Paedophiles and Adult Male Sexuality

Abstract

This book has argued that society has rather an odd attitude to paedophiles — simultaneously both intensely hostile and remarkably tolerant. Mainstream Hollywood ‘nymphets’ (Shirley Temple, Brooke Shields, Dakota Fanning or even Macaulay Culkin) act out fantasies which can seem very close to NAMBLA’s porn, and senior Establishment figures in Europe join with celebrities in the United States to protect a convicted child-rapist from justice. British MPs, international footballers, J. K. Rowling and the Pope all publicly share the horror and distress of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance — while in Portugal the law is carefully watered down ahead of the Casa Pia orphanage trial (in a scandal said to have ‘shaken the very foundations of Portuguese democracy’; Tarvainen, 2004) and the trial itself then peters out into obscurity. On the web, the owner of a site termed ‘the largest online child pornography-oriented videotheque’ (quoted in Leurs, 2005: 32) contemptuously brags that he knows ‘many of the best [internet] security people in the world, and none of them work for the British police’ (Clarke, 2009, online).