This essay is part of an open conversation. I welcome challenge, disagreement, and dialogue — understanding grows through honest exchange.

What happens next

This is Essay 7a. It opens a trilogy on reactions to acts of child sexual abuse. Examining reactions is a window into the deepest truth of CSA. It reveals why acts of CSA lead to sustained suffering. It reveals that reactions are caused by the same factors that cause the acts themselves. That is why we need to shift our focus from the acts to their causes and to what sustains suffering. This first essay is conceptual: it sets out why reactions matter more than acts, why most reactions fail or compound harm, and how they reveal patterns of avoidance that run through those failures at every level. Essay 7b will examine reactions close to the child — the child themselves, family, friends, partners, and, in wealthier contexts, the professionals who react to CSA. Essay 7c will examine reactions at the higher levels of power: the extremely wealthy, corporations, governments, justice systems, organised religion, national cultures, and public discourse.

• • •

Imagine an ideal set of responses to a child who has experienced severe sexual abuse. Across all the variations of CSA acts — inside the family, outside it, girl or boy, infancy or adolescence, in-person or Internet-mediated, a single act or a long pattern — the ideal set of responses has the same three components. Firstly, the re-establishment of neurobiological equilibrium. Secondly, an effective process that brings cognitive understanding. Thirdly, a change of conditions that makes future safety real. These components take many forms, but in essence, they hold for all cases and over time. Later, when we examine the challenges faced by older people in dealing with the severe legacies of CSA, we will see that these three components are also what is needed to live better lives.

Except in rare cases, the ideal or something close to it is not what happens.

My case is specific. The man who raped me twice, three months apart, was in my family environment but not in my nuclear family, and after the worst rape, he was kept away from me. Most in-person CSA happens inside the family, and most children who are severely sexually abused are girls. The average age of onset in the family environment is about six to seven. I was three. I was a boy. He was exceptionally violent to me. The specifics differ from case to case. The shape of what follows does not.

The ideal, for that three-year-old boy, would have been someone willing and able to hold me while my body came back from where it had been sent. Literally to feel another body envelop mine. To align with its calmness and strength.

For such a young child, it would have been close to a temporary return to the womb, a temporary regression to repair and recover. To actually feel safe. The obvious person would have been my mother. I was fortunate to have a loving mother, who later in life used to tease me that she breastfed me until I was about two and a half. I needed a return to that level of physical intimacy and security, for as long as necessary.

I needed to understand what had happened. Someone to say, in words simple enough for me to actually absorb: your parents made a mistake that won’t be repeated. We let a deranged man get access to you. There are not many such people in the world. We will never let him near you again. It was not even a little bit your fault. You did nothing wrong. You are loved. We are very upset about what happened and terribly sorry to have let this happen to you. This will not happen again.

And they had to make sure, and I had to know, that that last sentence was true.

There would have been language—age-appropriate, patient, repeated and elaborated until I truly understood—and, over time, an openness to return to talking about what happened, if healthy.

All of this dissolves the risk of a permanently disequilibrated neurobiology of fear.

There would have been no shame transmitted from the adults around me. There would have been room, across years, for what I had to say about it — not as disclosure in one dramatic moment, but as ordinary conversation inside a life that contained what had happened rather than hiding it. Eventually, the nervous system would have received the message that that particular threat had passed and was unusual. This system could grow to properly discern real from imagined threats, to activate and deactivate realistically. The mind would have understood and chalked it up to learning. It would have been possible, in time, to rest, to fully get over the terrible things that had happened to me. It would have been a positive learning experience, a real case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

That is not what happened.

What happened was far from ideal. My parents were not explicitly aware of what had happened. I was first raped on my third birthday, when he and his wife brought a cake for me. The second rape took place in their place. My mother was giving birth to my younger brother in our home, and his wife, who was childless and doted on me, offered to mind me for a few days in their house.

When I returned home, they knew something had happened. But there was a sort of silence around it. Not the cruel kind. The ordinary silence of people who had no language for what had occurred, no framework that could explicitly assess what had happened and accept it as real, no training or example in how to respond to such a thing, and no outside help available to them. I did not say anything. At that age, I would only have baby words, but I did not use them. I did not say that he did a bad thing to me, that I was scared. They saw something, but they did not look further. I knew that I could not seek special help. I already believed that I was a burden to my lovely mother. She had a brand-new baby and probably no more than one or two days’ rest post-partum.

My parents were not bad people. Both very kind and decent, they were dedicated to caring for my siblings and me. They kept the family alive inside a culture and an economy that left no margin for error. My mother, I feel with a certain resentment, had just given birth to her fifth surviving child in a society that forbade birth control, but even still, with love, without central heating or an automatic washing machine. Poverty was real. We had enough to eat, in fact, because we lived in Ireland and my parents grew a lot of it; our food was of the highest quality. My father worked every waking hour. My mother, on top of minding the house and five children and my father, took on near slave-like sewing work at home to make a little bit of cash.

The man who raped me, I now know, had been appallingly formed by conditions of his own — he was an extremely disturbed individual.

The society around all of us had no idea this happened to children at anything like the scale we now know it does. Thinking and action around child abuse were confined to extremities in a culture of widespread corporal punishment, and what nowadays would be called emotional abuse. Sex, even healthy sex, had literally no language. The idea of child sexual abuse, and that it could be profoundly harmful beyond reputation, was alien.

So, my parents did what the conditions permitted them to do. They noticed that I was very upset. They may have thought something had happened. They did not know what. They did not investigate further — life was already full of the challenges of survival. And this despite my father being a police sergeant and actually a big, strong man with standing in the community. Whatever happened was probably shameful and not aired. They had no language to ask. There was a small increase in care for an obviously distressed child, but they did not have the internal or external resources to give me what I needed. They carried on. I grew up. The fear stayed in my body for the next fifty years, because no one ever told my nervous system otherwise. The terrifying memory had to be suppressed. I became profoundly shame-filled. I truly believed I was a bad person and tried hard to sustain an image that protected me. And it took a massive effort to restrain my anger.

It was shortly after I returned home. My mother had a new open-top washing machine for clothes. It was basically a tub that could keep water hot, with an internal rotating arm and an external ringer. It was pale green. I could paint a picture of it. It was rolled out of a cupboard to be used once a week. She was labouring over it, probably two days after giving birth. I crept into the cupboard, where she also temporarily put the dirty washing. In my new habit of hiding in small, safe places, I peeped out at her. I stared. I was thinking. I felt moisture near my anus. I grabbed a white vest from the pile of laundry, adjusted my shorts, and wiped my bum. Opened the door a bit to let light in and looked. Blood. I felt a burning wave of shame. I bundled the vest up and hid it among the pile of dirty washing. I looked out at my mother bent over that machine, and I experienced extreme pain in my chest. My heart breaking.

My thinking ended. The conclusion reached. I was bad. I became the problem. I became the burden. And I knew, in the way children know these things, that my mother was already carrying more than she could bear. I did not want to add to her load. So even if I had had the words, I would not have told, would not have added to her burden.

The fear I carried in my body went underground, where it ran or confined everything I did. The shame grew and took root. None of the three things the ideal required was delivered: not the return to equilibrium, not the cognitive understanding, not the change of conditions that would have made future safety real. The acts against me were over in a few minutes. The reactions, mine and those of key others, lasted my life.

I am not describing this to condemn anyone. My parents were not the cause. I am fortunate to have made enough personal progress to be able to believe and to say that the man who raped me was not the cause either. They were products of the same conditions that produced both the rapes and the reactions.

I am describing this because it is a specific instance of what this essay and the two that follow it are about. In almost every severe case, the reactions that follow the acts come from the same river of causation that produced the acts in the first place.

• • •

Eddies, not events

There is a serious problem in public discourse about child sexual abuse. In almost all media — from sensationalist news and fiction films to academic and professional books and articles — two implicit assumptions recur. Firstly, that acts of CSA appear out of the blue, and their causation is impossible to explain. Secondly, there is a linear cause-and-effect relationship between these acts and the suffering that follows: a CSA occurs, and predictable harm ensues.

These are not moot points. They are at the core of why humanity is not dealing well with CSA. They are mechanisms we use to avoid the truth.

The first assumption, that CSA acts are out of the blue, is wrong. This whole series proves it in the vast majority of cases. I have spelt out the forces behind and the phases of causation, ending with why certain children are vulnerable and why certain, mostly post-pubescent males, develop a sexual desire for children and a failure of desistence. I have drawn attention to the particular contexts in which vulnerability meets desire.

The second assumption — that acts cause suffering — is a simplistic linear medical model. A virus or an accident happens, damages the body, and causes symptoms that need healing or coping with. When we look at reactions to CSA, we see this is not true. Whether suffering becomes sustained is determined by what follows the acts, not by the acts themselves.

Acts of child sexual abuse are eddies in a much larger current. They are significant. They are turbulent. They are not the source of the flow.

The current is the set of conditions that produce vulnerable children, and that produce adults whose desire has developed towards children and who fail to desist from acting on it. Earlier essays called these child vulnerability, D1 and D2.

The same conditions produce a fourth thing. The failure of reactions around the child when abuse occurs. Not separately. As part of the same pattern.

One upstream source. Four downstream manifestations. If we want to change anything, we have to look at the river, not the eddies.

• • •

The ideal response would have the three components. The ideal rarely happens. Suffering becomes ingrained, sustained and a life-long challenge. The professional psychology literature identifies five categories of suffering that people with severe experiences of CSA more commonly suffer from: psychological/emotional, behavioural, relational, practical and physical health. In Essay 3, I presented an insider view of this suffering as defined by the Unholy Trinity of fear, anger and shame. This is real suffering.

This logic — that reactions are more important than acts in determining the nature of subsequent suffering — dissolves a conundrum that runs through the professional and academic literature on CSA. The question comes up again and again. Why do some children have profoundly different outcomes from others after what look like similar experiences? Why do some people who experienced extreme things live strong, reasonably happy, productive lives, while others with superficially similar experiences suffer immensely and die prematurely? The literature treats this as a puzzle. It is not. Decades of research converge on the answer. The single strongest predictor of long-term outcomes is not the severity or the duration of the acts themselves. It is the combination of the child’s reactions, based on pre-CSA internalised factors, and the reactions of the key people around the child afterwards. Two children with comparable abuse histories end up in vastly different places — not because one was stronger, but because one was met and the other was not.

Two longitudinal studies bracket this finding at its extremes: the Amsterdam Case and the Putnam longitudinal study. In Amsterdam, at least eighty-seven infants were sexually abused, mostly through rape, by a relief childcare worker, living otherwise in stable families that responded swiftly and well: no discernible sustained suffering in the overwhelming majority when followed up years later. Putnam’s study related to girls in an American city experiencing severe familial CSA inside families already unable to provide safety: devastating outcomes across every category of later life. The difference is not the acts. It is the context that preceded them, and the reactions that followed. Amsterdam is the exception that proves the rule. The vast majority of severe CSA acts are not exceptional breaches of child protection but products of predictable conditions — the same conditions that determine reactions.

So, if reactions are the link between acts of CSA and suffering, then we must examine why reactions are generally so bad. And the answer is encapsulated in one word: avoidance.

• • •

Avoidance of the truth of CSA dominates reactions.

Avoidance of the truth about CSA is most pointed immediately after the acts occur. Avoidance of the truth defines reactions. In trying to answer the simple question of why reactions to acts of CSA were so bad, I read a quote by Professor Warrick Middleton, an Australian psychiatrist. He said that the problem was that we were “unwilling to look”. It was one of those AHA moments. I pursued it and soon realised that it was a superb window on truth. Over the years, I adopted the word “avoidance” not as a conscious act, but as a profound, often unconscious one that reveals true motivations.

Avoidance has three forms that, when we look at humanity’s reactions to CSA starting in the 1960s, come in three phases. And underlying these forms are two motivations.

The first phase of avoidance is denial of the facts. It doesn’t happen, or at least not on a significant scale, or it’s “those” people, nothing to do with us. At every level, there is an effort to avoid acknowledging that CSA acts are happening on the scale and in the proximity they do. Look at the reactions of the non-abusing people closest to the children, mostly in the family. Look at the reactions of front-line authorities, teachers, police, youth leaders, and religious leaders. Everywhere, there is avoidance of the fact, an unwillingness to look at what is mostly quite obvious when you do. Moving up the power hierarchy, we see this too. The Catholic Church was infamous, but just about every large child-serving organisation in the world has the same pattern of fact avoidance. Governments often need to be pushed to gather data. Globally, to date, very few have sanctioned and properly supported high-quality prevalence studies, and even when they do, the hallmark of subtler denial is evident in weak details and limited dissemination.

At the moment, the world’s children are being assailed by Internet-mediated child sexual abuse on a vast scale. Like the elephant in the sitting room, it is so large that we can’t, or won’t, see it. Big Tech has the capacity to measure this, actually to describe this monster, but they don’t want to paint this picture. The really big so-called “Intelligence” services could do this too — they can literally take on and complete the task of gathering the data, the base information about the scale and nature of all Internet-mediated CSA. But they don’t do it. They haven’t provided us with the basic factual picture. And the reason is obvious — paint this picture realistically, and the world would insist on serious action. All of this denial of facts, all of it, falls back on the children and now-adults who experience severe CSA. This is such an enormous weight that we end up needing to avoid the truth ourselves, for our sanity, for our very survival.

If the reality of the facts, the scale, the proximity, becomes unavoidable, the second phase of avoidance is that of denying the true nature of the connection between experiencing CSA and suffering. Throughout history, until very recently, whenever the fact of CSA could not be avoided, there was a reaction that suppressed its connection to suffering. The only acceptable harm was reputational. Girls, despite being entirely innocent, were tarnished by a loss of “purity”. Boys, equally innocent, were “not real men”; they might even be “homosexuals” to have allowed that.

In recent decades, there has been something that at first appears as a strange inversion of this connection to suffering. Nowadays, in much public discourse, from fiction and mass media to academic research, there is an assumption of catastrophic harm. This is equally wrong, and equally avoidant of the truth, and ultimately a contributor to suffering related to CSA.

Catastrophic thinking adopts the simplistic idea that acts of CSA have a linear connection to suffering. In fact, suffering is entirely dependent on reactions. Nowadays, this includes catastrophising. It actually contributes to suffering.

This catastrophising ultimately serves to redirect focus and give the impression that something is being done, even though CSA is “impossible to understand”. It has become a cheap form of attention-grabbing for mass media. Catastrophising is embedded in individualised thinking and in the near-deliberate avoidance of the truth of causation. Like sugar, it feeds the artificial desire to direct anger and opprobrium at inexplicable monsters. And in doing so, it deflects from real causation. From really facing the truth. Which brings us to the third phase of avoidance — denial of responsibility.

Denial of responsibility based on an understanding of causation is the phase that all countries with high public discourse about CSA are currently in. The avoidance of responsibility happens at every level, but the discourse — in fact misdirection — is dominated by powerful forces. Denial of responsibility extends to all social forms, including Big Tech, child-serving organisations and families. Everyone joins in with this deceit. Like a cascading waterfall, it all lands on two sets of shoulders: the unlucky children and the individual monsters.

The escalation of opprobrium against wicked paedophiles is clearly designed to dump all responsibility on them. Despite the simple truth that they are “us” and products of upstream forces way beyond individual choice or agency, humanity prefers to blame them, and that’s that. Escalated opprobrium has become so intense that it closes off help for adolescents who recognise concerning thoughts in themselves, precisely the point at which early intervention is most effective, which is precisely the point at which help is least reachable. And it has done nothing to reduce prevalence. Prosecution and conviction rates, even in the most resourced systems, sit under one per cent of people actively abusing children each year. The Internet has become the principal vector for a growing share of CSA because it is where deterrence cannot reach. Deterrence — D3 in earlier essays — makes sense as one element inside a strategy. This doesn’t make sense as a strategy. And yet that is what it has become.

The focus on the other set of shoulders — the children and now-adults who experienced CSA — is nearly a worse misdirection. We now get a lot of pity, but “healing” is still entirely our responsibility. We have the vast majority of responsibility to deal with CSA dumped on us. There are token efforts by justice systems to bring us justice, although these processes are often literally torturous. There are token efforts to fund therapy and social work. But even in the countries with the most money allocated, there is a vast gap between what is provided and what is needed. And this gap is not actually a matter of healing resources or money — it is a matter of allocating true responsibility, of humanity facing the truth.

In Essays 7b and 7c, I will look at reactions in more detail, all of which are primarily defined by avoidance of the truth. But first, the obvious question: if this is how avoidance manifests, and therefore determines reactions, and thus links to suffering, why do we do it? Why does humanity, at all levels, avoid the truth of CSA?

Two motivations behind avoidance

Firstly, CSA is emotionally avoided. It is a difficult topic to think about. Acts of CSA throw light into the darkest corners of humanity, and as Jung and many others have shown, we avoid this darkness because it can be deeply uncomfortable. We hide things from ourselves, individually and collectively, in this shadow.

Secondly, there are practical reasons to avoid the truth of CSA. These practical reasons range from the simple fact that, for almost all of history and for almost all people, there has been a preoccupation with daily survival, leaving little room to truly face CSA. My parents were classic examples. They were not turning away because they did not care. They were turning away because they could not afford to stop and look.

But humanity has now won the survival race; for most of us, there is room for facing it, and we know more and more about it. So why don’t we actually face child sexual abuse? The answer is a subtler but no less powerful practical reason: humanity’s material power culture, dominated by a small proportion of people and organisations, avoids the truth of CSA because it implicates them and threatens their material power. This is not a conspiracy; it is a manifestation of a culture dominated by an increasingly insane drive for a bigger slice of a bigger GDP cake. And to continue the sugar analogy, this cake is more and more full of useless, even harmful, carbohydrates.

Once you learn to recognise the pattern of avoidance, you begin to see it everywhere. The parent who avoids or suppresses what their child is saying or showing. The teacher who does not register the signs. The social worker who handles only the most severe cases. The researcher whose funding and publishing incentives push the individualised framing. The politician whose speech condemns the monsters and leaves the conditions producing them untouched. The corporation whose annual report highlights child safety and whose platform feeds the problem. The culture that agrees unanimously that CSA is a terrible thing and, in the same breath, pushes the responsibility to deal with it away.

It is the same pattern at every level. That is what the next two essays will trace.

• • •

What has worked, and what it has cost

Not everything about the reactions to CSA in recent decades has failed. The cultural shift, the move towards child-centred thinking, the slow but real recognition of child development as something that matters for what adults become, the opening up of academic and professional discourse, the end of the absolute silence that still dominated living memory when my abuse happened — these are genuine achievements. Child protection in child-serving organisations has reduced certain kinds of in-person, situational abuse. A child disclosing today is more likely to be believed than a child disclosing in 1960. These are not nothing.

But the progress has mainly been about suppressing symptoms and avoiding the causative force, rather than facing and resolving the causes. And when you suppress a symptom without addressing the cause, you get displacement. The eddy that no longer occurs in one part of the river appears somewhere else. Children not being abused today in certain institutional settings are being abused instead on an unprecedented scale through the Internet. Children are wrapped in more cotton wool in the physical world and handed devices that connect them, in the virtual world, to the largest community of men seeking to abuse children in human history—whack-a-mole, at a global scale.

