Furedi, Frank; The war on paedos: grooming the public’s fears
The British government has just announced that paedophiles are to be treated in the same way as terrorists.
According to several sources, new legislation targeting paedophiles will be included in the Queen’s Speech. It appears that the UK prime minister, David Cameron, is determined to close a ‘loophole’ that permits paedophiles to publish and possess ‘manuals’ that offer tips to would-be predators on children about how to identify and groom their targets.
The new law would authorise the use of the kind of extraordinary sanctions used to target terrorists who download bomb-making manuals.

The adoption of the tactics and strategy of the war on terror for the crusade against paedophiles is symptomatic of a worldview in which the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality has been lost.
The Lib-Con coalition government and many of its security advisers actually believe that the behaviour of terrorists and that of paedophiles share many common attributes.
Furedi, Frank; Are we all condemned to live in ‘cycles of abuse’?
It is now heresy to question the idea that child abuse damages a person for life. But such a deeply fatalistic idea must be questioned.
The diagnosis that child sexual abuse causes long-term psychological damage is influenced by today’s ‘cycle of abuse’ theories. This model, which says there is an intergenerational transmission of violence, is one of the most uncontested themes of the modern-day literature on family violence.
The abuse model is based on a belief that human action is determined and conditioned by powerful forces beyond its control. Such a fatalistic world view is conveyed through the idea that the experience of psychological trauma in early childhood directly shapes the actions and behaviour of a person for the rest of hisor her life.
We need to have a more open-minded discussion about this difficult subject.