On the one hand we should be relieved that the FBI has uncovered the names of thousands of viewers of child pornography, 7,000 in Britain - one of them, as we know, Pete Townshend - and hundreds of them in Ireland. But on the other, we know that we are only beginning to learn the scale of this deep and global evil, writes Kevin Myers.
For we can no longer dismiss paederasty simply as the obsessive perversion of a handful of evil men - and the problem is 99 per cent male. The FBI's Texas operation uncovered a network of 5,700 child pornography sites across the world, so the few hundred paederasts so far discovered in Ireland probably represent just the tip of a vast iceberg in our society.
Now we should be used to child abusers in Ireland: Sinn Féin-IRA spent the past 30 years making orphans and corpses of children. The IRA has killed scores of children, maimed hundreds, and left thousands without at least one parent. It confiscated fear-free childhood from at least two full generations of children in Northern Ireland; and throughout, the largest sporting organisation in Ireland, the GAA, voted to support the terror campaign. Child abuse for "patriotic" purposes is no more excusable than it is for sexual ones - so please, please, don't tell me Ireland is a child-loving country.
Wicked desires
To be sure, there's a difference. Sinn Féin-IRA doesn't have an appetite to wreck children's lives. It simply chooses to do so; and equally simply, then chose not to. Paedophiles are different. It's not a matter of choice. They are haunted by these wicked desires, and it's not good enough merely to dismiss them as evil, just as schizophrenics once were burnt at the stake for being possessed by the devil.
We must now accept that the desire to sexually abuse children has been far more widespread and and has been around for much longer than we have publicly realised. Many years ago, after hearing individual women talk about their experiences, I asked every woman I knew if in childhood she had been the subject of any sort of uninvited, unprovoked sexual activity - flashing or actual molestation - by an adult male. All, without exception, had.
Try it yourself: ask every woman you know the same question.
The only book in my library that might remotely tell me of sex abuse of children in the past is Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. It was written in 1977; it makes no mention of child abuse, in any sense, presumably because contemporary observers - and thus Stone himself - had no idea how commonplace it was. And outside the realm of anecdote, who did, until recent years?
To be sure, child abusers are covert, serial and obsessional, and one man can do a lot of damage. But the internet operation indicates that paederasts form a very substantial minority in any society - perhaps several thousand in this country. I suspect many more.
Pre-emptive measures
So what are we going to do? Wait for each one to offend? Or do we start programmes to rescue these creatures - and most important of all, their victims - from their abominable desires? Are we going to start pre-emptive measures to help the unoffending paederast, the young man who to his horror has discovered he has an interest in children, knows it's wrong, and wants to do something about it? At the moment, the only way that the State will provide him with help is after he has abused a child, and he's in a sex-offenders' unit. Then he becomes eligible for treatment. But if he doesn't commit an offence, and has these terrible fantasies, and knows that he is a danger to children, what State help is there for him? None.
Can you imagine what it must be like to have one's sexual appetite locked into such base and disgusting sexual desires? No doubt that's why so child-abusers resort to the big lie, that sex does no harm to children. And once they've swallowed that lie, then all else is possible.
Resorting to child pornography is to embrace the lie. To enter the porno market is to stoke it, to cause further children to be subjected to further abuse. It is not "passive": it is sexual violence, though at one remove, and is both evil and criminal. And because it is such a big business, it will probably devise ways of avoiding credit-card detection.
Sex education
But taking permanent residence in the pulpit and opening up industrial-scale sex-offenders' prison units is not good enough. If many men want to use children for sexual gratification, shouldn't sex education programmes warn boys about what they might become? And shouldn't we have State-run services from which potential sex offenders can seek treatment before they wreck a childhood or ten? No such service now exists. Any young male who is concerned about his aberrant sexual desires for children might seek private treatment, but of course he will probably be unable to pay for it. And the available evidence suggests that child sex abuse, once it starts, is obsessive, addictive and usually resists therapy.
The child pornography scare has given us a depressing insight into both the male mind and the male libido. Equally depressing is the knowledge that there are no simple solutions to this evil, which is clearly so vast in scale.
Let's start with the young man who is fighting these baffling, demented desires. What help will he get from the State? None at all, until he has raped a child, and only then do the armies of sex therapists and counsellors in Arbour Hill await him.
So which is better? The fire extinguisher or the fire brigade?