Displacement shows up in other forms, too. General anxiety around CSA has climbed steeply, well beyond what the risks to many particular children would warrant. Ordinary relations between adults and children — especially between men and children — have constricted in ways that reduce the informal adult presence around children that has always been part of how societies protect them. CSA has been successfully demonised to the point that it has become almost unsafe to think about it clearly. This helps with some forms of abuse while making others worse. The very catastrophising about CSA directly raises anxiety and adds to the refusal to face it.

This is not an argument against child protection. It is an argument for looking clearly at what our reactions have achieved and what they have cost, so that the same avoidance does not produce the next generation of responses as the last. Real progress will come when we stop suppressing symptoms and start facing and working on causes.

• • •

What the next two essays do

Essay 7b examines reactions close to the child and the adult they become. The child themselves. The family. Friends and partners. And in wealthier contexts, the professionals who react to CSA.

Essay 7c moves outward to the higher levels of power: the wealthy, corporations, governments, justice systems, organised religion, national cultures, and public discourse. These reactions are not separate from the proximal ones. They feed directly back into the conditions that produce the next vulnerable child, the next person who develops desire, the next breakdown of capacity in those near the child to help.

Everything rests on the observation at the core of this essay. Reactions do not fail by accident. They fail because the same conditions that produce the acts produce them. They are not a separate problem. They are part of the same one. And because they are part of it, they are also part of where it can be changed.

• • •

If this is your experience:

What was done to you was not your fault. The inadequacy or even the exacerbation that followed wasn’t your fault. The same conditions produced both, and both reached into your sense of yourself, over the years, until you probably came to believe that something was fundamentally wrong with you. Understanding this does not undo any of it. It can, sometimes, move the weight.

If someone you love has a severe experience of CSA:

If you are living alongside someone carrying this, or if you are a parent or sibling of someone now an adult with this legacy, this essay may read as an indictment. It is not. What it describes is how the conditions people are in shape what they can offer. You may have said the wrong thing or failed to say the right thing. So has everyone. What makes the difference over time is not fixing. It is staying and working to understand, not turning away, and staying steady when things are hard. That is reachable. It does not require formal qualifications.

If you work professionally in this area:

Most experienced practitioners already know that the context around CSA shapes outcomes more than the acts themselves. What this essay offers is not a correction of that knowledge but a language for it, and an argument that the work is heavily constrained by the distal conditions Essay 7c will examine. The real scope for change lies at the level of family and community capacity, and, in turn, in the upstream factors that influence them, not only in individual treatment. You know this already. The question is how much of the profession’s oxygen it gets.

If you carry something that frightens you:

The opprobrium the culture directs at people who have acted on, or fear they might act on, desires for children is one of the reasons help is so hard to find, and one of the reasons so few adolescents, in particular, reach help before a first act. That reflects a cultural issue, not a judgment on you. If you have not acted, reaching out — while that is still true — is both possible and worth doing. The Resources section is a starting point.

If you are in a position to influence institutions or societies:

The material power culture this essay has named is the context in which you work. The question is not how to do more of what is already being done. It is whether you are willing to look at what the current activity is actually achieving, and to use what influence you have to redirect it towards causation rather than symptoms—regulating the industries that profit from the conditions producing CSA and redirecting resources from deterrence towards the upstream conditions that produce vulnerability and desire. None of this is technically difficult. All of it is politically resisted. You are where that could change.

• • •

What has this essay brought up for you? I welcome disagreement — the framework I am building challenges well-established assumptions, and a serious challenge sharpens serious work. Leave a comment or write to me at nolitimereireland@gmail.com.

Next week: Essay 7b. Reactions close to the child — inside the child themselves, inside the family, inside friends and partners, and inside the professionals who meet the child or the adult she becomes.

• • •

Essay 7a • NOLI TIMERE • 2026

• • •

For most of my life, I could not begin to ask why these people sexually abuse children. In Essay 6a, I described my recurring nightmares, classic chase dreams with me running away from him. A faceless man in black, the relentless pursuit, waking in sweat. I could not look at him because I could not face him.

That changed. Slowly, over the years, through research and personal work running in parallel. I eventually saw him clearly. He was pathetic. And once I could see him, I could begin to ask the question, why.

I turned to the research. Some of it was useful. Most of it frustrated me. The dominant tradition — criminology, psychology, forensic psychiatry — works outward from caught individuals. It profiles. Takes on the challenge of delving into their murky, confused individual pasts. It describes them. It measures recidivism. There have been some efforts to offer a general answer to “why”. But these are unsatisfactory. They are inductive, working out from the individual to a more general answer. But there are too many gaps in the evidence, and it is nearly impossible to trace back through the complexity of individual lives. This work is very helpful, but it cannot satisfactorily explain causation in general — why over a hundred million males alive today sexually abuse children. For that, you have to work in the other direction, deductively upstream, from a theory of causation, into the individual. That conceptual framework did not exist in any usable form. I had to build it. And I think it is good. It seems to hold up against the evidence. It seems to explain things.

Within this conceptual framework, there is the specific question of why mostly males commit acts of CSA.

They are part of the broader river of causation, shaped by the dominant material power dynamic, a way of organising humanity that requires the abuse of other people. Justifies it and does not work to lessen abusiveness. They too are part of the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering where humans, individually and collectively, abuse each other, suffer and from this suffering continue the cycle of abuse.

Trying to get inside their world, I once again created a conceptual framework, an aid to seeing, with three components, found that each began with D, and called the framework the 3Ds. They are desire, desistence, and deterrence.

D1, desire, asks why some people develop sexual desire for children. D2, desistence, asks why they fail to develop the internal controls that prevent them from acting on this desire. D3, deterrence, is dealt with in Essay 7. This essay examines D1 and D2.

Nothing in this essay asks you to forgive anyone.

• • •

Why mostly males

Nearly 100% of Internet-mediated CSA is perpetrated by post-pubescent males. Across the different forms of in-person abuse — in family environments, in child-serving organisations, in work settings, by strangers, in exploitation — between 90% and 99% is male-perpetrated. Culture alone does not explain this. The explanation is ultimately genetic.

Male sexual drive is, at its biological root, more outward-directed and less selective than female. It is driven by testosterone, which males have far higher levels of, and which is also the underlying hormonal driver of force and physical aggression. This is the biological predisposition that makes males more vulnerable to developing sexual desire for children.

A predisposition is not a cause. Biology sets a range. What determines outcomes within that range is developmental experience. That is where the explanation actually lives.

Women do sexually abuse children, and at rates higher than is commonly assumed. The causes are similar to those that produce male perpetration. But desire-driven CSA is overwhelmingly male, and biology is part of why. Testosterone is what channels the developmental failures we are about to examine into sexual expression rather than other forms of abuse.

• • •

D1 — Why desire develops

If something in this essay rings personally — if you recognise something in yourself as you read — it is as much for you as for anyone else. That recognition matters. This essay will come back to you later.

About three years into my research, I was walking towards my therapist’s office on a sunny Dublin afternoon. Out of the crowds on the pavement in front of me, I was faced suddenly with a shocking image. A woman was strangling a girl of about twelve. Both standing side-on to me. The mother had both hands around her daughter’s throat and had more or less lifted her off the ground. On some autopilot, I walked past. Then I forced myself to turn around.

I told her to stop. She released her grip and turned on me with the same look she had been directing at the girl — murderous. I held my ground. I got my phone out and called the police. She became afraid. The girl ran to her father, who was thirty metres away. The woman cursed me and fled.

The whole time — and for more than an hour afterwards — I was shaking violently. Not only with fear. With something that came from much deeper. It was the first time in my life that I had directly intervened against child abuse. I understood, somewhere in the shaking, what the intervention had been: a power inversion. A child made powerless by an adult. An abusive adult was momentarily powerless before me.

The trembling came from somewhere I recognised. I had been that child.

I cannot feel my way into sexual desire for children. I have said so, and I mean it. But I can feel my way into the root of it — the somatic reality of being made powerless and terrified, and the imperative to escape that sensation. I felt it shaking through my body on a Dublin street. I feel it every day. When I read the research on what happens to boys who grow up without genuine intimacy, without adults who use power for them rather than against them, I understood something from somewhere much closer than the outside.

The root of desire is fear.

Sex, for a young adolescent, involves potential vulnerability and exposure. It is exciting. It is also risky — the risk of appearing incompetent, of being rejected, of being shamed. For most young people, this is navigable. A boy formed with genuine intimacy — who grew up in a home where close relationships felt safe, where adult power was used for him rather than against him, in a culture that treated respectful sex as something positive — has the interior equipment to meet this. The vulnerability is real. It is manageable.

A boy formed with little or no positive intimacy — who experienced, over the years, in the family environment where intimacy should have been built, adult power repeatedly used against him — does not have that equipment. When sexual life begins, the exposure it demands is precisely the exposure he was conditioned to be terrified of. A peer brings this into sharp relief. A peer can reject him, shame him, demand the relational competence he was never given. A peer can hold a mirror up to what he lacks.

What the person who later abuses children is managing is not simply the risk of being caught. He is managing the risk of feeling fearful — of being opened to a terror that genuine exposure would trigger. This distinction matters. Fear does not always look like fear. It can present as aggression, dominance, control, and macho posturing. All of it is avoidance of genuine vulnerability, genuine intimacy, and genuine exposure to another person who can see him clearly.

A child cannot do this. A child cannot expose his incapacity. A child cannot demand the relational competence he lacks. A child cannot hold the mirror up. This is the essential quality of childness that makes children the solution to the problem fear has created. Not an attraction to children in any innate sense. A search for a form of intimate experience — safety, control, closeness — that does not open him to what he cannot face.

And children are not only non-threatening. Children are often genuinely open to intimacy, even seeking it. Brian — the eleven-year-old Irish boy from Essay 5, hours alone at his computer, lonely in ways his family could not see — was looking for connection. What found him was not connection. But his openness was real. The person grooming him read it and used it. The match between the abuser’s need and the child’s openness is not coincidental. It is structural. Child vulnerability — as examined in Essay 5 — is not only why children get hurt. It is part of what produces and sustains the desire that targets them. The two currents meet.

There is a further dimension of risk management worth being explicit about. People who sexually abuse children pursue different strategies, each calibrated to keep fear at bay. Internet CSAM is the most remote — maximum distance, minimum personal exposure. Grooming and manipulation are about progressive control: the process of making a child dependent and manageable, step by deliberate step. Many who groom gain sexual pleasure, but describe the manipulation itself as satisfying, sometimes more so than any physical act. Late-onset abuse within the family environment, where a senior male — mostly the father — begins to abuse a young child sexually, is already inside a controlled situation: risk minimised by proximity and dependency. These are not fundamentally different types of person. They are different strategies for managing the same underlying fear, the same need, the same search.

Fear, anger, and shame

Fear does not operate alone. The full Unholy Trinity — fear, anger, and shame — runs through the formation of desire.

Anger — sustained, fuelled by fear, displaced from its real source — is the Son. The boy who experienced years of adult power used against him carries anger as well as fear. For most people who sexually abuse children, sex is not primarily about anger. But anger is present in much of it — as aggression, as dominance, as the need to control rather than share. There is a remarkable undertone in the secret discourse of these men; a sort of angry “fuck you” to the world.

At the extreme end, anger can be the primary driver. When extreme physical force is used against a child, what is happening is not primarily desire at all. It is rage, pushed over the final interior constraint by testosterone and finding a sexual form against the most powerless available target. This is what happened to me. It is the severe end of a spectrum, not the typical profile. It must be named.

A distinction is worth making here. Physical intensity in sex is not inherently abusive. An animal urgency in sexual intimacy can be an expression of respectful desire, welcomed. That is something different. The confusion between this and abuse is real, and pornography profits from that confusion — not through deliberate intent, but because there is a market for it. When such force is directed at a child, or at anyone without their genuine participation, it is something else entirely: anger expressed against someone who cannot resist.

Shame is the Holy Spirit — pervasive, invisible, running through everything. Here, it takes a specific and often misunderstood form. The shame most people who sexually abuse children carry is not primarily shame about their acts, though that exists too. It is older and deeper than any act. It is shame about what they fundamentally are and are not. Not manly enough. Not courageous enough. Not sexually attractive or desirable. Not able to be genuinely vulnerable with another adult. Unable to meet what respectful intimacy demands. The shame is about the incapacity itself. It precedes every act.

This shame produces a hidden life. The person cannot be revealed for what he fears he really is. Everything must be managed, controlled, concealed. The extreme secrecy of CSA is not only tactical — not only the avoidance of legal consequence. It is the secrecy of profound shame. Of a life that cannot bear to be seen.

The online communities assembled around CSA do something specific to this shame. When a man discovers that there are millions of others — when he finds a community that affirms rather than exposes — the shame is lessened. The online club does not create desire. It does something perhaps more dangerous: it dismantles the shame that might otherwise have held desire in check. This is one of the most insidious dimensions of what the Internet has produced.

At the furthest extreme are those who carry no shame at all. Shameless. In an aggressive form. The motivation there is different in character — extreme power-seeking, an inversion of having felt its complete absence, or formation in a genuinely psychopathic context. These people take satisfaction in the infliction of fear and pain. They are the extreme end of the spectrum, not the typical profile.

The three components

D1 — the development of sexual desire for children — is driven by three interwoven components: intimacy failure, power failure, and sexual development. All three trace to the same upstream source. They are not independent causes. They are one developmental failure with three expressions.

They are not equal in depth. Intimacy and power are the primary failures — the direct products of fear-laden formation. Sexual development is the channel through which those failures come to express themselves sexually.

These failures form within families. It is in family environments that intimacy, power, and sexual formation are most directly shaped. A family that cannot give a child genuine intimacy and a respectful experience of power is almost always a family that cannot model healthy sexuality. The conditions fail together. They come from the same source. The family is the proximal cause — even when the forces producing those family conditions stretch far upstream through the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering.

Intimacy and power

Sex carries intense sensation and feeling. Entering the world of sexual interaction as a teenager is exciting, challenging, confusing, and potentially exposing. For most young people, the risks are manageable when they have sufficient inner security and a good enough formation around them. It requires confidence in intimacy — the inner strength to be vulnerable without being overwhelmed, the capacity to behave respectfully with another person who is also exposed.

For boys who reach puberty without this — with a fear of closeness, a deep sense of having been made powerless unfairly, and no healthy template of what sexual relations should look like — sex becomes something far more disabling. A peer can see through them. A peer carries her own need for respect and safety, and can demand it in return.

Children resolve this problem. They are less powerful. They are not threatening. They cannot demand what the person cannot give. And they are, as Essay 5 established, often carrying their own unmet need for closeness and care. Vulnerable children pose little resistance or threat of a powerful reaction. The person seeking to abuse does not calculate this consciously. He moves towards vulnerability like water finding a channel.

The pattern, once established, becomes self-reinforcing. The physiological satisfaction is real. The sense of control is real. The relief of closeness without terror is real. Success in avoiding detection emboldens. The power, the intimacy, and the relief are real sources of satisfaction. This is what makes the pattern so resistant to change.

Sexual development

Why does all this take a sexual form rather than some other expression of abuse?

The same family conditions that failed to build capacity for intimacy and respectful power also produced poor sexual formation. They come from the same source. Sexual development is the channel through which the intimacy and power failures express themselves — not an independent cause, but the form those failures take.

Most children experience a sexual environment that sits somewhere on a spectrum. At one extreme, sexual abuse is normalised. In Desiree’s family from Essay 5, the powerful take what they want from those who cannot refuse. Desiree’s brother witnessed his father’s attitude toward his mother: extreme misogyny, implicit but real sexual abuse.

In other extreme and exceptional contexts, boys grow up severely and repeatedly abused — mostly physical and psychological abuse, but sometimes sexual too — by a dominant male from early childhood. For these boys, the move to perpetrating is almost seamless. They have absorbed a template. This is the only context in which there is a reasonably direct developmental line from being abused to becoming someone who abuses. To be clear: the idea that boys who experience sexual abuse are substantially more likely to become sexual abusers of children is often exaggerated. The evidence points to a direct connection only where severe, sustained sexual abuse of a dependent boy by a senior male has occurred.

At the other extreme, and very common, are families where sex is deeply repressed. Sex is unspoken, treated as something shameful and dangerous, controlled by rigid formulae rather than respected as something positive. This is widespread and is often reinforced by dogmatic religious cultures with a shame-based or highly controlling attitude to sex.

These are the family environments from which teenagers emerge into adulthood carrying poor sexual formation — and, in some cases, a trajectory towards sexual abuse.

A man formed in such conditions carries, alongside his failures of intimacy and power, a specific terror of sexual exposure with a peer. Genuine sexual intimacy with an equal demands exactly the vulnerability he was never formed to tolerate — the capacity to be uncertain, possibly rejected, seen as he is. Children cannot make that demand. This is not a separate failure from the failures of intimacy and power. It is their sexual expression.

The conflict between D1 and D2 — between what a person actually has to deal with and what they have absorbed about how they should be — not only produces CSA. It produces a whole population spectrum of damaged sexual lives. At one end: genuinely respectful, fulfilling sexual relationships — requiring real formation, or the hard work of finding it. Further along: functional but joyless sex, baby-making, releasing an urge. Then various forms of abusive dynamics — dominance, coercion, contempt. Non-practice, withdrawal. And at the far extreme: desire directed at children. People who sexually abuse children are not a separate species. They are the extreme expression of a damaged sexual formation that operates, in different degrees and different forms, across a vast portion of the population. The conditions the Material Power Culture creates and the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering transmits produce this spectrum reliably, generation after generation.

• • •

D2 — Why desistance fails

Desistence is different in nature from desire. It operates at a different level.

D1 is bio-neurological — formed deep in the body and nervous system through early experience, before or beneath language, before any conscious processing. It does not respond to what is preached. It responds to what was experienced.

D2 is learned. It is formed through introjected beliefs — ideas absorbed from parents and culture about how we should be and behave. From religion, from moral instruction, from what was transmitted about right and wrong. D2 is ideas about what is right, operating at the level of thinking rather than feeling and driving. D1 is what a person actually has to deal with. D2 is what they believe they should be. Many adults have lifetimes of interior conflict and confusion between D1 and D2.

Here is the insight that took me longest to reach, and that matters most for prevention. If a boy is formed with genuine intimacy — with adults using power for him rather than against him, and capable of protecting him from extra-familial abuse, with a lived experience of respectful sexual relationships modelled around him — he will not develop sexual desire for children. Not because of laws. Not because of religious dogma or school-based learning. Because the conditions producing D1 will not have been present, good formation makes D1 unlikely and D2 unnecessary simultaneously. The desire does not develop. There is nothing for desistence to suppress.

When D1 has developed, desistence is working against something laid down at a deeper level than itself. D2 can function and hold — many men who have a concerning desire never act on it, and that is genuine desistence functioning. But its durability depends on the conditions that support it: the visibility of transgression, the reality of social consequences, and the presence of a community that would react. Change those conditions, and culturally constructed desistence can be dismantled.

The collision between the two levels is visible in the most recognisable pattern in the entire history of CSA. A man receives a powerful religious formation. He preaches it. He appears to live by it. He is seen as a pillar of his community. He goes home and commits severe abuse. This is not simple hypocrisy. It is two levels of formation in conflict. The bio-neurological level — laid down before or beneath language, in experiences of fear and unsafe intimacy — is not reached by what is preached. It is reached only by what was experienced. When the two collide, and circumstances permit, the deeper level wins.

