THE oddest thing about the response throughout Europe to the horrific child murders in Belgium is the way it exposes a gap between what we know and what we are prepared to believe.
In most areas, the public tends to believe much more than it knows, to stretch its credulity way beyond the facts. We assume that politicians are more corrupt than they really are. We "know" there is life elsewhere in the universe even though we have no real evidence of it. Yet, when it comes to the abuse of children, much of what we actually know is apparently unbelievable.
In the Belgian case, the refusal of the authorities to believe the obvious may have cost the lives of some of the children.
Here in Ireland, huge numbers of people know about the abuse of children either at first hand or at one removed. In the ISPCC/RTE research published last year, one in eight Irish adults indicated they had been sexually abused in childhood.
Another survey published this week suggests one in five Irish women have undergone some form of sexual abuse. Most of those adults have partners, close friends, confidants, to whom they must have spoken about what happened to them. All of them, of course, were abused by someone else, and many of the abusers are presumably still alive. If you add these three categories - victims of abuse, perpetrators of abuse and the intimate friends of the victims - you get a large proportion of the adult population that has some knowledge of the subject. The abuse of children is not, therefore, some kind of dark secret.
The same is true for those who are still children. In the seven years up to February, 1995, the ISPCC Childline received an astonishing 171,878 calls, nearly a quarter of which related to sexual abuse. Even allowing for the fact that many of the children must have made more than one call, and even accepting that some of the calls may have been made on the basis of unfounded anxieties, those numbers remain indicative of something that is deeply ingrained in normal life.
Yet, all of this knowledge remains somehow inert. We seem to need to go through rituals of astonishment and shock. When the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy became a public issue because of the Brendan Smyth case, we acted as if it were an astounding revelation. Some of the most respected leaders in our society - the church Hierarchy - declared themselves thunderstruck. And yet the real cause for astonishment was that anyone could claim not to know that there were clergy who abused children. What that claim exposed was an extraordinary capacity not to believe what is known.
After what has happened in Belgium, it is no longer possible to disbelieve what we know about paedophiles. The question, though, is what to do with that knowledge. One of the problems in seeking an answer is that to some extent the dramatic horrors of the Belgian case obscure the continuing truth that most physical and sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by adults known to the child, and not by organised paedophile rings. Even keeping that in mind, though, it remains obvious that paedophiles do exist, that in some cases they have a great deal of money and organisation at their disposal, and that they pose real dangers for children at home and abroad.
Those facts present a fundamental challenge, not just to our willingness to protect children, but to some of the most cherished principles of law and justice. For the first thing that becomes obvious when you start to talk about protecting children from paedophiles is that most of the traditional legal frameworks are inadequate. Some of the central issues - international sex tourism, the use of the Internet by paedophiles, the trade in child pornography cannot be dealt with within national borders. They demand a level of international co-operation including the prosecution in their own states of paedophiles who abuse children in Asia and Africa - well beyond anything that has been seen before.
THERE is, though, an even more fundamental and difficult problem. It is the problem of what to do with paedophiles and compulsive sex offenders after they have been caught and sentenced. All the evidence suggests a high proportion of these people do not respond even to good treatment programmes. In thinking about what it should do with such people, the justice system has to take into account two unpleasant facts. One is that.the average sex offender may commit hundreds of crimes. The other is that in many cases the seriousness of the crimes can increase over time. It is, in other words, easy to predict that many compulsive sex offenders will, when they come out of prison, abuse others, until they are caught.
The professionals do not have easy answers to this problem, and it is unfair to pretend they do. Breidge Gadd, the Northern Ireland chief probation officer, explained the difficulty at the International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect at UCD this week. She said professionals working with abusers have to operate within "an increasingly ambivalent society where there is no common agreement on the definition or source of the problem, and where there is consequently no agreement about solutions
They know the treatment of sex offenders remains deeply problematic. If they say so too loudly they may undermine public support for programmes that do have some success. Yet if they go along with the belief that all or even most offenders can be cured, they set themselves up to get the blame when things go wrong.
It is time to stop pretending that psychologists and social workers can solve the problem in the foreseeable future, and to face up to the reality that we are continuing to release back into the community people who will almost certainly abuse children again. Even the most committed civil libertarians have to acknowledge the basic principles of the justice system cannot cope with this reality. The idea that a prison sentence wipes the slate clean and pays the criminal's debt to society remains important. But it loses much of its meaning when it is balanced against the responsibility to do whatever can be done to prevent the predictable destruction of another innocent life.
If we really do want to put children first, we have to face up to what that means in practice. It means ending determinate sentences for sex offenders, giving the State the power to supervise their behaviour even after they have been released from prison. It means establishing a register of sex offenders, and requiring all of those on it to inform the authorities of their movements. It means accepting the bitter truth that for some abusers there is no redemption and no release from the debt that is owed to society. It means, in other words, being prepared to believe what we know about paedophiles and to act accordingly.