Uproar in Plymouth, UK, today as a nursery assistant appears in court, charged with sexual assault and the making and distribution of indecent images of very young children. A woman, in a position of trust, perhaps abusing children in her care? Still worse, 39-year-old Vanessa George is reported to be married and a mother of two. It's a parent's nightmare.
It's also a journalist's dream. All those strong emotions: fear, guilt, innocent kids, and the loathing people feel for paedophiles. Also the attention-grabbing value of rarity, because this is an extremely unusual case. Vanessa George is older than your average nursery worker; she's older than your average criminal, and she's female. That doesn't make her unique, as Michele Elliott, director of the children's charity Kidscape, points out in today's Guardian newspaper - but it does make her a highly visible target. Like Myra Hindley, who assisted her lover Ian Brady in the torture and murder of children in the 1960s, George could become a nationwide hate figure.
In their press conferences, the police struck a reassuring note, emphasising the early stage of the investigation and the need to respect due legal process. They also commended the families involved for their calm reactions. Despite that, George's first appearance at court was greeted by an angry crowd, and the van carrying her was attacked.
George may, of course, be innocent (let us hope she gets a fair trial). If she is, her life in Plymouth may nonetheless be over, because the taint of paedophilia, however unjust, is one of the most potent social contaminants. If she is guilty, what motives could have led her to this atrocious behaviour? The love of money? Severe psychological abnormality, such as a personality disorder, perhaps following abuse? Submission, as in Myra Hindley's case, to the will of a much more powerful, dominant and dangerous man? At present we just don't know.
Researching my book Cruelty required me to study some of the worst behaviour ever carried out by human beings. In genocides, for example, the torture and murder of children and babies is routinely justified. I should be hardened by now, but the thought of paedophilia still makes me feel physically ill. I don't have children, but if anyone were to abuse my niece or nephew I'm well aware that my feelings would turn murderous. It's easy to empathise with the furious people outside the court in Plymouth. They sense a danger in their midst, a terrible moral evil, and they want to get rid of it.
It's harder to say: beware those feelings. We evolved to have them, to protect ourselves; but that was when we had no law, no police, no prisons. Those institutions protect us from cruelty. Not just the cruelty of others - they sometimes fail to manage that - but our cruelty. If Vanessa George is innocent, there will still be people who will want to hurt her, or kill her, or drive her out of their communities. If she is guilty, there will be many more. But if we abandon the law when it comes to paedophiles, we weaken it when it comes to everything else.
It's even harder - much, much harder - to acknowledge our feelings of revulsion without allowing them to deprive us of our reason. Yet we need to do this in order to understand why some people abuse children. It's hugely important to study such people, because child abuse can cause damage that lasts a lifetime.
Not all abuse is committed by paedophiles, but some is. How much? We don't know. We don't know much about paedophilia, except that it seems disturbingly common. Why are we so ignorant? Well, paedophilia research is so sensitive that very few people are brave enough to attempt it. Unsurprisingly, the syndrome is a scientific as well as a moral mystery. We're always hearing about new evolutionary explanations for human behaviour, but to my knowledge there is no adequate 'theory' of paedophilia, from evopsych researchers or anyone else.
This is bad news for children, frightened parents and the rest of us. Without understanding the problem, how can we ever start to solve it?
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