Think of a man viewing images or footage of child sexual abuse online, and what comes to mind? I’d bet that for most of us this horrible thought experiment conjures up a Jimmy Savile-style monster sitting in front of the computer screen. But new research from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a child sexual abuse prevention charity, highlights how this paradigm does not by itself account for the scale of online offending. Cling to it too hard and it could hamper our ability to prevent the abuse of children.

Because child sexual abuse is such a horrific and unthinkable crime, we tend to “other” the men who do it. They won’t be men in our families, workplaces and communities, but evil individuals in other people’s lives. This is comforting for us adults, but the complacency it engenders puts children at risk. It turns child sexual abuse into something that happens to other people’s children, not those you love, and if it were happening, of course you’d know because you would be able to spot it.

The figures tell something different: child sexual abuse is depressingly common, with at least 15% of girls and 5% of boys experiencing it before the age of 16, and abuse within the family is one of the more common types reported to police. The sad truth is that many of us will unwittingly know men who have sexually abused children.

Another misperception is that child sexual abuse is driven primarily by the perverted sexual attraction some men feel towards pre-pubescent children. That accounts for some offending, but it is far from the whole story: child sexual abuse, like other sex crimes, can........

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