Sex, being led by sex. So much easier than working on one’s intellect or real self-worth where one’s thinking, and consequent actions, are refined to the point where they become like burnished gold, lustrous and elegant. Lots of sex, that much easier than self-limitation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author and winner of the Nobel, in a recent essay on the abuse of the world’s environment, says, ‘It is difficult to bring ourselves to sacrifice and self-denial because in political, public and private life we have long since dropped the golden key of self-restraint to the ocean floor. But self-limitation is the fundamental and wisest aim of a man who has obtained his freedom. It is also the surest path towards its attainment. If we do not learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria, we, humankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth. It has been pointed by various thinkers many times: if a personality is not directed at values higher than the self, corruption and decay inevitably take hold. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing, but in refusing to seize. In other words: self-limitation.’

Solzhenitsyn could well be talking about a human being’s internal environment. Where the instant gratification of senses, at the expense of real internal feelings of self-worth, can only lead to deep unhappiness. For instance, the sexual revolution; has it really benefited women? The sexual revolution has made it acceptable for a man to live with a woman for years without marrying her, he need not marry her even when she has his child. When sexually bored with her, he can dump her and her child and move on to the next woman. Ergo, the women’s sexual revolution has only benefited men. The woman is left holding her child, and fending off other men who try and sexually assault her and her children.

Alfred Kinsey said this in 1948: ‘It is clear in general that adult sexual involvement with children is a manifestation of the peak level of sexual activity, particularly in males’. What is ‘peak’ level? At what age would such a level peak? It would appear that adults who want to sexually abuse children can peak, suddenly and quickly, as soon as there is a child at arm’s length. Young aunts and uncles to geriatric grandfathers included.

The perpetrator is really no different from such uncles and grandfathers. They do not necessarily have to—though this is also a pattern—put themselves where accessibility to children is a major factor. As examples, but not speaking generally: a physical training or swimming instructor, a worker, say in a non-government organization, who is in a position of authority over children. Speaking specifically: perpetrators are first in the child’s home and among its known family and friends’ circle.

I always thought that cruelty, too, subsumes a certain concept; this thought process also underlies the working of our police and courts to provide justice. I am wrong, and I suppose so is anyone else who thinks on these lines when it comes to children. I discovered this with a sense of shock when I was trying to understand why parents, fathers and grandfathers specifically, physically and sexually abuse the children of the family. I looked at the British literature around the abused child, at checklists provided for professional child-workers in cases of battered children and applied these lists to the perpetrators. Not one case fits neatly, no pronounced pattern emerges.