The entitlement beliefs visible at the surface of desistence failure — I pay for everything here. I’m the head of this house. She wanted it. He was old enough. He likes it — that is not the cause of that failure. They are what fills the space where formation did not occur. They are drawn from the cultural sediment of a Material Power Culture that has spent centuries constructing justifications for the exploitation of those with less power — the same logic that justified slavery, serfdom, misogyny, and the general abuse of children, differently dressed, operating in the mind of a man who has concluded that a child exists for his use.

Some years ago, I found myself reading an open forum on a publicly accessible travel site. Dozens of contributors discussing paying for sex with thirteen-, fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls in Thailand. Open acknowledgement that most had been pressured into this by family debt, but people do jobs they hate because they need money. Forceful anal penetration was noted as not quite right, but every job has its occupational hazards. What struck me was not the extremity of the rationalisations. It was how structurally familiar they were. Not aberrant inventions. Applications of cultural materials deposited in these men since childhood by a world that had never given them the tools to question them.

Laws can punish. They cannot form. The conditions that make desire unlikely and desistance genuine cannot be legislated into existence. They have to be built — in families, in cultures, over generations. This is the biggest message of this entire series: we cannot address the causes of child sexual abuse and related suffering without addressing the real causes — in the case of people who sexually abuse children, the real causes of their desire to commit CSA.

The Internet arrived and became the single greatest dismantler of culturally constructed desistence in history. It removed precisely the conditions under which that desistence had functioned — the visibility of transgression, the real social cost, the isolation of acting. In their place: a global community of men, connected anonymously, affirming each other, escalating together. Tens of millions of them, by some estimates considerably more. The Internet does not merely enable people who already want to abuse children. It strips the cognitive overlay from desistence, leaving only the bio-neurological substrate. And it converts latent desire into actuality — giving people who might never have acted the emboldening knowledge that they are not alone, that millions of others are doing this, that the shame that held them, that fuelled desistence, need not hold them now.

The criminal justice systems we rely on — which in England and Wales convict well under half of one per cent of people actively abusing children each year, and in most of the world, far fewer — are suppressing symptoms. In contrast, the conditions producing those symptoms remain largely untouched. Preventing desire from developing at all is a child development project. And child development is perhaps humanity’s biggest project. Humanity has only recently begun to understand this — that we have to apply everything we have learned about childhood to how we actually rear children. We are not doing it well. We are caught in the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering ourselves. We transmit what was done to us, even when we consciously know it was harmful. Consciously breaking the cycle is possible. It is not easy. It is the work this series is ultimately about.

• • •

The window we are not using

Child development starts with reasonably healthy, well-resourced mothers, mostly within supportive families of one form or another. This and the earliest formation of infants is the best point to break the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering.

But there are multiple points in the specific Cycle of Abuse and Suffering concerning boys who become sexual abusers of children. I want to highlight one area where we know targeted intervention works, but we haven’t yet developed our beliefs and attitudes, nor have we allocated the resources that knowledge demands.

The window of opportunity to intervene with adolescents who are demonstrating concerning sexual ideas and behaviours is much wider than most people think.

For most males who sexually abuse children, and especially those who are not situational but persistent, there are generally discernible signs in adolescence. Sometimes in the actual committal of crimes, sometimes in subtler but discernible ways, if you know what to look for.

Recent Australian crime data found that 22% of sex crimes coming to police attention were committed by minors — adolescents, mostly boys, whose concerning thoughts and behaviours had gone entirely unaddressed. More than two-thirds of men with persistent sexual attraction to children became aware of those feelings before the age of eighteen, when support could still reach something that had not yet hardened into the adult problem.

Sexual recidivism rates for treated adolescents in specialist programmes range from around 3% to 15%. The most robustly evidenced approach — Multisystemic Therapy, an intensive family-centred model — produced 83% fewer arrests for sexual crimes than comparison groups in one major study, with effects sustained over a 24-year follow-up. There are legitimate questions about recidivism data — it requires formal evidence of crimes committed, and people who are caught once and treated and controlled sometimes become more adept at avoiding detection. But overall, the evidence is clear: early intervention works. It is also, by any measure, a highly effective use of resources.

This sort of intervention is rare, only happening in a few countries with the necessary resources and orientation. The norm is silence and shame, while the pattern festers and hardens. The public intensity of hatred towards people who sexually abuse children creates, paradoxically, the conditions that make early intervention least likely — because no one wants to come near this, even in the act of asking for help before any harm is done. Destigmatisation is not a soft addition to the response. Any response must reach those who need it.

This is avoidance at its most costly. Not flinching from what is revolting but flinching from what is treatable. The adolescent prevention window is the highest-value intervention point we have. The criminal justice system, reaching fewer than one in two hundred people actively abusing children each year, absorbs resources that could fund the early intervention we know works. The technology corporations whose platforms dismantled culturally constructed desistence at an unprecedented scale have not been made to bear the costs of that. These are not inevitable arrangements. They are choices.

• • •

What looking at him showed me

About six years into my research, I was also doing intensive personal work — therapy, EMDR, breathwork. The research and the personal work fed each other constantly. It felt like climbing an uncharted mountain. You reach a ridge, find a platform, see the view from there, and another ridge appears above.

During one Transformational Breath session, I had a vision.

I was lying on the floor. The man who had raped me was kneeling beside me, leaning over me. For most of my life, this would have become a chase — the faceless figure, the flight, the desperate near-escape. Instead, I looked at him.

He was a pathetic man.

I felt pity.

I have not had those chase dreams since.

The pity was not forgiveness. Not absolution. Not a diminishment of what he did — what he did, I still feel, and I hold him fully responsible. It was the end of running. When I stopped running, I could see what he actually was: a damaged man who required a child’s powerlessness to feel safe, whose motivation, supercharged by sexual drive, was to take power from someone who could not withhold it. Pathetic is the precise word. Not a dismissal — a description.

He was inside the human world, not outside it. Formed by it. A current in the same river that formed me — the same upstream conditions, a different channel. Understanding that does not protect any child who has already been harmed. It is the only thing that protects the next one.

No wonder we keep running. And no wonder children keep being harmed.

• • •

If you carry something that frightens you: This essay is about you, and it was written with the intention of understanding, not excusing. If you recognise yourself in these pages — in the developmental patterns, the fears around intimacy, the desires you have not acted on — that recognition matters. It is where change begins. The capacity for insight that brought you to this page is the same capacity that makes change possible. Confidential help exists. The Resources section is a place to start.

If this is your experience: Nothing in this essay asks you to understand or forgive the person who abused you. If you were a child whose own body’s responses were used against your understanding of what happened, the responsibility was not yours. It was never yours. That is the ground on which recovery rests.

If you love or support someone who has experienced severe CSA, what this essay describes about how desire develops is not abstract. Understanding what shaped the person who caused harm is one of the few things that genuinely helps the person you love make sense of what happened to them — and points towards the kinds of support most likely to reach them.

If you work professionally in this area, the adolescent with concerning sexual thoughts or behaviours who never receives support is a missed prevention window. The research base for the intervention findings here is detailed in the full forthcoming manuscript. The obstacle is not knowledge. It is public opinion and resource priorities, and these priorities are shaped by the same forces this series has been examining throughout.

If you are in a position to influence institutions or societies, the conditions producing people who sexually abuse children are the same conditions producing vulnerable children — different expressions of the same upstream forces. The hundred-million-strong online community did not assemble itself. It was produced by choices made by technology corporations and enabled by governments that deferred to them. That is a political question. It requires a political answer.

• • •

What has this essay brought up for you? I am genuinely interested in disagreement — the framework I am building here challenges some well-established assumptions, and a serious challenge sharpens serious work. Leave a comment or write to me at nolitimereireland@gmail.com.

Next week: what happens after child sexual abuse enters the world. How reactions at every level — from a child’s silence to a culture’s avoidance — are shaped by the same forces that produced the abuse. And why the failure of those reactions is not incidental but systemic.

Essay 6b • NOLI TIMERE • 2026

This essay is part of an open conversation. I welcome challenge, disagreement, and dialogue — understanding grows through honest exchange.

Them

This is Essay 6a of the NOLI TIMERE series. It examines the people who sexually abuse children, who they actually are, and the forces that prevent us from seeing them clearly. Essay 6b, which follows in a few days, examines why they develop sexual desire for children and why their internal controls so often fail to stop them from acting on it.

• • •

From the moment I set out on this journey, I have been driven to understand, to lift the mattresses of avoidance and face the truth of my own experience of CSA and of CSA in general.

During this journey, there were particular milestones, markers of progress. I would find myself trying to understand a particular issue, only to get stuck. You could call it writer’s block, but for me, it felt life-threatening. I would get very stressed, and it would be even harder to live with than normal. I would grow tenser and tenser. But, even with periods where I could barely work, I persisted. And then a moment would happen, often in the very early morning, and I would find the words — my brain working at a million miles an hour, my insides releasing pressure. Words would pour out, and a deep feeling of warm relief would spread through me. My deepest feelings, my experience and my words line up. I felt that I had solved a hard puzzle.

When I have these moments of release, I actually smile a full-body smile. People who know me well will know how rare that is.

But in my pursuit of understanding people who sexually abuse children, I have not had such an alignment of insight and words. I literally cannot get them. That’s why I call them “them”. It’s probably why humanity in general has this problem with them, too.

I studied them by reading dozens of academic and professional articles and books, watching in on some of their Internet discourse, listening to insiders and others talk about them, talking with specialist psychologists and counsellors who work with them and just plain trying to get inside their heads. And after all of that, I still don’t get it — I don’t get that deep sense of how a man can look at an obvious child, in-person or in a picture, and become sexually aroused. I think most people have this same sense of bewilderment. It is like looking into the dark.

On reflection, the reason for this bewilderment is simple: I, like the vast majority of people, have not felt a sexual desire for children. Almost no woman does. The great majority of men do not either. We look into this particular darkness and genuinely cannot see what is there, because what is there is not in us. It does not resonate. This is not a failure of intelligence or imagination. It is a simple absence of the thing itself, and it is the first and most basic reason why understanding people who sexually abuse children is so hard.

But there is also a second dimension: not seeing the truth about these people. It is not looking, and it is not actually wanting to see their truth. This comes from a very different place — a place of fear. Throughout human history, we have created monsters: inexplicable evil-doers, always different, not really human, undefeatable. They are symbolic, mythical embodiments of things we do not want to face, and for some of us, they play a prominent and powerful role in our lives. In recent times, in certain countries, “paedophiles” have become the favourite monster.

But monsters are not real. They are psychological and cultural constructs, and the real secret is this: they hide certain truths that we do not want to face. The simple truth of the monsters who sexually abuse children is that they are not actually monsters. They are people not really very different to us. Their sexual desires and behaviours are not innate; they are shaped early in their lives. It is very difficult to face this truth, especially for insiders. As children, we cannot see their truth because we are young and because key adults do not help us. So they become monsters hidden within us. For insiders, a key element of living better lives is to sufficiently face and dissolve the fear embodied in “them”. For everyone else, it is also a key to understanding and facing child sexual abuse. But facing and slaying monsters is far from easy.

I suffered, and I mean suffered, at least hundreds, if not thousands, of nightmares containing a particular type of monster. An absolutely terrifying man dressed in heavy black clothing, whose face I never see, or perhaps never look at. He hunts me with evil, relentless intent. Like Tolkien’s Nazgûls, I feel him like pure evil that cannot be escaped. These nightmares involved me using tremendous creativity, physical actions and resourcefulness to get away, but he always seems to know where I am. He comes again and again. I cannot escape. The end only comes when I wake, often wet with sweat and immensely stressed. Until my mid-teens, these nightmares included wetting the bed.

The refusal to really look at monsters is not only personal. It is not only mine.

The mass media know that these people can both attract and repel. The case of Epstein is instructive. There is a simultaneous fascination and demonisation of him and the people associated with his abuse of teenage girls and young women. But the shallowness of this discourse, the sheer evasion of real causation, is painful for someone like me to watch. There is almost no true insight into why these girls found themselves in those abusive situations, no analysis of the true nature of their vulnerability. This is avoided because actually identifying the causes of children being vulnerable is so saturated in judgmentalism and individualised thinking that asking why none of these girls had effective protection from their parents is not actually considered in public at all.

On the other current of causation, the level of discourse about why literally hundreds of powerful people — mostly men, but quite a lot of women too — must have known what was going on, but did nothing is remarkable. The most that any of these hundreds of people did was to avoid falling into the actual sexual abuse of these girls. This way, they avoided two things: many of them would have felt scared to do it, simply not confident enough, and many of them probably realised that it would mean coming under Epstein’s power, creating a hostage to fortune, something that could damage their public image. These reactions were entirely driven by self-interest. The much bigger and much more revealing question is this: why did not even one of these hundreds of powerful and influential people do anything about it? And why is THIS not the focus of media attention? The answer is quite simple: most media vehicles are dominated by the material power culture (MPC), people and corporations driven by materialistic greed. Their Machiavellian nature cares about one thing only, their own material power, which is the core cause of all forms of abuse, including child sexual abuse, that was examined in Essay 4. This is the very culture that this CSA case threatens to shed light on, but cannot be allowed to do so.

This specific discourse is but an example of general public discourse about child sexual abuse. The public is led by the nose to this paradoxical situation of looking, releasing acceptable reactions, but not seeing. And most of the public actually know this, deep down.

This begs an even deeper question: why don’t we try to understand, and therefore deal with, these “paedophile monsters”? Why do we avoid their truth?

Let’s consider some key contributors to this avoidance.

We start with a sensitive topic. CSA insiders — people who have severe experiences of being sexually abused as children — now have a significant voice in public discourse, and this is mostly a welcome change from the silence that preceded it. But we insiders are still, in the great majority of cases, unable to examine those who abused us, and to go further and examine the whole causation of CSA with analytical clarity. Most of us are still internally dominated by the fear embodied in us, forced into us, by the monsters who abused us and the other adults who failed to protect us. What insiders therefore transmit in our public utterances is that very sense of something monstrous and inexplicable having happened, not because we are lying, but because that is genuinely how it felt when it happened. For most insiders, that is still how it feels.

Mass media is entirely content to go along with this. Where there are easy targets to blame, they feature in this discourse. The easiest target is the evil individual monster. It adds spice to know their names, especially if you have a photo of them. In recent years, if they are already a public figure, they become the focus of immense anger. The MPC is quite happy to sacrifice individuals at their altar of material power – so long as the anger is aimed at individuals, not actual systemic causes.

It is also acceptable in many places to direct anger toward certain institutions. Organisations like the Catholic Church, especially where its alignment with the MPC is weakening, or certain schools and childcare institutions, become targets too, but only ever at a superficial level. Sympathy and outrage sell. Targeting of weak targets is allowed. Any channelling of this discourse or anger against the dominant material power culture is squashed.

There is no significant current of discourse about the true nature of the material power around the people and organisations associated with Epstein. There is no discourse or criticism of his obvious primary motivation — to gain information and influence to accumulate more material power — which is the very core issue in the so-called “Epstein case”. All of the people associated with him, whether they explicitly understood their own behaviours or not, justified their abusive, neglectful behaviours because they were all motivated by the same individualistic and cultural lust for material power. They existed in a material power culture wherein the exploitation of “those” girls was a sort of “natural order”, losers, collateral, not “us”.

The media have taken a few baby steps towards systemic understanding. Still, the people and corporations that own or dominate most media outlets would never facilitate the promotion of meaningful insight. Child sexual abuse, in general, is the most prominent current example of the essential contradiction of looking but not wanting to see.

And so public discourse has been dominated by insider testimony filtered through an avoidance of examining “them” directly. We hear an enormous amount about the suffering of people like Virginia Guiffre, which is absolutely real. Still, nobody says too much about her background — the abuse she had already experienced in a stress-filled, uncertain childhood, the lack of protection by her key adults against malicious forces like Ghislaine Maxwell. To be clear: this is not blaming. This is an attempt to see past the smokescreen and to travel the path towards understanding causation.

All of this media attention has produced enormous heat and almost no light. Most mass media manipulates everyone, including us insiders — and it does so consciously.

The public absorbs this image of unlucky children and inexplicable monsters. It often connects it unknowingly to feelings from their own childhoods — powerlessness in the face of adult authority and even actual abuse, fear that had nowhere to go, things that are often not even explicitly remembered. “They” become a screen onto which much deep feeling, especially fear and anger, is projected. “Their” individual actions have been treated as the cause of evil in the world, when they are in fact the manifestation of conditions that run much deeper and wider than any individual. This is the individualised framing at its most emotionally satisfying and its most analytically misdirecting.

Another layer of explanation for humanity’s failure to face the truth of these “monsters” has its source in upstream reality as well. Academic and professional work on people who sexually abuse children has been, for the most part, too weak to influence public discourse significantly. Much of this work carries its own undercurrent of inexplicability and moral horror. This is understandable — it is genuinely difficult to work at the edges of the Dunkelfeld without absorbing some of the revulsion surrounding it — but the failure to significantly influence public opinion actually compounds the problem of CSA.

The professionals and organisations who know more than most of us about “them” are actually very limited in size and influence. The paradox is that their work is so distasteful — mere association with these monsters, and the hint that they might actually be supportive of, or making excuses for, “these people” — means that their work gets tiny resources and a suspicious profile. In the rich countries that have the services for them, such as direct counselling, psychotherapy and other support services, even adolescents with concerning sexual behaviours literally do not have a public profile or have a deliberately obscured one. Later, we demonstrate that adequately resourced interventions to treat and redirect the development of sexual behaviours by adolescents can be highly effective. So why are we not substantially investing in this proven approach?

There has also been a structural reason — or is it an excuse? for the weakness of these professionals and academics: the Dunkelfeld. The dark field. The world of “these people” has been shrouded in darkness, deliberately secretive. They are a hidden population that is rarely caught. The core insights gained by this small research and professional community came almost entirely from those who were caught — a tiny, systematically unrepresentative fraction whose profiles said very little about their inner truth. But this challenge, too, has been exaggerated, ultimately for reasons of power. If it really became known that we can actually do something very effective and not that expensive, the looming presence of these monsters — their ordinariness, their correctability — would reveal something: the actual truth.

The dual-edged sword that is the Internet has brought one genuinely hopeful counter-development. It has begun to shine game-changing light into the Dunkelfeld for the first time in human history — through anonymous surveys reaching men who have never been caught and have no intention of being caught, and through observational data tracking digital behaviour at scale. Big Tech could open this window of reality much further, not for the purpose of producing convictions of individuals or even locating children being abused, but for building a genuine understanding of how desire develops, how it manifests in these people and how it is acted on. Big Tech has the technology and capacity to paint enough of the full picture to make dealing with the majority of “them” and their behaviours relatively straightforward. But yet again, we run head-on into the logic of material power. It has only one sociopathic objective: to accumulate more material power, no matter what the cost.

We have the means to open their reality, but we are not using them. What is absent is the will to use them for anything other than minimal regulatory compliance and a thin veneer of responsibility — while the real game, just as with Epstein and his hundreds of powerful “friends”, carries on regardless. Literally without regard for the suffering associated with child sexual abuse. Those girls meant absolutely nothing to those hundreds of powerful people.

