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I refer of course, to the rather significant number of arrests made in Australia yesterday as police flushed out hundreds of people allegedly involved in child porn.

Although this sounds like a very large number of offenders, I'm pretty sure that for every one which has been caught, there may well be dozens or hundreds of others who have an undetected stash of kiddy porn on their PCs.

In fact, if you correlate the situation on Pitcairn Island with the news out of Australia, it raises a very sobering possibility.

Could it be that there are far more people in our society who have an "unnatural" interest in juvenile sexuality than we'd care to acknowledge?

As a percentage of the total population, the number of those charged with under-aged sex offenses in Pitcairn is disturbingly high -- but could it be that we also have the same percentage of potential paedophiles within the general populations of the Western world?

If so, this would confirm my suspicion that the kiddy-porn arrests we've seen recently are just the tip of an extremely large iceberg.

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Perhaps we've always had this disturbingly high percentage of potential offenders within our population but it's only since the advent of the internet that they've been able to feed their lust for such things so easily.

Now, sitting in the comfort and (false) anonymity of their homes, this small but grossly underestimated percentage of otherwise completely normal people can now seek out and download the material we know as kiddy-porn.

This is not too dissimilar to the Pitcairn situation, where such activities appear to have lost the stigma and sense of moral outrage that they hold here. Perhaps our own population would produce just as many "offenders" if we removed the constraints that currently limit such activities.

This also hints at the problem being very much a cultural one. Obviously, within at least a part of the Pitcairn population, sex between adults and consenting minors was considered to be acceptable. This means that those engaging in such activities likely felt just as safe as the offender in suburban Sydney who thought he was hiding from society's scrutiny when he downloaded kiddy-porn images.

Perhaps what our lawmakers and politicians should now be focusing on is how we can get a more accurate indication of just how many people are potential offenders and wether this problem is perhaps several orders of magnitude larger than it might at first appear.

And then perhaps, we should also look at (excuse me while I put my devil's advocate hat on) whether kiddy porn might be a positive thing.

Gasp! How can I possibly suggest such a thing?

Well, if such a huge percentage of our population is attracted to the notion of having sex with children, isn't it possible that the availability of these images might help sate their desires before they grow to the point where they result in actual offending against some poor innocent child.

Of course I'm no psychologist so I'm simply speculating here and it's quite possible I guess, that doing so might have exactly the wrong effect and be like throwing fat on a fire.

That I have to speculate, raises a very important point however: do we actually have any scientific studies that show whether kiddy-porn addicts are more likely to go on and commit a sexual crime against a minor?

Does kiddy porn control or inflame latent paedophile tendencies amongst those who collect and view it?

Indeed, is someone who actually collects kiddy-porn suffering from the same dysfunction as someone who is a paedophile -- or would this be like assuming that anyone who drinks alcohol will automatically go on to become a heroin junky or methanphetamine abuser?

Surely it's very important that we undertake studies like this so as to protect our kids from potential abuse.

Unfortunately, it seems that it's just far more socially acceptable to cry "evil paedophiles -- hang em" and forget to focus on determining the magnitude, cause, effect and treatment of the underlying problems.

As a parent myself, I would actually be more than happy to allow latent paedophiles to keep their little stash of carefully selected pictures if scientific studies proved that this would significantly reduce the likelihood of them going on to actually commit crimes against real children. After all, we give heroin addicts methadone don't we?

Surely if a really significant percentage of our population suffer from this problem it's better that we treat it like drug addiction by introducing some kind of support system and treatment rather than simply waiting for them to offend.

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