I thought paedophiles were rare – but then I read the newspapers

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 also 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. But neither had any perceptible effect on the amount of sex offending that went on, and even Brooks herself later admitted that her campaign ‘could have been done better’ and that it had ‘carried risks of vigilantism’.

In addition to all that, we have all become aware in recent years of the many cases of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and of the shock that this created within the Church (possibly, in my opinion, being a significant factor in the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, who in his previous Vatican job as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith had to read all the revolting dossiers on this scandal pouring in from around the world).