If we want to address CSA, we have to face and understand it. It is possible to understand them, their ultimately ordinary formation and predictable behaviours, and it is possible to deal with them. The very act of facing their truth, relegating them from the status of monsters to being mere mortals, is by itself something that immediately dissolves a large portion of the fear and suffering associated with child sexual abuse.

• • •

Who exactly are they?

So, now we have some idea of why we do not face the truth of these people, but what is it about them that we do not want to understand?

There are three dimensions of their truth that humanity has so far resisted facing: the scale of their existence and CSA activities, their external ordinariness, and the nature and formation of their inner worlds that contain their deepest motivations behind their sexual desire for children.

The scale is staggering. In 2023 the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute found that between seven and eleven per cent of men surveyed in Australia, Britain and America admitted to at least one form of Internet-mediated sexual abuse of a child — a category spanning a wide range of behaviours, from online grooming through to the production and distribution of CSA materials — close to twenty million men across three countries.

The German MiKADO study (2012), using a definition of children limited to under-fourteens, found that 4.1 per cent of men surveyed reported significant sexual fantasies involving pre-pubescent children and 3.4% of these actually acted on these desires. These are small percentages, but applied to adult male populations, they represent millions of men — over a million in Germany alone, over four million if the same proportions applied in the United States. And these numbers were calculated in 2012. Every scrap of relevant information says that these numbers have grown substantially since 2012.

We do not face their ordinariness. Criminologist Stephen Smallbone put it plainly: “The person who might sexually abuse a child is likely in all other respects to appear normal, even ordinary.” Research by Abel with nearly sixteen thousand people caught for CSA in the United States found their religious, educational and economic profile almost identical to national male demographics — no ethnic signature, no class signature. They look like other men because they are other men. The wealthier and better-connected are more able to avoid detection, which means the full population of people who sexually abuse children skews, if anything, towards better-off males.

We do not face their interior world. When they are challenged or asked about their behaviours, they respond in various ways. At one extreme, there is aggressive defiance and dismissal of concerns about the impact of their behaviours, with no excuses offered and no distress apparent. In the middle, especially the post-pubescent males who engage in the less severe acts of Internet-mediated CSA, there is a tendency to accept that it’s not quite right. Still, most justifications or explanations either imply complicity or minimal harm on the part of the children. On the other extreme are men who describe their situation as something closer to addiction, involving recognition of serious harm to children and their own experience of severe and sustained suffering. In the Nurmi study of men who accessed the most extreme child sexual abuse materials inside the TOR dark web, 50% of them described cycling between desire and self-disgust, unable to stop, unable to feel other than ashamed when the arousal passed. Many studies of persistent sexual abusers reveal high degrees of self-disgust and even suicidality. This range itself is something most people prefer not to look at. But these men are not aliens. They are damaged men. They are carried along in the same torrent of causation as the rest of us.

Sometimes, when they do reveal something of their thinking, we often encounter a layer of justification that is at once astounding and structurally familiar. The vast club of men with paedophilia that is enabled by the Internet literally has tens of millions of members. It is now technically not difficult to observe their interactions. To my knowledge, no one has conducted a comprehensive analysis of their millions of daily interactions. Still, I suspect that the vast majority of their discourse concerns features of the acts of sexual abuse and the children. Nauseating discourse for us, exciting stuff for them.

And when this discourse is defensive about their behaviours, we see terms like “She wanted/started it.” “He was old enough to understand.” “I’m the only one who truly understands children.” “I am only one of thousands looking at this video — the video would have been made without me.”

The justification and rationalisations shift with the method and the moment, but their underlying logic does not: a denial of the child’s inner reality, a claim of power equality where none exists, an erasure or minimisation of harm. These are not personal inventions. They are drawn from the same cultural sediment that has always justified the exploitation of those with less power. But they tell us almost nothing about what actually drives these men. They are on the surface, not in the depths.

And here is a revealing dimension of their interior world: even they cannot tell us what produced them. Research consistently shows that people who sexually abuse children — even when caught, even after substantial psychotherapy — display remarkable deficits of self-awareness about their own formation and motivation. This is not always, or even only, deliberate concealment, though that does exist. It is, in many cases, genuine incapacity. The same developmental conditions that shaped the desire also appear to have impaired the capacity for introspection that might illuminate it. They cannot read the river that formed them any better than we can — and in some respects, far less well.

This is the double difficulty that Essay 6b has to work against: not only our reluctance to look at these men, but the fact that even looking — even listening to them — only brings us so far. To understand what actually produces them, we have to go beneath what they say about themselves. That is what the research, patiently accumulated over decades, embedded in the wider development of the internal understanding of human motivation, makes possible: an account of the developmental conditions and failures that consistently produce the pattern, regardless of what these men can or cannot articulate. That reconstruction is the work of Essay 6b. It matters not only for understanding them, but for identifying the weakest links in the cycle of abuse and suffering. In these places, intervention is likely to be most effective and efficient.

• • •

Overall, our unwillingness to face the truth about these people means that public discourse is dominated by words like “predator,” “monster,” “evil,” and “inexplicable” —almost always deployed with tones of blame, as if containing a verdict. For an adult man to be even remotely associated with these words is public, if not actual, death. But what these words are is avoidance. They stop the inquiry before it starts and allow us to feel that driving police and justice systems to catch and punish the fraction of one per cent of these people caught each year constitutes a response. It does not.

The forces and the conditions that produce their motivations and behaviours are essentially the same conditions that produce everything else in this series. They come from the same place. At the end of the day, who are they? They are just a subset of us.

…

I need to say one thing directly before Essay 6b goes further. If I do not, what follows will be read as an excuse. It is not.

The person who sexually abused me made choices. He bears full responsibility for what he did to me, and for whatever he did to other children before and after. Nothing in this essay, or in Essay 6b, reduces that.

But I have come to understand that blame, by itself, is a kind of screen. It satisfies something real in us — the need for a verdict proportionate to the harm, for a clear target, for the comfort of locating the problem in a person rather than in conditions. And it stops us seeing. When the problem is always a monster, the conditions that produce it are never in the frame. Individual accountability and systemic understanding are not in competition — they are both necessary — but accountability after the fact does not protect the children who have not yet been harmed.

Understanding how desire develops and why internal controls so often fail to stop it is what does. That is the work of Essay 6b.

• • •

A note to readers: I have been hearing from many of you that the essays in this series are long and carry a great deal at once. You are right, and I have taken that seriously. From this point in the series, I am splitting the heavier essays into more digestible parts. Essay 6a — this piece — addresses who people who sexually abuse children are, and why we avoid looking at them clearly. Essay 6b will address the harder question: why some people develop sexual desire for children, why the internal controls so often fail, and where genuine prevention is actually possible. Each essay is complete in itself. Together they form the argument.

• • •

If you experienced severe CSA, I’m not asking you to understand or forgive the person who abused you. To know that they can be understood and that such understanding can lead directly to feeling less fear, and to taking more effective actions to dissipate their influence on us.

If you carry something that frightens you: This essay is about you, and it was written with the intention of understanding, not excusing. If you recognise yourself in these pages — in the developmental patterns, the fears, the desires you have or have not acted on — that recognition matters. It means you have the capacity for insight. Confidential help exists. The Resources section is a place to start.

If you love or support someone who has experienced severe CSA, understanding what shaped the person who abused the person you care for does not diminish what the abusive person did. It points towards where change is actually possible — and towards the kinds of support most likely to help the person you care about.

If you work professionally in this area, the key message is that our organisations need to find a way to contribute to public discourse about these people. We need to do it in a way that dissolves the individual monster image and builds the idea that they are us, and we can achieve much by working towards true understanding.

If you are in a position to influence institutions or societies, you must go beyond individualised thinking and the notion of monsters. We must link the macro and the individual.

• • •

What has this essay brought up for you? I am genuinely interested in disagreement — the framework I am building here challenges some well-established assumptions, and a serious challenge sharpens serious work. Leave a comment or write to me at nolitimereireland@gmail.com.

Next week: Essay 6b — why some people develop sexual desire for children, why the internal controls so often fail, and where genuine prevention is possible.

Essay 6a • NOLI TIMERE • 2026

This essay is part of an open conversation. I welcome challenge, disagreement, and dialogue—understanding grows through honest exchange.

• • •

I said it out loud, I think. Not within anyone’s hearing. I was three years old, sitting in a corner after what had just happened to me. I am bad.

Not: something terrible had just happened to me. Not: I needed help. What settled in me was something quieter and more permanent—a verdict. About who I was. About what I deserved. About what I could expect.

I want to start here, rather than with statistics or frameworks, because this is where vulnerability actually lives—not in demographic data about who gets abused, but in the interior of a child who has already, before anything explicit has happened, absorbed a verdict about their own worth. I had been conditioned to that expectation—not by my parents, who strained simply to keep food on the table, but by a broader, deeper culture passing through them before I had language to receive or resist it consciously. What they transmitted most powerfully was not what they said, or even what they did. It was what they carried.

That is one kind of vulnerability. Not the only kind.

Annabelle, the Asian girl I introduced in Essay 3, did not lack self-worth in any obvious sense. She lacked a floor. The mine that destroyed her father’s lungs, the debt at punishing interest rates, the political class that looked away—these were identifiable forces producing her poverty as a predictable output. When the agent came and offered to pay off the family debt, her parents were not fools. They knew what the job would entail. They had no real choice. The dying nineteen-year-old I met in a cheap restaurant embodied all of this.

Two children. Very different lives. Both were severely abused. The question this essay asks is not simply who was vulnerable, but why—and whether the conditions producing that vulnerability were inevitable or made.

They were made.

• • •

Acts of severe CSA occur at the confluence of two currents. One current — why certain people develop the desire to sexually abuse children — is the subject of next week’s essay. Here I examine the other: why roughly one in twenty-five children alive today will experience severe sexual abuse — penetrative rape or attempted rape — before their fifteenth birthday.

Child vulnerability has three dimensions. They are interwoven in practice — I separate them here for clarity. All three are, in principle, manageable. Not fixed destinies, but conditions that can be changed.

Before going further, one thing needs to be said plainly.

Every adult who appears in this essay as failing to protect a child was shaped by the same conditions that made that child vulnerable. Tara, the unwell lone parent who could not protect Cat, was carrying her own unresolved severe experience of CSA into sixty-hour working weeks on minimum wage, nearly alone, in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Desiree’s mother, who slapped her daughter for trying to tell, was a woman whose entire world was organised under the thumb of a culture that had produced in her a deep powerlessness and almost no space for genuine intimacy. Brian’s parents were not neglectful people. They were chronically consumed by pressures neither had quite chosen, and neither could see clearly from inside.

The closer we get to acts of CSA, the more the failings of individuals become visible. The temptation to direct anger at those failures is understandable. It is also worse than useless, because blame prevents us from seeing what is actually causing this. It is a screen that hides the forces genuinely responsible. Those forces — ultimately powerful people and institutions — are entirely comfortable encouraging blame that takes them out of the frame.

• • •

What children are born with

The first dimension of vulnerability is innate: what a child is born with. Sex, age, physical characteristics, disability, ethnicity. These shape who is targeted and how — always in interaction with the contexts around them.

In most family environments globally, pre-pubescent girls face a higher risk from situational abusers, typically older males within the family. But this pattern shifts sharply depending on context. In child-serving organisations — schools, churches, residential institutions, sports clubs — boys have historically been the majority of those severely abused, placed under non-familial adult authority in environments that not only failed to protect them but tacitly accepted that a certain amount of child abuse was simply what happened. Post-puberty, the vulnerability picture shifts again, with girls facing substantially higher risk in exploitation contexts, where innate characteristics intersect with poverty, misogyny, and ethnic and class bias.

Children with certain disabilities carry higher vulnerability across almost all settings — a compound of reduced protective capacity, fewer resources, and the way prejudice lowers their standing in the eyes of both those who might otherwise protect them and those who abuse them.

Physical force runs through almost all of it. It is nearly unknown for someone to sexually abuse a person who is physically stronger. In historical terms, physical force is the ultimate root of power inequality, and though its form has changed — from brute strength to the ability to pay expensive lawyers — its function has not.

But none of these innate characteristics determines outcomes. Context is what actually matters. The same characteristic that creates vulnerability in one setting can offer a degree of protection in another. Managing context prevents CSA.

• • •

What children absorb

The second dimension is internalised vulnerability — and in many ways the most revealing.

A significant proportion of children experience life in such a way that they expect, and are resigned to, being abused by much older people. When severe experiences of CSA arrive, they are not so much surprising as confirming. This is not innate. It is absorbed early, deeply, largely before language.

Two processes produce it. The first is introjection: the unconscious absorption of attitudes and beliefs from key caregivers, especially — though not only — the mother. This happens before the child has the language to consciously receive it. It carries individual histories of fear, anger, and shame. And it carries broader cultural contents — what it means to be female, to be dark-skinned, to be low-caste, to be a child in a world where children’s bodies have historically been available to adult authority.

Consider: until very recently, every culture in world history condoned, even encouraged, violent physical punishment and control of children. By 2025, only sixty-eight countries had passed legislation fully banning all corporal punishment of children in all settings. When you stand back and reflect on that, it is astonishing. The whole cycle of abuse and suffering permeates every life, every drop in the river of causation.

Understanding introjection matters because it clarifies why internalised vulnerability runs so deep. The prejudices producing low self-worth — the lesser worth assigned by gender, caste, class, colour — are not primarily taken in through experience. They arrive at a level below conscious experience. This is why telling a child they are worthy, or giving them knowledge about risk, touches only the surface of something laid down much earlier and much deeper. The internalisation of shame converts what happens to a child into a verdict on who they are.

My parents did not fundamentally believe they could do anything about what happened to me. My father was a big, strong man — a policeman with good social standing. My mother would have been physically capable of killing anyone who attacked her children in front of her. And yet they could not react. They were part of a culture resigned to suffering, with almost no public discourse about sex, that had absorbed, bone-deep, that abuse was something that happened, that just was. So many of us become so angry with our parents for failing us. It is imperative that we get to the point of understanding that enables us to forgive — forgiveness is the dissolution of anger and the fear beneath it.

The second process is experience itself — what actually happens to the child, processed however inadequately by a mind already significantly shaped by what was introjected. The child is primed to react in a particular way. Unable, in most cases, to call in help from an adult, we process what happened in isolation. Part of what we have already absorbed is the expectation of an unhelpful reaction, which is why the overwhelming majority of children do not tell. When a child naively speaks about something bad that happened and gets a cold or hostile reaction — like Desiree’s mother’s slap — they learn quickly that they cannot do it again. They become isolated and left to figure things out on their own.

People who are considering sexual abuse can read this internalised vulnerability. A child who has absorbed, through the texture of daily life, that they are worth less — less protection, less belief, less care — is visible to someone looking for a target. In families, in child-serving organisations, the person considering abuse may be driven in part by a particular attraction, but he acts on something closer to instinct than calculation: he will move towards the child least likely to fight back, least likely to be believed. Not through any deliberate signal on the child’s part, but through what is simply visible in how they inhabit the world. Despite the apparent strengths of my parents, the man who raped me knew that.

And so another link in the cycle was cast. I was left alone. I had already, by the age of three, been conditioned to the expectation of suffering — not by my parents, but by a broader, deeper culture, while my parents were straining simply to keep food on the table. I said: I am bad. I had no expectation of being helped because I had no expectation of being respected. I did not think I had any right to have good things happen to me. I decided to make myself useful — a screen behind which hundreds of millions of children construct their lives. That is the very centre-point of shame.

But internalised vulnerability is not fixed. It is transmitted, embodied through introjection and experience, which means it can be interrupted. That possibility runs through everything that follows.

• • •

Context is everything

By context I mean the largely visible conditions immediately around or external to a child that shape vulnerability to severe sexual abuse. This is where systemic causation becomes most discernible — and where the possibility of change is greatest.

Three forces organise contextual vulnerability, corresponding to the three dynamics through which the material power culture operates: techno-economic conditions, social forms and culture, and the control of discourse.

• • •

The floor and the platform

The most basic contextual vulnerability is material. A child cannot be protected beyond the material capacity of the adults around them. Where that capacity is absent, depleted, or distracted, vulnerability follows as surely as water follows gravity.

Annabelle’s story sits at one end of the spectrum. The adults who could not protect her were not choosing this from a position of security or agency. They were in the same torrent, at a different point in the current. In fact, they were drowning in it.

Brian had an expensive smartphone, a bedroom door, and hours of unsupervised time online. The Internet is now the single greatest medium for child vulnerability to sexual abuse. It is not neutral infrastructure. Big Tech has repeatedly and deliberately chosen not to deploy protective measures that their own engineers could build, because doing so would cost engagement and growth. The treadmill funds the machine. The machine reaches the bedroom. Governments have, in most countries, stood aside — blocked from acting by the same industry whose platforms are being used to abuse children at a scale that dwarfs everything that preceded it. Rome is burning. Children wait.

• • •

The world that is built around children

Every organised form of human life — families, schools, churches, governments, corporations, justice systems — tends to avoid the truth of child sexual abuse. Each has its own reasons. The pattern is consistent enough to be a pattern, and it matters enormously for child vulnerability. Avoidance is not passive. It creates the conditions in which abuse can happen and continue unchecked.

Avoidance works in layers. The outermost is denying that CSA exists at all, or at the scale it does — that layer has been cracking for decades, in wealthier countries first, under pressure from insiders speaking, from feminism and child health workers, from researchers publishing and inquiries reporting. The second layer is minimising the suffering it produces. That, too, has weakened, at least in public utterances. But the third layer — the question of where responsibility actually lies — has barely moved. Institutions and powerful interests will acknowledge the first two under sufficient pressure. Almost none will face the third honestly, because the honest answer implicates them.

Brian’s family were not bad people. They had organised their lives in such a way — the careers, the mortgage, the image of success — that certain kinds of truth had become practically impossible to see. What makes that so durable is culture: the shared assumptions that make certain kinds of not-seeing feel normal rather than chosen. Culture is how avoidance reproduces itself without anyone deciding to reproduce it.

The Catholic Church is the most documented example of what institutional avoidance looks like at scale and over time. For generations, its response to abuse within its own structures was to protect the institution — moving abusive clergy, suppressing complaints, managing people into silence. This was not the behaviour of a few corrupt individuals. It was an institution operating on an unspoken logic of self-preservation — and of protecting power. The children paid for it. The same logic, differently dressed, operates everywhere institutions are threatened by the truth of what has happened within them. The more powerful the institution, the more forceful the probable response.

Lawrence Nassar abused hundreds of girls over nearly two decades inside the official structures of USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Girls had reported him. People in authority had known. When the courtroom statements finally reached the world, coverage focused on the monster, registered the outrage, sent him to prison for multiple lifetimes, and moved on. The structural question — why a system organised around the total submission of children to adult authority keeps producing this — was not asked, because the institutions involved had no interest in asking it.

For corporations and governments, there is something beyond discomfort. Child protection is a direct threat to profit and to the conditions by which governments measure their success. Technology corporations have fought with extraordinary resources against every serious attempt to legislate protection for children online, because the measures that would protect children would cost them users and growth.

