Pedophilia deserves greater coverage

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Should a foreign affairs columnist apologize for writing about pedophiles and others when the front page story is Saddam Hussein? Weren't the last two weeks' stories enough--the terrible revelations of child sexual abuse and murder in Belgium, followed by the Stockholm Congress Against the Commercial Exploitation of Children? As every news editor has been bred to recite, "a good story is as long as a piece of string." (Pause, for effect.) "Long enough to go round your little finger."

But this, as the late Walter Lippman, perhaps the greatest of all columnists, used to say, is where news and truth divide. "News and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event; the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other and make a picture of reality on which one can act."

Journalism, I suggest, needs to modify its obsession with "news" and concentrate a little more on pursuing the truth. Two weeks out of 52 on arguably the most important story of our time, only to drop it like a hot cake when the bombing starts, is irresponsible. Unless we get hold of the inter-related problems of pedophilia, child prostitution and the whole issue of street children, now of such proportions that Unicef estimates that 100 million live abandoned by their families in our major cities, we're going to have a lot more Saddam Husseins in the future.

Psychological research is still in its relative infancy, but it's obvious enough from what is known and tested that child murderers, sexual abusers and most of history's war criminals come from unhappy family backgrounds -- a violent, over- authoritarian father, an absentee mother or a lonely childhood.

If today we have such vast numbers of children whose formative and most innocent years are being made bleak and wretched, before very long we'll have a similar vast number of adults who, disturbed and disrupted at an early age, feel they owe the world very little. Resentment can be one of the most destructive of social forces. We stand in great danger, before the twenty-first century is much advanced, of being overwhelmed by an army of psychopaths and perverts who will undermine civilization in a way Hitler or Saddam Hussein could barely have conceived. Ordinary life will not be worth living.

I feel tremors of this already : Last week I was in Sweden, in my mother-in-law's house, in the remote pine forest. Friends came to stay and over dinner in the garden said "let the children camp the night outside." I froze. Only last summer, in England, a psychopath had abducted, raped and murdered a little girl, sleeping with her friends in a tent on the lawn. Only a month ago, in France, a child sleeping in the dormitory of a youth hostel was raped and murdered as her companions slept. But this is Sweden, I told myself, a quiet, very non-violent, very civilized country. Yes, everyone else said, but even Sweden is changing. At that moment, there was a flash of lightning in the far distance and the threat of an evening thunderstorm. Thankfully, the subject of garden camping was mute, at least for this summer.

I don't want to live like this. Neither do I want to see more Saddam Husseins in political power. Nor weird terrorist groups with stolen Russian nuclear materials.

Your foreign affairs columnist has no answer to the conundrum posed by Saddam Hussein's latest military moves, other than the assassin's bullet. If George Bush couldn't decide, or find a way, to finish him off his way at the end of the Gulf War, economic sanctions, my suggestion at the time, haven't done the trick either. But I do have a suggestion for avoiding a lot, lot more of this in the future, which is to get a grip on the issue of street children, child prostitution and pedophilia -- and for the press to relentlessly highlight the issue to make sure the politicians do the job. (And not to be overlooked is Saddam's terrible record in torturing the children of his political opponents -- is this politics or a perversion?)

The California legislature is right -- compulsory chemical castration for two-time (but make it one-time) child sex offenders. That is a demand-side (or part of it) solution. What we need more of is action on the supply side.

Unicef estimates that there may be 40 million street children in Latin America alone. The Anti-Slavery Society counts 200 million "child slaves" around the world. In Bangkok, according to the Thai Center for the Protection of Children's Rights, there are 800,000 girl prostitutes between the ages of 12 and 16. Even in the U.S., it is estimated that there are around 750,000 young runaways and in Germany, one report numbers around 20,000 runaways under 16 every year.

It is on these huge numbers that governments, religious and voluntary agencies -- and the media -- have to turn their energies and redouble their efforts. We are only at the beginning of a long and difficult road. It is not alarmist, I think, to say the very future of humanity is at stake.