The men I know are shocked and bewildered by the stories about child sexual abuse cases that seem to be appearing with increasing regularity. Perhaps we don’t ask ourselves often enough “why would any man actually do that”. We tend to either look the other way or resort to finger-pointing — probably getting reassurance that however much of a mess we might be making of our own lives, at least we’re not ‘that bad’.
Maybe it’s not that simple.
It’s well known that accessing porn sites is the single largest use of the Internet, with the average time spent by men each week being hours rather than minutes. It doesn’t take long to notice that women on those sites are mostly portrayed and treated in demeaning ways, so the overriding impression is that the men who produce and watch this stuff have a very low valuing of the female gender. Another observation is that the body hair of these women is almost always shaved. My wife tells me that her friends also do this to please their men – and we’re talking about women up to 60 years old!
Most men don’t want to cause the kind of harm that is bound to be the outcome of actual sexual contact with children. So why is it so popular amongst men for women to make their partners’ sexual parts look prepubescent? The only explanation I can find for this ‘hair phobia’ is that a part of male sexuality is turned on by the sexual appearance of a young girl – maybe because many men are, at some level, afraid of sexually mature women, and a ‘child-woman’ seems non-threatening and compliant, and less likely to be challenging to our fragile sense of masculinity.
What about the small number of men who look at images of child abuse or are abusers?
To change their behaviour, we need to reduce the demand for these images. Just trying to regulating the supply of anything has never worked, and just ducks the hard question of why some men are turned on by images of sexual abuse. We may be able to understand them better by reflecting on our own sexual feelings so that we are able to educate and inform others about the harm caused by the creation and consumption of this material, and the distorted sexual needs that it satisfies – as well as reduce any risk that we might ever be tempted to look at it ourselves.
Demonising paedophiles only drives them, and the material they enjoy, underground, where it festers and continue to cause harm. Prevention is always the most effective route to changing behaviour. One first step must be to ensure that there are more resources put into researching the root causes of a sexual attraction to children, and into providing counselling and support so that individuals with the psychological and emotional needs which are satisfied by abusing children, or looking at images of abuse, can and will get help in understanding and changing their behaviour
It’s time to break the taboo about talking about this issue. If men and women can work together to bring this hidden part of male sexual behaviour more out into the open, we can collectively pressure more investment into devising the best ways to redirect or neutralise the needs of abusers and reduce the risk of them doing harm.
Looking the other way, or trying to bury or deny the problem will just ensure that it continues to exist, and will be a betrayal of the duty of care we owe to children and to all vulnerable members of our society.
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