The discourse surrounding child vulnerability to CSA has almost entirely failed to ask why. Every story lands on a monster. The outrage is real, the sentence is handed down, and coverage moves on. When the problem is always a monster, the conditions that produce it are never in the frame.

Boys navigating confusion about sexuality — particularly around puberty — frequently take serious risks to find others who might understand them, and those routes are frequently intercepted by predatory adults. The shame already built into their sense of being different is exploited before abuse and can deepen catastrophically afterwards.

The children most invisible to the discourse around online abuse are not the ones in the headlines. They are the ones whose abuse will never be reported, whose parents had no idea what the platforms their children used were designed to do, and who carried what happened to them in exactly the silence that the whole system — from Big Tech to the governments that deferred to it — depended on. Placing responsibility for that on children, or on individual families navigating it alone, is not a protection strategy. It is the appearance of one.

I do not think about the man who raped me with much anger any more. I think about what I have spent this essay describing. A world organised in such a way that a three-year-old child could not win. That the adults who should have protected me were themselves caught in the same current. That the institutions and cultures around us were shaped to look away. The rage — at the arrangement, not the individuals inside it — still lives in me. It is part of why I write.

• • •

The three forces described in this essay — techno-economic conditions, social forms and culture, and the control of discourse — are not separate problems. They are three expressions of the same underlying dynamic, each reinforcing the others, all flowing from the same source.

What this essay has shown is that child vulnerability to severe sexual abuse is made, not given. It is produced by identifiable conditions that are themselves the product of how human societies have been organised. And because those conditions are produced, they can be changed.

The same conditions also determine how deeply a child suffers after abuse, and for how long. Both vulnerabilities share the same upstream source. Addressing that source changes both. That is the argument this series builds towards.

For the first time in human history, the survival challenge has been substantially won. What remains is the material power drive itself — still running on a kind of unthinking autopilot, still structuring how the world is organised, but now without the justification that genuine scarcity once provided. Against it, humanity now has the material capacity, the accumulated knowledge, and the growing space to see the conditions clearly and act on what we see.

That understanding is not a precondition for change. It is the mechanism of change.

That is why this series exists.

• • •

If this is your experience: The vulnerability you carried as a child was not about you. It was about the conditions around you — conditions that were not your fault, not your responsibility, not of your making. Those same conditions shaped what the adults around you had available to offer. The people who failed to protect you were themselves formed by the same river. Understanding this is not an instruction to forgive anyone or release them from responsibility for what they chose. It is an accurate account of where things come from. The suffering you carry has sources. Sources, once understood, can be addressed. That work is real and worth doing — not because it undoes what happened, but because the cycle need not continue.

If you love or support someone who has experienced severe CSA, you are part of the conditions determining what comes after — and those conditions matter enormously. Steadiness, presence, belief, and the willingness to stay when it becomes difficult are not small things. In the framework of this essay, they are precisely where the cycle is most likely to be interrupted. It will not resolve overnight, but the direction of travel is clear. Your capacity is genuinely consequential — and support for you, in building and sustaining it, is as legitimate as support for the person you are trying to help.

If you work professionally in this area, the children most in need of protection are sometimes the ones least likely to receive it through their immediate environment, because the same conditions that create their vulnerability have simultaneously depleted the informal caring capacity around them. Investment in that informal capacity — in families, in communities, in the conditions allowing those closest to a child to act — is not a distraction from direct professional work. It is the precondition for it to reach the children who need it most.

If you are in a position to influence institutions or societies, vulnerability is determined by context. The conditions producing it are identifiable and, in principle, changeable. The material power culture simultaneously produces vulnerable children, people capable of abusing them, and environments incapable of adequate response — all from the same source. Addressing that source changes all three. What is required is the understanding to direct effort correctly — away from individual acts and individuals, toward the conditions that produce both, and the political will that genuine understanding, at scale, can generate.

If you carry something that frightens you, or you are close to such a person:The next essay examines the people who sexually abuse children — what formed them, what drives them, what holds them back or fails to. If something in this essay has landed close to home in a way you did not expect, that recognition is not a condemnation. It is the beginning of understanding where things come from. The Resources section is a place to start.

• • •

What has this essay brought up for you? I am genuinely interested in disagreement — the framework I am building here challenges some well-established assumptions, and a serious challenge sharpens serious work. Leave a comment or write to me at nolitimereireland@gmail.com.

Next week: who are the people who sexually abuse children, and what formed them? Understanding the answer is not the same as excusing what they chose to do. It is the precondition for preventing it.

Essay 5 • NOLI TIMERE • 2026

NOLI TIMERE • Donnacadh

This essay is part of an open conversation. I welcome challenge, disagreement, and dialogue — understanding grows through honest exchange.

• • •

One Question

There is a question humanity almost never seriously asks about child sexual abuse.

Not: who did this? Not: how do we catch them? Not even: how do we help those people with severe experiences of CSA? These questions get asked — imperfectly, inadequately, but they get asked. Here’s the question:

Why does this happen at the scale it does and why is there so much associated suffering?

Not why did this happen to this child, in this situation, at this time. But why, in every society on earth, across every era of recorded and probably unrecorded history, generation after generation, why are so many children sexually abused? Why are roughly four hundred million people alive today carrying, or soon to carry, a severe experience of sexual abuse before the age of fifteen? And why, despite fifty years of professional effort, research and inquiry, and proclaimed commitment to children, is the number not falling, the suffering not ending?

The prevailing answer — the one embedded in most professional frameworks, legal systems, media coverage, and public conversation — is that CSA is fundamentally a problem of individuals. Inexplicable, monstrous people prey on vulnerable children. Children suffer undesirable things directly linked to CSA acts. We try to catch the monsters, “heal” the children and now-adults, tighten the laws, and move on.

This approach ultimately derives from avoidance of the truth. This avoidance has two motivations. Firstly, child sexual abuse is an emotionally uncomfortable thing to face. Insiders like me were children who were deeply scared by our experiences and by the fact that we were not helped to understand and recover, so we pushed the potentially overwhelming truth down — we had to avoid it to survive.

However, we are left with many consequences, not least the irritating pea that underlies all our efforts to avoid — it simply won’t let us rest, truly relax. Everyone else also finds it emotionally challenging to face.

However, the second and ultimately most powerful reason for avoidance is that the truth, combined with respect for children, would necessitate many practical responses — responses that would require a loss of material power by disproportionately powerful individuals. Avoidance of truth is not accidental. The individualised “evil monster meets unlucky child” story is all about avoiding the systemic, upstream truth.

To understand why CSA happens at the scale it does, why it is wrapped in profound suffering, we need what the field entirely lacks: a theory of causation. A coherent framework that adequately explains not individual cases but the persistent pattern — across cultures, across eras, across every attempt at containment, across every attempt at so-called individual healing. Without such a framework, reactive effort is primarily avoidance, and where some action is forced, it still avoids true causation. Even with many genuinely committed people, the responses may be well-intentioned, but they are not effective and efficient; sometimes, they are actually counter-productive. Often, for society as a whole, these front-line workers, in justice, social work and psychology are the end of the line of passing the buck, and their work and commitment often become deeply frustrating. Applying plasters to systemic illness cannot work.

Meagre resources concentrate at the symptomatic end. The numbers and the related suffering seem insurmountable. And the people who most need protection and support to lead better lives remain misunderstood, shunned, blamed and abandoned.

I have spent more than a decade on this key “why” question. All of these essays are contextualised and largely defined by this conceptual framework.

I was originally thinking of presenting a highly deductive, top-down theory, but this is a very academic and intellectual approach and runs the risk of alienating readers. So, instead, this essay is going to start by working backwards, moving upstream, starting with consideration of the lives of five people who have severe experiences of CSA. These are real people, anonymised, but all people I know personally or through my work. The first four have their names and key identifiers changed. Two are probably now dead. I am the fifth.

I don’t like so-called trigger warnings, but I feel the need to make two. Firstly, for people who know me, especially my close family, this is not easy reading. After pondering whether I should talk about my experience in context, which means it includes some stuff about my family, I decided to go ahead. These are the sorts of things the avoidance of which acts like anchors dragging back real human progress. They are not easy to face, but ultimately we must.

The second warning is that the other four are not just “cases”; they are, or were, real people. For two of them, I can barely write their stories without feeling both rage and a deep sadness. I feel somewhat guilty about “using” their stories, but I hope I do not abuse them or their memories, but do them honour. So, here goes.

We are going to travel upstream, against the current, toward the source. What we find will challenge not just how we think about why CSA happens — but why the suffering associated with it persists long after the acts themselves have ended. This essay will arrive at a point where it becomes necessary to name a conceptual framework, a structured way of seeing the reality of CSA, which in turn becomes a lens through which we can understand why humans — the only species we know of with a vast tendency to sexually abuse our young — generate this enormous suffering within a torrent of cause and effect.

• • •

Audrey

Audrey was thirteen, from a rural village in Southeast Asia, the oldest of six children, in part the product of Catholic dogma and restrictions on affordable contraception. Her father had chronic lung disease from years of working in a mine and smoking. Her mother, who grew up in a precarious and abusive home, was exhausted and depressed under the weight of poverty and stress, often angry with Audrey, verbally and physically harsh. Audrey, although very bright, could not go to school from when she was about 10 because she had to mind her younger siblings and help on the tiny farm. The family was in debt, in large part due to her father’s expensive medication and inability to earn money. The children often went to bed hungry.

An agent came and offered to pay off the debt if Audrey took a job in the big city. Her parents were no fools — they knew what the job would be. They had no choice. Within two weeks, Audrey was servicing at least two, mostly native, not foreign, clients a night. She steeled herself every day — drugs and alcohol helped. She had never expected much from life. This sort of thing was always going to happen. At least she was sending some money home.

In time, because she was forced to have dangerous sex, she contracted AIDS. Her body was wrecked. The pimps moved her on. She went home to the village to die. I met her shortly before she went home. She was nineteen, emaciated, almost unable to walk. I fucking rage against the world when I think of her. I apologise to you for using you in this story. I feel guilty about it.

Why did all of this happen to a little girl?

I owe her to try to understand, not just feel angry and upset. I have to look upstream. And I see two currents of the river merging with the sexual abuse of Audrey. One that caused her to be so vulnerable and one that caused all the people who took advantage of her, who abused her, to do what they did.

The individual men who paid to rape Audrey bear responsibility for what they chose to do. But they didn’t reach their eighteenth birthday having had a reasonable upbringing and then, with true agency, make a choice to sexually abuse children. Something caused this. Essay 6, “Them!”, examines this in detail. We need to understand how they came to that moment — the moment of paying to rape her.

We need to understand why the seemingly cruel act of her parents effectively sent her to this. We even need to understand the recruiter, the pimps, the police who knew what was happening and turned their backs, the politicians and rich people who all made money out of her. These people, when questioned, have the most extraordinary set of justifications, prejudices, and explanations. The ones who say bluntly that they did it for personal gain are almost more palatable than the weaselly, utterly unselfconscious justifications of the majority.

Child sexual abuse manifests mostly in the family environment, but it is not caused there. Audrey’s family were in a dire situation. How low do people have to go to send their thirteen-year-old into this? Very low. This is the reality of absolute poverty. But let’s keep travelling upstream.

Her family’s brutalising poverty was generated by material power systems. Ownership of good land was concentrated by force. The mine owners knew the health impacts of their mines. In this country, cigarette marketing was oppressive — massive billboards even in isolated villages. Systems of debt ran at usurious interest rates. Branded medications made supernormal profits through market manipulation and the capture of political classes. In the city, many people took a slice of Audrey’s income, believe it or not, a contribution to her country’s GDP.

Lots of people gained from her thousands of rapes: hotel and food businesses, pimps, landlords, backhanders to police, bribes to politicians — it went on. And all of this was obvious if you looked. There was a whole culture of justification and avoidance of truth. Researchers whom I know tried to survey girls and women, and some boys, subjected to sexual exploitation in this city. They were violently threatened. Shedding light on the truth was too dangerous.

And the moral guardians of image simply denied it existed, or claimed it caused little harm. And this obscene, vicious cycle went and goes on.

And I ended up meeting this abused child on the edge of death, and I raged against it.

And the men who paid — travel upstream through their lives too. They were not born monsters. Blinded by anger, it is hard to travel up this river to its source, but we have to. I estimate that at least two thousand individual men raped Audrey. These were men who did this because there was no deterrence — it was even encouraged. But where did their desire to sexually abuse a small girl come from? How was their natural sexual drive not focused on respectful sex with a contemporary, at least not a child? I address this in Essay 6. For now, it is important to know that this desire is not genetic — it is shaped by individual development and experiences, internalised as warped desire.

And why did they not develop control of such desires? Why not a self-control, an inner self that desists from such urges? I will examine this closely too — it has a lot to do with personal development but also with the cultural context people grow in. These were cultures that taught them that the bodies of poor children in poor countries are available; that poverty renders girls without value; that desire justifies whatever power can purchase. These ideas were formed somewhere. By something.

Every element of Audrey’s vulnerability was built by identifiable forces operating upstream of her. And the capacity of those who abused her to do so was built by those same forces, differently expressed. There were two currents, but in the same river.

Notice too what the upstream journey reveals about what came after. The forces that made Audrey vulnerable — the poverty, the absent state, the culture of exploitation, the culture of blame for “sluts” — also ensured that no one was coming to help her. These forces shamed and shunned her. She probably died in a dark, hidden place. The conditions that created the vulnerability and the conditions that foreclosed any adequate response are not two separate failures. They are one. We must understand them to understand child sexual abuse. I am so sorry, Audrey.

• • •

Brian

Brian was eleven, Irish, an only child, quite shy but very bright. His parents were high-achieving professionals — always busy, always stressed, driving expensive cars and living at a “desirable” address. Their own intimacy was thin and undeveloped. Too busy, too preoccupied by the weight of a large mortgage and relentless careers in which they seemed to sell not just their labour but their souls.

Brian did well in school but spent long hours alone online with an unsupervised smartphone and computer in his room. He had no close friends. He began to wonder if he might be gay, and there was nobody he could imagine telling. He had no language of intimacy, no capacity for it — nobody he felt safe to talk to about this. He read and saw all sorts of things online; over time, it made him feel even more confused. Outwardly, he kept his face, achieved enough to avoid criticism, and avoided attention. He had never had a real, meaningful conversation with anyone. His parents were concerned, talking of therapists.

A man named Mike asked for his number one day. Mike coached the boy next door in football. This boy and Brian walked to and from school some days, and Mike met Brian this way. He later messaged him on an encrypted platform. Mike was thirty, bisexual, chronically lonely, successful in work, but lacking the confidence for adult sexual relationships — he felt comfortable, safe in the company of boys around puberty. He claimed in court that he, too, had been sexually abused as a child.

He groomed Brian through hundreds of messages over many months, along with tentative, secretive in-person interactions increasingly around football. Brian, never particularly sporty, joined the football team. Mike was patient, attentive, offering what Brian most needed: someone who seemed to understand him and had time for him. Brian’s parents noticed he seemed a little happier, pleased that he was playing football. They were grateful and preoccupied. One thing led to another. Mike raped Brian.

Why?

Brian’s parents were not neglectful by any conventional measure. They were running on a treadmill — mortgage, career, car loans, pension anxiety, image. Like most middle-class people, they lacked introspection and awareness of the treadmill they ran on. They were, in large part, living the life their parents and culture — equally lacking in introspection and self-awareness — had reared them for. They were in the flow of material life, right in the middle of the river of causation. Over generations, striving for material survival had morphed into materialistic striving. Their parents had been proud of their children’s “success”. They didn’t really like their lives; they just did them.

Both incomes were required to service their debt — a debt caused by the “need” for two new cars at least every second year, costing over €50,000 each and a house bought with some inheritance and a €300,000 thirty-year mortgage. Their careers demanded long hours and constant availability. Brian’s loneliness grew in a house where love was genuine but presence, self-awareness, and actual intimacy were thin, carved out by the relentless logic of a consumption pattern that both parents would, if asked, have said they never quite chose.

Their pension contributions and their mortgage interest payments, most likely, were invested in investment funds, which in turn invested in the technology companies whose platforms Mike used to groom Brian.

This is where the internet enters the story — not as a neutral backdrop but as an active mechanism. Almost all modern teenagers with their own smart devices are the focus of grooming attempts. The vast majority dismiss it. A lot of the time, groomers cast wide nets and only follow up when they get a bite. But there are two broad groups who don’t dismiss it: children who are curious and confident, and children who crave contact, like Brian.

The technical capacity to substantially reduce this exists — these companies employ some of the most sophisticated engineers on earth. But they don’t do it. In fact, with increasing encryption and other evasion technology, they knowingly expand the capacity for grooming. They have chosen, repeatedly and deliberately, not to deploy protective measures at the cost of engagement and growth that would require. Big tech is mounting extraordinary campaigns to prevent legislation that would protect children.

The platforms are not neutral infrastructure on which abuse occasionally occurs. They are a new and extraordinarily powerful amplification of forces that have always existed — now reaching directly into the bedroom of an eleven-year-old boy whose parents believe he is safe because he is at home.

And Mike. I don’t know much about him, but let’s travel upstream. Somewhere in his history, almost certainly, there is a story of deprivation, of intimacy that went wrong or never formed, of experiencing abusive powerlessness, of sexual drives not respectfully channelled, of desires that developed in conditions nobody planned, and nobody helped him navigate. He was not a random aberration. He was a product. Those conditions do not excuse what he chose to do. They explain how a person arrives at the capacity to do it. The explanation is not a defence. It is the beginning of prevention.

When the truth of what Mike was doing eventually came to light, some things shifted for the better. Brian’s parents were shaken to the core. Initial rage at Mike gave way to guilt, but guilt gave way to a process of professionally assisted introspection, reflection, and real learning.

The parents modified their debt and work terms and deliberately made more time and energy for Brian. Brian received regular therapy, and his parents were directly involved, too. They were a family shaken to the core, but one with resources. It took a virtual grenade exploding in the kitchen for them to respond. It was not easy, but Brian was actually doing well.

Mike is in prison.

• • •

Cat

Cat was eight, American. She lived with her mother, Tara, who was twenty-six and single. Tara herself had severe experiences of CSA as a child — within her chaotic and often violent family, in circumstances from which there was no visible exit. She had received no meaningful help. She carried the fear, the anger, and the shame described in the previous essay: largely unrecognised, because survival had always displaced everything else. She had very poor relational skills, did not know how to manage basic childcare, had run away from all previous contacts and was largely alone. Tara loved Cat. She also struggled to feel it consistently, to be present without the weight of her own interior crowding in, to offer the steadiness a young child needs as air. Tara was a very confused and unsure woman. She had almost no informal support.

She was physically attractive and was very vulnerable to men who were abusive. That was confusing but kind of normal.

She worked two jobs, 60-70 hours a week. She was exhausted. She was sometimes with men who were not good for her or for Cat. One of them moved in and gradually took over and abused Cat — mostly through non-penetrative sexual contact. He oscillated from telling her he loved her to threatening her. This went on for about a year. Cat also witnessed him hitting and verbally abusing her mother, even taking her money.

Why?

