Remember: paedophiles are people too

Poor Pete Townshend, who probably isn't even a paedophile, is the latest victim of our – yes, our, not his – sick obsession with child abuse. Every time a child abuse story is thrust on to our front pages, I search fruitlessly for coverage that will answer basic questions about paedophiles. And every time I am shocked to realise that, in all the rotting acres of newsprint expended on this topic, there has been almost no discussion of such serious questions as: Can paedophiles be treated? How did they become this way? How can we reduce the odds of them abusing children, either for the first time or as repeat offenders?

Let us, for once, look instead not at the froth but at the facts. Press coverage and popular myth invite us to see paedophiles as cold, clever Machiavellian plotters. Sometimes this is true: the people who ran the "Wonderland Club", the foul paedophile ring that was finally shut down in 2000, do seem to have been intelligent and worryingly calculating. But far more often, they are sad, pitiful losers, the furthest of outcasts from our society.

Last year I visited Maidstone Prison's Sex Offenders Wing, where Britain's most notorious child molesters, including Jonathan King, are held. Far from being the Hannibal Lecters I had expected, these paedophiles were mumbling, pitiful wrecks – barely literate, with no social skills or ability to make adult contact. One of them, Ray, did not look at me once during a half-hour conversation, his eyes fixed on the ground and his vocabulary fixed at the level of a five year old.

The lengthy and extensive sex offender treatment programmes they were on did seem to have genuinely made them think for the first time about the damage they were causing; when they had abused children before, they had been too mentally limited and socially stunted to understand that they were causing horrific damage. After all, they had grown up being told by their own abusers that this sort of behaviour was normal. Although what they had done was undoubtedly horrific, they, too, were clearly victims: of severely low intelligence, of their own distant but ever-present sexual abuse, and too often of poverty.

Even the intelligent paedophiles – like the two as yet unnamed Members of Parliament whom the police are investigating – have a strong chance of having been molested themselves, and therefore of having had their sexuality moulded at the earliest possible age into a horribly deformed shape.

Our hysterical climate about paedophilia had actually made them more likely to offend. As Jim, a thirtysomething man, explained to me: "I could never tell no one [sic], not even my best friend, how I felt because then they'd know I was a paed... a paedoph... [he couldn't quite say the word] and then they'd say I was just evil and totally beyond the pale. If I had been able to talk to somebody about it, I think I might have been able to control it more. I might not have, you know, actually hurt a kid. I might have been strong enough to get help. But because everywhere it was saying I was evil, even if I had not done nothing, I began to think I was evil and then I done it."

He began to abuse a six-year-old girl. If we had a culture that saw paedophilia not as an irrevocable sign of the beast but as a sad reality that will always afflict some people – people who then need our support and help to ensure that they do not act on their sexual urges – then that girl and hundreds like her might have been protected.

Pete Townshend says that he was a victim of sexual abuse, and that was why he felt so strongly about the subject that he looked at child porn. I do not know if he is attracted to children, but if he is, it would be typical for him to have suffered at the hands of a paedophile. Ray Wyre, an expert on paedophiles (they do exist, though we rarely call them), explains that "66 per cent of paedophiles claim to have been victims of sexual abuse, although that falls to 36 per cent when you use a lie detector". He added: "Paedophilia is often about learnt behaviour. The abuser almost clones himself by taking power over his victim, because, as the victim grows, he mimics this behaviour."

Most of the paedophiles I met had given credible testimony of sexual abuse. We do not like to admit this, because it muddies our moral indignation. Could the monster Gary Glitter once have been one of the innocent abused children we so want to protect? Can there be mitigating factors that make paedophiles human?

All of this will be hard for right-wingers to accept. They want straightforward evil; to condemn, not understand. But there is a hard truth that we on the left will have to accept, too: paedophilia is an intractable sexual orientation, like heterosexuality or homosexuality, that cannot be "trained out" of a person. This goes against our natural belief in the possibility of redemption and the possibility of criminals being allowed a "fresh slate" after their release.

Research by the Australian psychologist JK Marques and his colleagues, published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour, indicates that a man who is sexually attracted to children always will be.

We cannot hope for a cure – that is not realistic, and paedophiles can never be released from the hell of being attracted to people who are incapable of reciprocating. However, they can undergo counselling that reduces their chances of reoffending substantially. (I was persuaded of this by the wealth of evidence forwarded to me by academic psychologists since I last wrote about this topic, where I said I suspected that even limited treatment would not work. Home Office research has proved me wrong).

The best we can hope for, then, is to help paedophiles to control their urges and to desist from harming children, and to imprison indefinitely the small minority – such as Sidney Cooke – who do not want to stop. This can obviously be done through the sex offender treatment programmes in prisons – and the prison officers and counsellors in Maidstone who toil at this horrific work every day are quietly heroic – but it would also be a good idea for the Government to launch a high-profile campaign that can reach paedophiles before they begin to offend.

This could take the form of adverts on national television, which should carry the message: "If you find yourself sexually attracted to children, we will help you to make sure you do not act on it."

After all, most people who find themselves attracted to children have memories of their own abuse, and, when reasoned with, do not want to inflict that on somebody else. There needs to be a point where paedophiles can find help other than in prison. We should promise therefore to provide them with a therapist who will be available 24/7 to stay with them if ever they feel tempted to offend; who will keep them occupied and not alone; and who will, if necessary, house them in secure gated communities where they will never have access to children.

Instead of driving them underground as we do at present, where their only source of friendship and comfort is to get involved with on-line paedophile rings, we need to draw them out into an environment where they can be supported in their efforts not to offend. It is not perfect – but it is far better than the current situation, where under the guise of caring about children, we are making it far more likely that child molesters will strike.

johannhari@johannhari.com