Dr. John Coleman, director of the Trust for the Study of Adolescence, based in London. "This is almost more difficult to acknowledge and it's more difficult for them to get help because of the extra taboos surrounding women pedophiles. There's nothing innately male about child abuse."
So what turns people into pedophiles? According to Dr. Mervyn Glasser, former director of the Portman Clinic in London, which specializes in treating sex offenders, the question is difficult to answer, not least because there are many different types of pedophile.
"Often they have a history of sexual abuse in childhood, but there may be no such history," he said. "Pedophilia is no respecter of class or culture. Some are apparently `normal,' such as the scoutmaster or teacher who abuses a child when the opportunity presents itself. These people are often married. Others are more disturbed, lonely, isolated figures who don't achieve much in terms of career."
And their backgrounds are similarly varied. Most have personal histories of abuse or neglect - but not all. Something more subtle may have gone wrong with the relationship with the pedophile's parents who may appear on the surface to be an ordinary family.
"The father tends to be emotionally absent with no warm supporting character, so there is no man with whom the child can identify, and the mother tends to use the child as a pawn in her own emotional life," said Glasser.
But why are they attracted to children?
"Crucially," said Glasser, "the child represents themselves. They are narcissistically making love to themselves and enacting what they imagine is being a loving parent to the child. They are trying to find way of being loved themselves. Many have been fostered or been in institutionalized care."
Nevertheless, many people with similar unhappy backgrounds don't turn into pedophiles.
"Ultimately, I think pedophilia is a mystery," said Peter Wilson, director of the British children's charity Young Minds. "We just don't understand enough about human sexuality."
According to Wyre, there are many motives for child molestation which takes different forms, from incest to hebephilia (post-pubertal abuse) to pedophilia (pre-pubertal abuse). Some pedophiles want to hurt children. But many delude themselves into believing they are doing the child a favor.
"Pedophiles think they have evidence that the child gives consent and enjoys it," he said. "They think of their own experience of abuse as children and think they gave consent and liked it. While they believe that, they won't stop it. They interpret the survival behavior of the child they abuse as supporting that belief."
But most devastating of all, according to Wyre, is the fact that that "survival behavior," in which the child may say he or she consents to or is enjoying the experience, occurs because the child has been corrupted by the pedophile's own belief that the child is enjoying it.
It is precisely that vicious circle, in which pedophiles falsely believe they themselves consented years previously to their own abuse, which prevents them from acknowledging the damage they are now doing to the latest child in the chain.
The way popular culture sexualizes children, said Wyre, is also very important because it gives pedophiles a crucial message which reinforced their central delusion.
"Wherever you sexualize children as if they were adults, you are feeding into the belief system of the pedophile that children enjoy sex. They want the child to be demonstrated as a sexual being who, if approached in the right way, would want sex as an adult," he said.
So what chance is there that any pedophiles can be cured?
None, said Wyre. We must think rather in terms of controlling their behavior. He believes his residential program is relatively successful in this.
But surely pedophiles will go to almost any lengths not only to deny the harm they have done but to protect themselves from treatment designed specifically to drive precisely that message home?
One British probation officer who runs programs for pedophiles agreed that this made any treatment very difficult. But she was optimistic that her programs did help control such behavior, not by searching in offenders' histories for explanations but by explaining the harm they do, identifying trigger points and helping them avoid situations where it might happen again.
Others, however, are more skeptical.
"It's very difficult to stop this behavior," said Glasser. "A minority have seemed to be cured by psychotherapy with me, but I'm not sure whether a few years down the line the picture might be different."
Wilson agreed: "There's such a strong compulsive element here, made up of so many things. This compulsive behavior is part of that person's identity. To cure them, you've got to remake that identity from scratch."
So what should we do to prevent such crimes from occurring?
"No one has any real answer," said Coleman. "My view would be relatively eclectic psychotherapy. Individual work may be the only way forward for people as damaged as this. But the people doing this work are very few because of the shock and disgust and distress they have to deal with.
"If people who have been abused could get help early, even if they merely acknowledged what had happened to them, it would make an enormous difference in breaking the cycle."
Wilson agreed. "These people should never be abandoned," he said. "Behind the grossness of their behavior there's unbearable sadness and anger. That all needs . . . a lot of a lot of resources, time, skill, backup and tolerance."