Travel upstream through Tara’s life, and you find that the conditions which shaped Cat’s vulnerability were not new. They were already running through Tara’s childhood. Her own abuse went unaddressed in a system that had neither the resources nor the cultural framework to genuinely reach her. No one came. The suffering settled in and became the chaotic, unstable, unpredictable ground of her adult life — her choices, her patterns, her capacity to protect.

This is the moment in the upstream journey where the current reveals its deepest nature: not a chain running in one direction, but a cycle turning back on itself. Abuse generated suffering in Tara. Suffering, unresolved and unwitnessed, shaped the conditions in which Cat grew up — the abusive conditions that, at the most immediate level, created Cat’s vulnerability. Cat’s abuse would generate its own suffering — and without something changing, it would eventually shape the world her own children inherited. This is the most obvious closed loop and the most easily understood cycle of abuse and suffering that I have noted earlier and will address in detail in Essay 8.

Now notice what this reveals about suffering. What would determine whether Cat carried that suffering for decades, or found her way through it, was the quality of the response she received. And that quality was already being determined by the same conditions that made her vulnerable. Tara’s capacity to respond to Cat’s abuse had been shaped by the same forces that shaped Cat’s exposure to it. This was not bad luck compounded. It was the structure of the cycle. The conditions creating vulnerability and the conditions determining reaction quality are not separate problems. They are the same problem.

In this case, the police and social work services intervened strongly after Cat told a classmate who told her mother, who told a teacher, who told the designated person in the school, who brought in the social workers and the police. Cat was taken into care. I don’t know what has happened since, but she probably had a better chance of a decent life.

Tara will no doubt be judged. But she was not a failure. She was a person formed by conditions she did not choose, doing the best she could within constraints she did not set. The same conditions that had abused her created the limits within which she was trying to love her daughter. She had to work sixty to seventy hours a week at minimum wage just to materially survive — in a very rich country. Responsibility for those conditions lies upstream of Tara — just as it lies upstream of Cat. The cycle does not announce itself. It simply continues, one generation written into the next.

I briefly met Cat in the course of my work. The details here were shared with me by professionals. I do not have the same personal connection to her that I have to Audrey, but children within such families often come to the attention of social services in wealthier countries. I dislike the word “dysfunctional”. It is unfortunately accurate, but too detached and clinical. We should be angry that we allow children to live in such circumstances — but we end up shunting this reality aside, passing it to the police and social workers to deal with. Most of us avoid looking at this, and we are too busy and tired to do much about it.

• • •

Desiree

Desiree was four in a small town in Latin America. Her father was the unquestioned head of the household — a brutish, misogynistic man, his authority absolute, his word the final word on everything, including what was spoken of and what was not. Her mother deferred without apparent thought, spending much of her time appeasing him and avoiding his anger. The older children had absorbed the same structure: power belongs to those who hold it, and those without power comply.

Her thirteen-year-old brother started to get sexually aroused by her and gradually escalated to penetrative sexual abuse. He threatened her to stay quiet.

He didn’t physically hurt her, but it was all very confusing. One day, Desiree was alone with her mother, who was washing dishes. She told her what her brother had been doing. Her mother turned with intense animation, fear and anger, and stared down at Desiree. She scolded her, threatened her never to say that again, and then did something that shocked Desiree to the core: slapped her across the face — the first time she had ever been struck. Desiree was alone. Nobody to back her up, to protect her. Intensely confused, she could barely focus on anything. She started to wet the bed, had dreadful nightmares, hid in corners and cupboards, stayed outside the house, became sickly, and scratched her skin until it bled. All the while the abuse went on. She was afraid of her father, but now she watched him and her brother constantly.

Why?

The brother did not arrive at this alone. He was raised in a household where power over others was the governing principle — where male authority, and barely suppressed anger, were the air, and submission was the expected response of those lower in the order. He had no experience or skills in intimacy. He related to girls and women the same way as his father. He absorbed this the way all children absorb everything: not through instruction but through immersion. He learned that bodies, especially female ones, beneath him in the hierarchy were available to his will. That lesson was not delivered by one person. It was delivered by a culture — and behind that culture, running deep into the history of how this society organised its material and social life and who got to control it, there are forces that long predate Desiree’s family.

Desiree’s journey is shorter than the others — because by now, you are beginning to make it yourself. Notice also what the same household structure reveals about what comes after. The culture of silence and unquestioned authority that permitted the abuse would equally determine what happened when harm was done: who spoke, who was believed, who was protected. The same current produced both outputs.

Desiree is dead now. She took the only way out. Aged seventeen.

• • •

Donnacadh

I was severely sexually abused as a very young child by my godfather. A man, who died in 2012, was known to my parents only because he had married a woman my mother had befriended and pitied as a lonely, unhappy person. But it gave him access to me.

In the worst rape, when I was three years and three months old – I know the date because my mother was giving birth to my younger brother at that very moment- he tried to anally rape me. I struggled as if my life depended on it, because it did. He pushed my head so hard into a sofa to control me that he suffocated me. At the same frenzied moment, he used a knife to widen my anus.

The intensity of my inner experience of this is impossible to exceed. As he used the knife on me and pushed my face into the couch with extreme force, I experienced something that is hard to describe, but something I can now recall with extraordinary clarity and consistency. I describe it with outside words that do not feel quite right, but have the best currency: I experienced clinical death from the inside. I know the interior experience of being sort of dead. It was an extraordinary awareness of blackness. I don’t know how I came back.

Why did this happen to me?

My parents were very good people — caring, decent, kind and hard-working, never violent. But Ireland in the early 1960s was a desperately poor country. In the 1950s, about half of our young adults emigrated, mostly to Britain and America, running from a stagnant economy and no prospects.

We were still decades from economic transformation. My parents were in a genuine struggle for basic survival: five children, no central heating, no automatic washing machine, my mother actually giving birth to her youngest child at the time of my worst abuse. Both my parents were shaped by a culture in which sex was taboo, emotional expression and communication were constrained, and problems — above all problems of this kind — went unaddressed as a matter of course. They had neither the emotional nor the practical capacity to respond to my obvious symptoms with anything beyond a small, instinctive increase in care.

The average household lacked active intimacy, real connection, and was saturated in shame — especially regarding sex, even respectful sex. My parents didn’t know what had happened, but this was in large part because they didn’t know how to look at the obvious symptoms I showed. Having been fully toilet-trained, I started to wet the bed — something that did not stop until I was fourteen. I started to bite my nails so that I always had bleeding, and most of the time, infections. I became chronically sick with two or three bouts of severe bronchitis every year. I withdrew, hid in cupboards and corners, and had horrific nightmares populated by a monstrous, malicious man.

I had, and have, a strong will to live. I was otherwise well-resourced and reasonably cared for. I think that without all the counter-balancing resources and the subsequent growth of Ireland, I would not be alive.

They didn’t know what had happened. Even if they had, there was no language for it, no capacity to face it, few resources to deal with it — and putting food on the table was a real challenge.

I was left to deal with it all on my own.

Is it any wonder I am so angry! Is it any wonder that there are millions of us who are so angry!

The conditions that left me without adequate protection before the abuse and the conditions that left me without adequate response after it were the same conditions — the poverty, the culture of silence, the suffocating grip of shame, the Church’s dominance over every dimension of interior life. A lot of it was good, but too much of it was not. Shame was one of the most potent weapons this institution applied in order to feel powerful and in control. The incongruous mix of Christian good and earthly power-seeking abuse is difficult to fathom. Sexual desire became the most shameful thing. All realistic discourse about sex was suppressed.

But too many people simplistically blame “the Church”. Blaming is worse than useless — it blocks understanding. The post-famine version of the Irish Catholic Church was not made by aliens. Apart from a small number of foreign, mostly French, missionaries, we made it ourselves.

Why? Because we were reacting to an extraordinary period of violence perpetrated deliberately against most of our population. The Penal Codes of the early 1800s codified a deliberate attempt at cultural evisceration — what you could call a cultural genocide. The creation of mass famine as a direct by-product of imperialist actions of greed, rack-renting, enclosures and a facilitating ideology. Extreme anti-Irish racism justified our millions of deaths. Extreme political liberalism by a parliament occupied only by property-owning men and backed by the ultimate symbol of inequality, the House of Lords, is only matched by modern brash neoliberalism. Both so-called liberalisms were and are thinly veiled justifications for exploitation, which is abuse.

All of this was the setting for the growth of a type of Catholic Church; it took power over the minds of the survivors, it was pragmatic in seeking power, and shame became one of its key weapons.

A population forced into resignation of their lot by brutal violence embodied shame and felt that they deserved it. This is the precursor to a culture that housed an exceptional level of violence against children, and it takes many generations to dissolve this cyclical dynamic.

Against this backdrop, the elite literally watching people starve, the rape of children is easy to understand. It’s also easy to understand why in Ireland and the whole world, the issue of child sexual abuse was and still is way down the list of priorities.

What happened to me was an eddy in an irresistible torrent of internalised suffering and abusiveness, against a backdrop of imperative basic survival. This made it impossible to face the truth. So, abuse became a source of sustained suffering and suffering regenerated abuse, a vicious cycle.

Abusiveness and violence of all sorts were rampant behind the squinting windows of Ireland. A nation of outwardly friendly street angels was unwilling home devils. We could not face the truth of our experience of violence to such an extent that most meaningful intimacy was crushed. Culture and social forms — including the repressive Church and the brutally institutionalised, child-abusing schools — emerged to reflect and perpetuate this abuse and suffering. Frustrated, angry teachers, priests and nuns became prominent manifestations of child abuse. But they were not the cause. We always have to look upstream to find causation. And it always lands at material power.

This regenerating cycle of abuse and suffering contained a sense of powerlessness, and a reaction to it by abusing those with less power — women and mostly children. We suppressed intimacy. Sex is the arena of human life where the greatest intimacy is possible, but this was laced with the poison of fear and shame. People driven into the inner keep to stay alive don’t easily open the doors to intimacy.

Women told that their bodies and sexuality are sinful have a mountain to climb to enjoy sexual intimacy. Inadequate, unskilled, fearful relationships gave way to remarkable superficial friendliness and banter. Until very recently, almost no Irish male could, in a straightforward, eye-to-eye way, say that he liked or even loved another male. Ireland possesses an extraordinary lexicon of words and actions that actually, in a roundabout way, express affection while appearing to do the opposite.

The central plank of this cultural self-abuse was the utter shaming of sex. All of this was like the perfect recipe for widespread sexual abuse of children — and that is exactly what happened. And it happened to me too.

It is as far from a case of an “evil monster attacking an unlucky child” as it is possible to get. It is extremely challenging to face these truths. This is my fourth essay, published in three weeks.

People close to me who read this will feel immensely challenged. Some, especially my closest family, will find it very difficult that this is public. I use real cases, including mine, to retain the humanity and sense of suffering at the core of this dynamic. Even the debate inside my head about whether to include my personal story reflects this battle to face or avoid hard truths. This is all part of the culture of avoidance of truth that ultimately makes the experience of child sexual abuse so painful. It also makes truth so necessary.

In this context, it is worth reflecting on why sexual abuse of children holds an unusually high profile in the media. Explicit abuse of children (and animals), especially sexual, is the only thing that is not yet shown on mainstream media, including fiction. There is something particularly obnoxious about it. Epstein and the people who collaborated in the sexual abuse of teenage girls attract extraordinary attention. Why exactly is this?

It is because there is something particularly, exceptionally, truth-revealing in the abuse of children. It reveals not just the truth of CSA; it sheds light on the darkest recesses of humanity. Jung described this as the shadow. And the biggest shadow that hovers over, within, humanity is the existence of a material power culture, of unbound Machiavellian egoism, that dominates humanity. It wasn’t just Epstein and Maxwell who didn’t have an iota of caring for the girls and young women they exploited; it was literally hundreds of powerful men and women who knew but did nothing. Not one single powerful person did anything! This is a culture. This is the culture that generates child sexual abuse and the suffering associated with it. In this context, CSA is but one sub-current of a whole river of abuse of less powerful people (and animals and nature).

The dynamic that causes acts of CSA, and more importantly, the associated suffering, always starts with the use of material power to abuse other people. This is the reason why materially powerful people try to ensure that humanity does not face the truth.

Ireland’s poverty in the 1960s was not accidental, not just bad luck. It was the accumulated consequence of centuries of brutal colonial extraction — land taken, resources stripped, labour exploited, even quasi-enslaved through mass indenture of labourers. We had a culture deliberately degraded by the dominant material power of its time. What imperialism left behind was not merely poverty but a culture of submission — a culture in which suffering was to be resigned to: of silence in the face of authority, of private suffering kept private, of shame so pervasive it felt like the natural condition of being Irish.

Into that vacuum, the Catholic Church — an institution that preached suppression of material desire, and acceptance of this life as a “valley of tears” whilst the inadequacies of its leading agents drove it to build mansions of material power in that very valley. It inserted itself as the governing authority on every dimension of life. It condemned sexual sin from every altar. It simultaneously concealed, systematically and deliberately, the sexual abuse of children within its own structures, for generations.

My godfather, a man so disturbed that he violently raped a three-year-old child, was a product of this world, too. But we must, as I have, move past rage against such men. Because disturbance of that kind does not arrive from nowhere. It is formed in the conditions that the river creates. He had his own upstream, and it was the same river as mine.

Now, from the upstream vantage point, look downstream — to what happened to Ireland next. The country’s embrace of a particular economic model — low corporate tax, open doors for multinational capital, widespread enablement of capital investment from changing the education system to roadbuilding, combined with the “good” fortune to speak English and be inside the biggest economic community in world history — generated, within two or three generations, extraordinary wealth. Ireland’s middle classes emerged and grew, and now form the majority.

They elbow each other on exactly the same consumption and work treadmill I described for Brian’s parents: the mortgage, the careers, the debt serviced by two incomes, the children left to the Internet. And the technology companies whose tax arrangements and juicy jobs part-fund Ireland’s prosperity are the same companies whose platforms are facilitating the global explosion of Internet-mediated child sexual abuse. Irish people are proportionately the biggest financial gainers from the near-free rein given to Big Tech. Ireland kind of knows this. We look away. The well-paid jobs, the tax receipts, the national self-image as a modern, successful country — these are part of why we do.

• • •

What We Keep Arriving At

This essay has travelled upstream through five lives — four portraits drawn from the lives of real people, and my own. Every journey ended in the same place, or very close to it. Not an individual monster. Not an unfortunate coincidence. Not a failure of particular parents or a deficiency in particular children.

What I’ve been building toward, through these five lives, is an explanation. Not an explanation of why this particular person abused that particular child. An explanation of why the pattern keeps repeating — in every society on earth, across every era of recorded history, in every type of family and culture and religion. That question is almost never asked. When someone does ask it, they tend to be met with one of two responses. Either what they’re saying is too abstract to be useful — let’s stay with the individual cases. Or, there’s a political motive behind it — this person is trying to grind an axe. I want to address both honestly rather than hope they don’t come up.

Voiced opposition is welcome, provided it is motivated by a joint quest for truth. The ideological charge is worth addressing directly — it is, invariably, itself a form of avoidance. Avoidance permeates every single dimension of CSA. In a real sense, it is ultimately this avoidance that sustains suffering.

Pointing out that a small minority controls most of the world’s resources while many still struggle and most are ensnared in an unsatisfying consumerist mire is not a political claim. It is simply a description of how the world is organised — one that historians, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists across every tradition have always acknowledged. The questions that follow from it — about how this arrangement is sustained, who it serves, and what it costs — are not the property of any political party or ideology. They belong to anyone willing to follow the evidence rather than protect a conclusion they arrived at before they started.

I also want to be clear about what kind of claim I am making. This is not just a feeling or an opinion. It is an explanation that can be tested against what actually happens in the world. If the approach of catching and punishing individuals — without changing any of the underlying conditions — had consistently brought the numbers down over fifty years, that would challenge it. It hasn’t.

If individual psychological work had consistently resolved severe CSA at scale, that too would challenge it. If countries with very similar levels of poverty and inequality consistently showed very different rates of CSA, without any obvious reason, that would challenge it too. That hasn’t happened either. The evidence keeps pointing in the same direction. This doesn’t mean the explanation is complete or beyond question. It means it deserves to be taken seriously — rather more seriously than the prevailing approach, which has never really been an explanation at all. It has been a way of avoiding the question.

What we keep arriving at, travelling upstream through five very different lives, is a world organised around the acquisition, retention, and growth of disproportionate material power by a minority — a culture so ancient, so pervasive, so embedded in our institutions, cultures and our individual psychologies, that it is very nearly invisible. I call this the Material Power Culture, or MPC.

Every upstream trajectory also arrived at a second finding — quieter, but equally consequential. The conditions that created each child’s vulnerability and the conditions that determined the quality of what happened afterwards were not two separate problems. They were the same conditions, expressing themselves at different points in the same cycle. In a sense, the real problem is not the acts of CSA — they are symptoms. Audrey’s poverty removed her choices before the abuse and simultaneously foreclosed any response after. Brian’s parents’ treadmill created his isolation and simultaneously shaped what they had available when the truth emerged. Tara’s unresolved suffering created the conditions in which Cat became vulnerable and simultaneously limited what Tara could offer.

Desiree lived and died in a culture where men, with no capacity for genuine intimacy, abused women and children, their dominance at every level of material power enabling this. The same source. Every time. This is the framework’s most consequential claim, and I want to name it plainly before going further.

Evidence for this comes from opposite ends of the spectrum. In Amsterdam in the mid-2000s, a male relief childcare worker sexually abused at least eighty-seven infants, mostly by penetrative rape. Severe acts. But these children were otherwise living in safe, loving, stable homes, and when the abuse came to light, the families and professionals responded swiftly and well. For the overwhelming majority of these children, tracked over many years, there is no evidence of lasting harm related to the sexual abuse. The acts were real. The conditions before and after were genuinely good. The children’s lives were not defined by what was done to them.

Frank Putnam’s long-term study in an American city sits at the other end. He followed girls who had severe experiences of CSA within their own families in early childhood, in homes that were already frightening and unstable, not unlike Cat’s. Every one of them went on to have extreme outcomes across every dimension of their lives. The difference between Amsterdam and Putnam is not the severity of the acts. It is the conditions before, and the quality of what came after. Which were themselves produced by the same conditions. This is not a hypothesis. It is documented, replicated evidence. The pre-existing vulnerability and the reactions — not the acts themselves — determine long-term outcomes.

What is worth noting in Brian’s case is that once the abuse came to light, real change was possible. This family, and this society, now had resources, knowledge, insight, and assets that allowed them to face what was really happening and bring about a real crack in the cycle of abuse and suffering. They are facing up not just to specific acts, but to all the conditions and factors that brought these acts to pass. Writ large, this is also true of all humanity. For the first time in human history, we produce enough for everyone to live a decent, healthy life. And we actually have the capacity to generate profound change.

The MPC is not capitalism specifically — this dynamic predates and outlasts capitalism, taking many forms: theocracy, attempted communism, feudalism, authoritarian and liberal variants, imperial and postcolonial states. The underlying logic is the same across all of them – a minority gains dominant control of material power. Material power is a combination of control of economic assets and physical force – these two cannot exist without the other. And then this culture does anything it deems necessary, the very essence of Machiavellian motivation, to retain and, in many cases, grow material power.

English so-called private schools deliberately created monsters with manners by brutalising their own children.

This is worth pausing on. The MPC is not a world of psychologically healthy people exploiting others from a position of inner security. It is a world of people who are themselves formed by their own version of the cycle — shaped through the systematic suppression of intimacy, the channelling of fear and rage into arrogance, the deliberate destruction of empathy in the name of character. The English ruling class did not exempt its own children from abuse; it simply gave that abuse a different name and a uniform. The internal cost — the emotional crippling, the incapacity for genuine closeness, the compensatory hunger for dominance — is not incidental to how the MPC reproduces itself. It is the mechanism.

You cannot create a person willing to watch others starve without first doing significant damage to that person. The MPC eats its young, too.

It simply calls it education.

This dominance is not a conspiracy. Its most powerful members are also products of a culture whose motivations they have absorbed largely without examination, as most people absorb most of their deepest assumptions.

If the MPC were a chess player, it would be a grandmaster — not because it plans each move with conscious precision, but because it plays on a board it has largely designed. The pieces it controls are not armies but the conditions within which everyone else makes their choices: what is scarce, what is valued, what is shameful, what seems possible. The particular form of MPC almost always gains power through physical force, but it sustains power most often by always having potential force, including legal systems, but not necessarily using it. It is far more efficient and less tiresome to manage what the majority of people come to believe about themselves and their place in the world. When people carry within themselves the assumptions that serve the powerful, enforcement becomes largely unnecessary.

The child raised in a culture of submission does not need to be coerced. She has already learned that this is simply how things are.

One of the strangest insights gained from a close examination of CSA is that the shame it engenders makes people submissive, makes them accept their lot, like the brutalised Irish. Many feminist thinkers see this truth for women, but it is also true for almost all people, especially children, the most abused people of us all.

The MPC sustains itself through three interlocking forces. The first is control of material things — land, money, technology, the productive assets of a society and the various arms of force; property laws, policing, armies. Something significant has shifted here in recent decades: the entities exercising this power are no longer primarily people.

The large corporation, legally a quasi-human entity, has become a machine with its own self-serving logic — profit and expansion — that overrules even its most powerful human members. You cannot appeal to the conscience of a corporation, because corporations do not have one. They have legal duties to their shareholders. When those duties conflict with protecting children — as they do, repeatedly and demonstrably, in the case of technology platforms — the children lose. Not because anyone decided children should lose, but because the logic of the machine requires it.

The second force is control of social forms and culture — the institutions through which people organise their lives: families, legal systems, governments, organised religion, and education. The MPC shapes these to serve material power, neutralising any that threaten it and using others to embed submission. This works most powerfully not through coercion but through people coming to believe that the arrangements they live within are natural, inevitable, even deserved. Children raised in cultures of submission absorb submission. They become adults who sustain those cultures and pass them to the next generation.

The post-famine Irish Catholic Church was a classic example of a major social form enabling the MPC. The US military complex, another social form, is essentially used to generate and sustain material control around the world.

The third force is controlling the story — ensuring that challenges to MPC power never gain sufficient traction, and above all, that the question that would matter most is never seriously asked. For most of human history, physical force and the threat of starvation were sufficient to keep people compliant. As those tools have become less reliable — in wealthier societies, and with the communications revolution (literacy and the Internet), decisively so — the population must be persuaded rather than coerced. And the most effective persuasion, in relation to CSA, is this: CSA is imagined to be a problem of monstrous individuals, not of the conditions that produce them. When the problem is individual monsters, the system is never in the frame. This is not a neutral way of thinking about CSA. It is the most effective possible protection for arrangements that generate CSA at the population scale.

Now we come to the piece that took me the longest to see clearly.

The MPC does not merely generate what I call the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering — the CAS. It requires it. This is a central claim of the framework, and it is more radical than it sounds.

Abuse, in my definition, occurs whenever the actions of a person negatively affect another — regardless of intent or awareness. The economic exploitation at the MPC’s base is itself the primary, the source of abuse in this sense. The garment worker in Bangladesh who is paid twenty dollars a week produces value far exceeding what she receives. The debt at usurious rates extracts more than it gives. The mine that destroyed Audrey’s father’s lungs took his health without adequate return. This is not a metaphor. It is the same act — one person’s actions negatively affecting another, without regard for their wellbeing — at a different scale and in a more socially normalised form. From this foundational abuse flows the suffering that constitutes the CAS.

But here is the loop: the MPC needs that suffering to continue. Not as a side effect. As a structural requirement. A population of people who are genuinely secure, genuinely dignified, genuinely free from the internalised fear and shame that abuse generates — such a population does not accept the arrangements on which MPC dominance depends. It organises. It demands redistribution. It withdraws the compliance on which the whole edifice rests.

The CAS delivers exactly what the MPC requires: people too damaged, too afraid, too sick, distracted and ultimately too ashamed and resigned, to organise against the conditions that damaged them. The fear, anger, and shame transmitted through generations — the Unholy Trinity I described in the previous essay — produce the psychological conditions on which submission depends.

Audrey’s community did not rise up against the trafficking networks. Brian’s parents did not challenge the corporate platforms. Ireland did not challenge the Church, or the colonial inheritance, or the technology companies whose profits we now think we depend on. It is not primarily fear of physical force that keeps people in their places. It is the internalised belief that this is the way things are, that suffering is one’s own fault, that one does not deserve better. Fabricated fears fuel consumer demand and justify the use of force. Angry men make “good” soldiers. Cultivated prejudice of all sorts, from racism to misogyny, distracts from the one real inequality, that of material power. Shame is the ultimate motivator of resignation. The MPC needs the Unholy Trinity to be endemic. And the CAS reliably produces it.

Through these forces, the MPC simultaneously generates three things from the same upstream conditions: the vulnerable child, the person capable of abusing them, and the environment incapable of adequate response. All three. From the same source.

The conditions that create child vulnerability and the conditions that determine the quality of reactions after abuse are not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are the same problem, operating at different points in the same cycle. This is why the five individual upstream journeys all lead to the same place: because the forces that shaped Audrey’s poverty also shaped the absence of any protective response; because the forces that left Brian isolated also left his parents without the capacity to notice or respond until the grenade exploded; because the conditions that produced Cat’s exposure to abuse are identical to the conditions that constrained Tara’s ability to protect her. The misogyny that fuelled Desiree’s terrible life and death comes from the same dominant culture of abuse.

The suffering associated with CSA does not connect in any simple or linear way to the acts themselves. The acts are eddies in the current — significant, damaging, never to be minimised. But they do not, on their own, determine the long-term outcomes for those who experience them. What determines those outcomes is the pre-existing balance of vulnerability and resilience and the quality of what happens in the reactions afterwards — and both are products of the same upstream conditions that enabled the acts in the first place. Address the acts alone, and you have addressed the eddy while leaving the current untouched.

This is why controlling the story is the MPC’s most important priority — not to win any particular argument, but to ensure that the connection between how we have organised the world and the reliable production of CSA is never drawn. Once drawn, it cannot be undrawn.

• • •

The god of GDP

For most of human existence, the accumulation of material power, driven initially by the competition to survive — however brutal its cost — carried at least a partial justification. It drove technological development, food surplus, and the accumulated knowledge that eventually lifted billions from starvation and early death. Global average life expectancy at birth rose from around thirty years in 1800 to over seventy today. The material drive was monstrous in many of its workings. But those who defended it had a case: the growth it drove did, eventually, improve material conditions for more people than any previous arrangement had managed.

But. Except in those places that continue to have large-scale absolute poverty, this justification for selfishness is now dissolved.

For the first time in human history, we produce enough for every person on earth to live a reasonably healthy life. The survival challenge — the ancient motor of the whole engine — has been won. What remains is the material power drive itself: still running, still accumulating, now generating not survival but non-necessity, from material drive to materialistic drive. Manufactured discontent to sustain demand. A metric — GDP — that counts weapons systems and avoidable illness management as growth, that registers Audrey’s rape as positive economic activity, and treats four hundred million people’s suffering as a line that doesn’t appear in the financial accounts.

The middle classes — Brian’s parents, Ireland’s professionals, educated people across the wealthy world — are caught in a treadmill powered by the same neurobiology of fear that once served genuine survival needs, now redirected toward mortgage anxiety and status consumption. The costs of working, debt, insurance, pension — the structural trap of modern material life — constrain every real choice while appearing to be freedom. They know the treadmill is a treadmill. They do not get off it, because the world around them has made getting off feel like failure.

But here is the turn, and this is where genuine grounds for optimism live, not as sentiment but as logical consequence.

Crossing the survival threshold not only dissolves the justification for MPC dominance. It simultaneously, for the first time in human history, gives humanity both the material capacity and the accumulated knowledge to actually protect children at scale, and thereby break the cycle of abuse and suffering. We have never before had this capacity in the history of humanity. The knowledge exists — we understand more about what generates child vulnerability, what determines whether suffering persists, and crucially, that these two things share the same upstream causes, than any previous generation. The resources exist. What is lacking is not capacity. It is the understanding of causation that would direct effort appropriately, and the will and bravery to act on it.

Understanding is not merely a preliminary to change. It is the mechanism of change. That is why I write.

• • •

The discourse war

For most of human history, there was almost no public discourse about child sexual abuse at all. Before survival ceased to be the dominant preoccupation, CSA was simply swallowed by the vast general current of abusiveness and struggle. It was prevalent everywhere. It was not discussed. Organised religion condemned it in general terms, whilst sometimes perpetuating it from within. The culture of fear, anger and shame — the same Unholy Trinity the previous essay described living inside — kept children silent, families protective of their image, and communities looking away. The MPC won by default. There was nothing to resist.

From the 1960s onwards, in wealthier countries, something shifted. Psychology entered popular thinking. Feminism began examining sexual and gender violence, and this in turn put a spotlight on childhood sexual abuse. Research accumulated. Laws were passed. Public inquiries were held. A vast apparatus of child protection policies, therapeutic services, awareness programmes, and specialist legal frameworks came into existence. In certain respects — particularly around in-person abuse by strangers and child protection policies in schools and other child-serving organisations — some of this has made a difference, especially for middle-class children. It looks like progress. And in some ways it is.

But here is what these fifty years of discourse have almost entirely failed to do: it has failed to ask the upstream question. Every element of the new conversation about CSA — every academic paper, legal inquiry, media investigation, therapeutic framework, awareness campaign — has been channelled into the same individualised frame. Individual monsters who abuse. Individual people who have experienced abuse suffer. Individual therapists who heal. Individual prosecutors who punish. The systemic conditions that produce all of them remain, somehow, outside the frame. This is not accidental incompleteness. It is the third pillar of the MPC operating exactly as intended.

Media coverage of CSA is the clearest illustration. When CSA surfaces publicly, the lens lands on an individual — the monster exposed, the institution shocked, the sentence handed down. Outrage is expressed. Reforms are announced. And the story moves on. What never becomes the story is the pattern itself: why does this keep happening, in every culture, every era, every type of institution? Legal inquiries provide genuine insight into what happened in a particular school, diocese, or sporting body. But their recommendations almost always point back to familiar individual-level tools: better detection, stronger punishment, clearer policies. The systemic question — what conditions produced this, and in whose interest is it that we keep not asking — is barely touched.

Lawrence Nassar is as good an example as any. He was sentenced in 2018 to up to 175 years for sexually abusing hundreds of young female gymnasts over decades, inside the official structures of USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Girls had reported him repeatedly. People in authority had known or had every reason to know. Nothing was done for years. The courtroom statements of the gymnasts were seen around the world. The outrage – almost entirely directed at the evil monster, in truth a pathetic man - was real.

And then the coverage moved on. What barely got asked was: why does a system that places children’s bodies under total adult authority, in conditions of isolation from parents, in a culture of absolute submission to coaches and officials, keep producing this? And during those same eighteen years Nassar was abusing those girls, what were law enforcement and intelligence agencies doing about the other three or four million American children being sexually abused? These questions were not asked. The monster had been sentenced. That was the story.

Academia and the professions most closely involved with CSA — psychology, psychiatry, social work, criminology, paediatrics — are predominantly structured to deliver individualised services and conduct individualised research. Funding flows to treatment, not causation. Career advancement rewards working within established frameworks. Training reproduces dominant assumptions without questioning them. This is not a conspiracy — it is how institutions reproduce themselves. But the effect is that the field studying CSA most closely is also the field least likely to develop frameworks that challenge the power arrangements generating it.

The communications revolution is genuinely double-edged here. The same platforms facilitating the explosion of internet-mediated CSA also make it possible, for the first time in human history, for the upstream question to be asked and heard outside academic walls. My work is an example. The discourse war is not over. CSA is, in a curious way, one of the few issues that genuinely threatens the MPC’s self-image. Even people who accept extraordinary inequality without question will not accept the sexual abuse of children. Association with CSA has brought down people and institutions that every other form of exposure has left intact. In that sense, child sexual abuse is a pea under the MPC’s own mattresses — and a genuine understanding of its causes is a pea that, once seen for what it is, cannot be unseen.

• • •

What This Changes

The upstream journey has a purpose beyond understanding. It changes where effort should go.

If the answer to why CSA and related suffering happen is individual monsters, then the response is individual deterrence and punishment: make CSA a high-risk behaviour, generate child protection policies in places we can control, such as schools, catch them, imprison them, and manage the apparent consequences for those they harmed. This is what most of humanity’s meagre effort on CSA has consisted of for fifty years.

England and Wales, which make among the world’s most sustained law enforcement efforts against CSA, charge over six thousand people a year. The total number of people who sexually abuse children in those countries continues rising — probably between one and two million – and they mostly operate with Internet mediation. The reactive approach cannot reduce prevalence because it does not address causation. It tries the ultimately futile task of managing the river at its mouth while leaving the source untouched.

If the answer is the world we built, then responses are different in kind — not replacing individual accountability, but prior to it and more consequential in scale. Reducing material inequality reduces child vulnerability. And because the conditions producing vulnerability and the conditions determining the quality of reactions after abuse are the same conditions, reducing the former changes the latter simultaneously. This is not a secondary benefit. It is the mechanism.

Strengthening the informal caring capacity of families and communities — the people immediately around a child, long before and long after any professional involvement — addresses both the conditions that create exposure to abuse and the conditions that determine whether suffering takes root afterwards. Challenging the story of individualisation opens space for collective understanding and action. Building conditions in which people form genuine intimacy rather than loneliness and shame addresses one of the primary upstream sources of both the development of harmful desires and the erosion of caring capacity.

The essays that follow take each of these in turn. Why are some children more vulnerable than others — and what does this reveal about where protection is most needed? Who are the people who sexually abuse children, and what formed them? Why do reactions so consistently fail, and what does that reveal about causation? How does the cycle lock together across generations? And what, given all of this, do we actually do?

None of those essays can be fully understood without this one. The upstream journey is not background. It is the argument. Everything that follows is its application.

• • •

If this is your experience:

The forces described in this essay ran through your life before you were old enough to have any say in it. What made you vulnerable was not something wrong with you. It was something identifiable, something caused, in the world around you. And the reactions that followed — or failed to come — were shaped by those same conditions. The people who could not respond adequately were themselves constrained by the same upstream forces. Neither the vulnerability nor the inadequate response belongs to you as a personal failing. Both were produced upstream. Understanding that is not a consolation. It is a reorientation. The suffering you carry has sources — and sources can be addressed.

If you love or support someone who has experienced severe CSA:

The upstream journey reveals something important about what you can and cannot do. You cannot change the conditions that created the vulnerability. But you can change the conditions of the reaction, and because vulnerability and reaction quality share the same source, building genuine caring capacity in yourself and those around a person who has experienced CSA is one of the most structurally significant things available to any individual. Growing insight and understanding. Presence. Belief. Steadiness over time. In the framework of the cycle, these are precisely where it is most likely to be interrupted.

If you work professionally in this area:

This framework challenges where current effort is overwhelmingly concentrated — downstream, at the symptomatic end of the cycle. That work is necessary. It is not sufficient. The reason reactions so consistently fall short is not professional inadequacy. It is that the conditions producing the child’s vulnerability have simultaneously degraded the capacity of every system around them to respond. The cycle creates the problem and structurally forecloses the response. This is an argument for investment in the informal systems that surround children long before and long after any professional encounter: family capacity, community connection, the reaction infrastructure that research shows to be most predictive of outcome. That is not a challenge to what you do. It is an argument for the conditions that would allow you to do it better.

If you have the capacity to shape how institutions or societies respond:

The central argument of this essay is not ideological. It is evident. CSA is not an inexplicable aberration. It is a predictable consequence of how humanity has organised its material life, which means it is also preventable, not primarily by eliminating individuals who have already reached the point of abusing, but by changing the conditions that produce both child vulnerability and the development of the capacity to abuse in others. And because those conditions are the same conditions that determine the quality of reactions after abuse, changing them addresses the full cycle — not merely one end of it. The resources exist. The knowledge exists. What is lacking is the political will that an adequate understanding could generate.

Some readers will feel resistance to this framework. That resistance is worth examining. An account of CSA as the natural consequence of how the world is organised is more demanding than one that locates the problem in defective individuals, because it implicates the system, and everyone who benefits from and sustains it. That is uncomfortable. It is also honest. The question to put to yourself is not: do I agree with this framing? It is: what is my alternative account of why four hundred million people have experienced severe CSA, generation after generation, in every society on earth — and what follows from that account in terms of where we should direct our effort and our resources?

If you carry something that frightens you — thoughts or impulses you have never said aloud, or if you know someone like this:

The same river that ran through Audrey’s life, and Cat’s, and mine, ran through the lives of those who abused us. Understanding that is not absolution. It is the beginning of an honest account of how harmful desires develop — and the recognition that development is not destiny. The path from early damage to harming a child is not inevitable. It has to be chosen, however constrained that choice feels. There are people and places equipped to help understand what is happening and where it came from. The Resources section is a place to start.

• • •

What has this essay brought up for you? I am genuinely interested in disagreement — the framework I am building here challenges some well-established assumptions, and a serious challenge sharpens serious work. Leave a comment or write to me at nolitimereireland@gmail.com.

Next week: why are some children more vulnerable to sexual abuse than others? The answer is not about individual children’s characteristics. It is about the contexts adults build around them — contexts shaped by the very forces this essay has described, now seen from closer in.

Essay 4 • NOLI TIMERE • March 2026

Visit the Conceptual Framework to see where this fits.

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• •

Someone Is Coming Towards Me

The first time I went to a therapist who specialised in trauma, she asked me to stand in the middle of the room, take a ball of wool, and make a circle around myself. This represented my personal space. She would stand in the far corner, about five metres away, and walk towards me — but only on my precise command. I could tell her to lift a foot, take a step, or stop.

Internally, I thought she was an idiot. I was close to telling her to fuck off with her loopy shit and leaving. But I did what I was told.

When everything was set, I invited her to lift her right foot.

A surge of terror and adrenaline flooded me in a microsecond. My hands came out of my pockets like a gunslinger’s. I was paralysed, rigid, staring at her with extraordinary intensity. I could not move, could not speak, could not think. She eventually asked what I wanted to do next. I forced out an assenting nod. As she began to lower her foot, an enormous second surge hit me. I started trembling violently. She stopped. I collapsed onto a nearby couch, shaking, unable to speak for several more minutes.

What had happened was this. The clever set-up had made it impossible for me to do what I always did: dissociate from someone approaching me. I could not relocate my focus. That was the core of this seemingly trite exercise. The terror arrived before I could intercept it. The man who raped me when I was three had disturbed my sense of safety so profoundly that fifty years later, my body still could not tolerate full awareness of another person approaching me.

That afternoon was the first time I had truly seen the fear rather than merely carrying it. Not experiencing it — I had been experiencing it all my life, managing it with such practised invisibility that I did not know it was there. As a child I had to hide it, or it would overwhelm me. But it never went away. Seeing it so powerfully was different. I saw its depth, its age, its absolute dominance over every encounter I had ever believed I was handling. That incident changed everything about how I came to understand what had happened to me.

He terrified me so much.

But here is what I also had to understand: he did not find me by accident, and what happened to me did not begin when he first touched me. I was already in water that had been flowing powerfully long before he got there. I was vulnerable because I lived in a culture drowning in shame, with a particular focus on shaming sex. My parents were struggling in a very poor country to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. My mother was giving birth to her fifth surviving child at the time of my most severe abuse. She was in a culture that insisted on no birth control. She had no central heating and no automatic washing machine. My father worked every waking hour to fund our survival. The man who raped me could not have been reared well — he was an extremely disturbed individual. These were among the reasons why I was so horribly abused, and why, despite a small increase in care for an obviously distressed child, my parents were unable to give me what I needed. They simply didn’t know what to do and even if they did, they did not have the internal or external resources to do it.

And what made the terror last — what turned a series of acts into a lifetime of being dominated by inner fear — was the silence afterwards. Not malicious silence. The ordinary silence of people with no language for what had happened to a small child in their care, and no means to help. I was afraid, and I was left alone in my fear. That is where the suffering lives, and that is what this essay is about.

• • •

The River

In Bern, Switzerland, the river Aare makes a loop around the ancient city centre. It is about eighty metres wide, fast and chaotic — violently turbulent in ways barely visible from its banks. Every summer, people jump in above the bend and with some sort of flotation device they let the current carry them down. It is tradition, excitement, pleasure, a rite of summer. It is also dangerous. People drown in the Aare. It is impossible to swim against the current and very challenging to get out of it.

The suffering described in this essay does not begin with the acts of abuse. It was already being made — in the flow of something older and more powerful, like a manifestation of turbulence, an eddy, in a river such as the Aare. This flow is the long human struggle for survival, which has morphed into a material power culture dominated by a minority of people with disproportionate control of economic assets and base physical force. This culture is inherently exploitative; its material inequality is built on abuse. Abuse, at its most basic, is this: the use of power over another without regard for their wellbeing. Abuse is necessary for such material power inequality. Child sexual abuse is one manifestation of this. It manifested in me and millions of other children.

And the current is cyclical. The suffering that severe CSA generates — when it goes unresolved, as it almost always does — feeds back into the conditions that produced it. Not through a simple linear link to more child sexual abuse, but through a contribution to the wider current. People carrying fear, anger and shame they were never helped to understand and dissipate raise the next generation in the same water. Abuse produces suffering; suffering, over time and generations, produces the conditions for more abuse. This is what I mean by the cycle of abuse and suffering.

For most of human history no one could have stepped outside it. But something has shifted. For the first time, our species has accumulated enough — materially, and in understanding — that the current can be seen from the outside. It is increasingly possible to understand the real source of suffering, and to apply our growing capacity for agency to real, causal change.

What makes the current most powerful is not its force alone. It is that you are in it without language for what is happening to you, surrounded by people in the same water who are equally unable to name it. The suffering is not only the acts, or the vulnerability that preceded them. It is also the silence — the inability to say what is happening, and the absence of anyone truly willing to hear it.

Essay 4 examines the river. This essay is about what it feels like to have a severe experience of CSA within it.

• • •

Fear: The Father

Fear is the ground of everything that follows. Not anxiety, not worry — fear in the body, the kind that floods a person before they have time to think, the kind the zebra feels when the bushes rustle.

For as long as I can remember, a low hum of watchfulness ran beneath everything I did — who was approaching, where the exits were, what mood was on someone’s face. I had no name for it. I did not know it was unusual. It was just the way it was. I didn’t know I was different. It was fear. Not a response to anything present; it was the air itself.

For a zebra on the Serengeti, a rustling bush might mean a lion. For a child, footsteps in the hallway might mean the person who abuses is coming. Both respond the same way: every sense sharpens, the body floods with adrenaline, everything narrows to the threat. The zebra, if it escapes, shakes off the stress — within minutes it can be seen serenely grazing.

But we are not zebras. We cannot shake it off in the same way, because the threat we faced was not a predator at a distance. It was a person we depended on for survival, or — as devastating in its own way — the people we depended on who failed to protect us. For a child dependent on human relationships for approximately fifteen years — the longest early-life dependency of any animal — this is not merely frightening. It strikes at the very foundation of survival. The nervous system records it as such and does not easily let it go. If fear is not dissolved, it becomes embodied — fixed in the body in ways that can persist for years, for decades, for whole lives. The body stays in a fearful state long after the real external danger has gone.

Child sexual abuse strikes at a child’s survival in two ways. The first is direct: during a particularly threatening act, the primal responses fully activate — fight, flight, freeze, or in extremis, tonic immobility. The second is relational, and often more devastating: the child’s understanding of what happened — that someone they depend on has used them, or that the people responsible for their safety have failed them, or both — becomes a threat to survival at the deepest level. Both routes lead to the same place.

The intensity of fear varies enormously, and this variation matters. High levels of fear indicate severity of experience, not necessarily severity of acts. A child who was violently raped but immediately believed, supported, assured of future protection, and helped to re-establish a sense of safety may carry less fear than a child who experienced less severe acts but encountered silence, disbelief, and compounding shame. The acts and the experience are not the same thing. Fear — its depth, its persistence, its grip on the body — is the measure.

The primary way most of us manage this fear is through control. We control who approaches us, what we allow to be seen. We use dissociation — the mind’s capacity to separate awareness from experience — as a daily management system. I could hug people. I could appear physically intimate. What I could not do was actually allow it. The dissociation was seamless. I was there and not there simultaneously, and I had no idea. The ultimate dissociation is to disconnect from other people, sometimes to physically isolate, more often to be utterly alone in a crowd, incapable of, fearful of, the beautiful thing called intimacy.

This fear restricts and distorts nearly every dimension of life — emotional, behavioural, relational, physical. It does not always announce itself as fear. It appears as avoidance, as control, as a low hum of vigilance that never quite switches off, as a permanent low-level confusion about why the world feels different to us than it seems to feel to everyone else. It appears as behaviours that do not connect with other people.

Fear gets stuck inside us. You would cut off your arm to be rid of the sensation, but it does not properly go away. The fear that gripped me inside that breached ball of wool was astonishing — and every insider who carries the unresolved legacy of severe CSA has something like it within them. Many of us have no real understanding of what it is. We were so afraid that we hid what was in our bodies from ourselves. That apparently irrational but entirely explicable embodied fear is at the core of all human suffering. CSA is but one eddy on this river.

This fear is not a metaphor. It lives in the body. Bessel van der Kolk spent three decades demonstrating what those of us with severe CSA already knew in our bones: the body keeps the score. Felitti and colleagues’ Adverse Childhood Experiences study, across more than seventeen thousand people, confirmed the same truth from a different direction: the body does not forget. The alarm set in childhood does not simply switch off. It runs — chronically, exhaustingly — driving inflammation, compromising immunity, shortening lives. Sleep is rarely restful. The things we use to manage the internal discomfort — alcohol, poor diet, screen-distraction, relentless work — compound the damage rather than relieve it.

This is why the suffering of severe CSA cannot be addressed from the outside in. You cannot reason with a nervous system that never received the signal that it was safe. You cannot talk a body out of what it learned when it was three, or seven, or twelve.

During my worst experience, I focused with extraordinary intensity on the faded tartan pattern and rough texture of the upholstery on the couch I was face-down on while he raped and suffocated me. Over sixty years later, I can describe that upholstery with perfect accuracy. The mind finds anything — anything at all — to fix on other than what is actually happening. That image is burned into memory with a vividness that ordinary recollection never achieves, because it was not made by ordinary memory. It was made by a child doing the only thing left to do.

What saves the child can imprison the adult. Dissociation becomes habitual, practised, automatic. We zone out of conversations, disconnect from our bodies, sleepwalk through relationships. We appear physically intimate while being psychologically absent. We use dissociation to keep the fear at bay. Getting out of this pattern requires undoing the very strategy that kept us alive: feeling what we spent decades learning not to feel, letting someone approach. This is not a failure of willpower. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do — protecting us from a threat that ended decades ago but that the body, never having been told otherwise, believes is still there.

• • •

Anger: The Son

Fuelled always by fear, the anger that comes with severe CSA is different from ordinary anger. It is persistent, often misdirected, and exhausting. It emerges from the accumulated experience of being overpowered, unprotected, and left, abandoned, to cope alone.

Living with this anger is like pressing one foot on the accelerator with the other on the brakes. When suppression dominates, it damages the person carrying it. When it escapes, it damages those nearby. Either way, it’s not easy to live with — for the person carrying it or for the people affected. It shows up as teeth clenching, self-harm, explosive outbursts, the driven exhaustion of someone who has been fighting themselves all day, and a particular bitter compliance — working hard, asking for nothing, taking what is given but feeling an eroding resentment quietly churning underneath.

Street angel, house devil. Many of us present a pleasant, accommodating face to the outside world. We are often the peacemakers, self-effacing, people-pleasers, superficially easy to get along with. At home we are withdrawn, barely present, unreachable. The people who live with us know this pattern better than we do, and it frightens and confuses them. They pull away from it. They cannot reconcile the two people. We often cannot either.

One of the most painful consequences of this anger is that it falls heaviest on the people closest to us. Like a liquid cascade, this inner tension flows downwards towards those with less power to resist it. At the end of this fall are children. This is one of the key links in the cycle: the suffering of one generation becomes part of the conditions in which the next is formed. The current continues.

The individualised framing of humanity’s now dominant worldview makes this worse. When the systemic conditions that generated vulnerability are hidden from view, leaving only the individual and their difficulty, the anger has nowhere legitimate to go. It turns inward, misdirects onto people nearby, or gets channelled into a driven exhaustion — working hard, asking for little, resentment churning quietly underneath. The source stays invisible.

I found the sheer ugly depth of my own anger in a therapy session. During an EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) session — a structured, evidence-based psychotherapy designed to reveal and process traumatic memory — the man who abused me appeared as a sort of vision. I felt extreme rage: pure, physical, prolonged for at least ten minutes. I imagined destroying him completely. I literally saw myself, felt myself, pulverising him to mush with my bare hands. Afterwards, guilt — and then something unexpected: a ray of particular lightness, as though something uncomfortable had been removed. In my fantasy, I had done to him what my body needed to do to the fear he left in me.

• • •

Shame: The Unholy Spirit

If fear is the father and the dominant sensation, and anger is the expression, then shame is the deepest and most harmful belief. And it begins with a child’s impossible logic.

Many children who are sexually abused already carry a low sense of themselves. Ashamed children are like a magnet to people who would be sexually abusive.

After experiences of sexual abuse, and without good help from adults, a child’s confused and immature mind faces what I call the abused child’s Hobson’s Choice: either the grown-ups on whom I depend for survival are bad — an unbearable thought — or I must be bad. There is, in an inexperienced unassisted mind, no third option. Often this is compounded by the person doing the abusing who literally tells the child it is their fault. Often the reaction of key non-abusing adults — most often the mother who is unable to face the truth — can compound this sense of responsibility, of shame. If this child is living in a whole sub-culture of shame, like slaves or like the Ireland of my childhood, all the pointers are in one direction – it was my fault. The belief in being bad grows, takes root and dominates the interior world. This is the core of toxic shame, and it can poison a whole life.

Toxic shame colours everything: the deep pessimism, the fleeting joy immediately crushed, the replacement of any sense of being loved for who we are with the idea of being useful. People with this deep-rooted sense of self are not assertive. They are resigned to and even expect further mistreatment because they believe they don’t deserve anything better. They hide the self they believe to be bad behind a persona designed for protection — and intimacy becomes nearly impossible, because intimacy requires dropping the mask. And who the hell could possibly like me?

Much of the energy of a day goes into managing how we appear. We learn to read rooms, to calibrate ourselves to what is needed, to be whatever keeps us safe. Many of us become very good at it. The performance is exhausting precisely because it never stops. And behind it, almost always, is the conviction that if anyone saw what was actually there, they would confirm everything we have always suspected about ourselves.

Shame operates at every scale. This is what I call the fractal principle. The same force that silences a child silences the family. The child who cannot tell becomes the adult who cannot speak of it, in a family that collectively looks away, in a culture that has become expert in not seeing. In the past, slavery in its multiple forms — serfdom, caste — could not exist without an internalised belief that experiencing exploitation was deserved. Shame is the mechanism by which the powerful make the powerless carry the weight of their own abuse. The same force, at every scale. Every single child who severely experiences CSA is not responsible for this abuse, yet humanity insists that they believe it was their fault and they have to carry this weight.

Shame is part of the reason children do not tell, and why adults do not report. It is also part of the reason why the people around them stay silent. Non-offending parents — most often mothers — frequently suppress what they know for fear of it. The child carries the secret. The family carries the secret. The culture looks away. The cycle continues.

Sexual abuse is the most intimate violation there is. It enters the body — literally, in many cases — the most private and protected part of a person’s inner world. What it leaves behind is a corruption of closeness itself. The very thing human beings most need — to be touched, held, seen, known — becomes the thing that feels most dangerous. We build something to manage this. I think of it as a keep: an innermost fortress, thick-walled, designed to withstand siege. Inside it we hold three things: a defended space against attack; our hearts, the place where intimacy could flourish; and our anger. We live most of our lives inside it. The sentries watch outward for threat and inward to keep the anger locked away. But in doing this, they also lock up our hearts. You can fill a room with warmth and conversation. You can appear connected, present, engaged. The keep remains closed. The management is so practised it is invisible — to others and usually to yourself.

When I was fifteen, an older girl became sexually excited with me. She was probably less than half my weight. I was frozen. Paralysed. It was almost funny. But it was not funny at all. This is what the keep does: it does not just hold people at a distance. When someone, without abusive intent tries to reach in, it feels like they are trying to break through. We drop the portcullis, close the shutters, we shut everything down. The mechanism is the same dissociation we use to manage the daily fear — now turned against the dangerous territory of closeness.

• • •

Why Reactions Matter More Than Acts

Fear, anger, and shame do not operate separately. They lock together — fear feeding anger, anger armoured by shame, shame deepening fear — forming what I call the Unholy Trinity. Together they shape virtually everything: relationships, health, the capacity to parent, the willingness to trust another human being. But they were not formed by acts of CSA alone. They were formed by the acts and by everything the cycle generated around them — the conditions that made the child vulnerable and the reactions that left the suffering unresolved.

Consider the Hobson’s Choice again. The child who concluded ‘I must be bad’ reached that conclusion because there was no adequate response — no adult who came to say: this was not your fault, I believe you, you are safe. No adults who helped the child restore neuro-biological equilibrium and actual practical safety. No adults who helped unravel the child’s confusion about what happened.

Shame is not a psychological accident. It is the direct, predictable consequence of being left alone with something too large to carry. A child who is believed, protected, and supported learns that the world contains trustworthy adults, that violations can be addressed, that they are worthy of protection. A child who is disbelieved, blamed, or abandoned learns that they are alone, that adults cannot be trusted, that something about them invited what happened. These lessons persist long after the abuse itself has ended.

Of all the research findings on CSA, the most important and least publicly known is this: reactions received after abuse are among the strongest predictors of long-term outcomes — often more powerful than the nature of the acts themselves. Decades of research, from Everson and colleagues to Hébert, from Spaccarelli to meta-analyses across multiple populations, converge on the same result.

An infamous case in the Netherlands supports this thesis. The so-called Amsterdam Case involved a male relief childcare worker who sexually abused — mostly by penetrative rape — at least eighty-seven infants in the mid-noughties. These children were otherwise living in safe, nurturing families. Their abuse was an atypical breach of security in otherwise secure contexts. For the overwhelming majority, when tracked in subsequent years, there is no evidence of sustained suffering related to the sexual abuse. The acts were not less severe. But these children were not otherwise vulnerable, and when the abuse came to light, the families and professionals responded swiftly and well. Without pre-existing vulnerability, and without inadequate reactions that deepen and sustain suffering, the acts alone did not define their lives.

Frank Putnam’s landmark longitudinal study sits at the other end of the spectrum. He followed the lives of girls in an American city who experienced severe CSA in a familial setting in early childhood for many years. These girls lived within abusive and unstable family environments, families that could not make a child feel safe. All of them went on to have extreme outcomes across every category of suffering. This is extreme intergenerational transmission of suffering with CSA as a manifesting eddy in this current. The difference between Amsterdam and Putnam’s cases is not the severity of the acts. It is the pre-conditions. It is the reactions. Which are the same.

This does not mean reactions are easy to improve. All front-line social workers and others at this coalface know this. They know the challenges are concentrated in the family home. They know it to the extent that where resources permit, they sometimes take the child away from such environments. Family work at this point is immensely frustrating. The families most capable of supportive responses are the least likely to be families where CSA occurs — because the same conditions that generated the child’s vulnerability also determined the quality of what is available after. This is the Catch-22 of Care. The mother who cannot respond adequately is not the cause of what happened. She is a product of the same conditions. Understanding this does not reduce the consequences of her inadequacy. It reveals where responsibility actually lies. And this is in the totality of the river, way upstream.

Individual psychological work is necessary — all human beings need to examine their inner lives, and people with severe CSA experiences have an enormous amount to examine. But you cannot treat an experience. CSA is a series of things that happened, not a psychological condition. A therapist can help you understand what happened inside you. She cannot change the conditions that made you vulnerable, or alter the culture that produced inadequate reactions, or act on the system that continues to generate new vulnerable children. Offering individual work as sufficient is not merely inadequate. It is a structural function of a culture that needs the individual to carry the burden of what the system produced.

• • •

Suffering Begets Suffering

I hate writing this section, because I have struggled with how I affected my own children and family. But it has to be faced.

The Unholy Trinity does not make good ingredients for a parent. Fearful, angry, ashamed parents — however hard they try, however much they love — struggle to enjoy their children, to transmit a genuine sense of wantedness, to conceal the weight they are carrying. Saying we love our children but not feeling it — actually not being able to feel it. It is hard to love someone when you are emotionally out to sea on a rickety boat in the middle of a hurricane. Children feel it. They absorb their parents’ fear, anger, and shame.

What makes this harder still to face is not only what we fail to give. It is what we pass on. The anger that could not find its real source, the fear that never found its voice — these do not stay contained. They flow toward those with less power and capacity to resist. At the end of that line are children. Not always through violence or obvious harm. More often through the thousand small withdrawals — the unreachable parent, the unpredictable mood, the love that is present one day and somewhere else the next. Children are exquisitely attuned to the emotional weather of the adults they depend on. When that weather is chronic fear and suppressed rage, they learn what I learned: that in certain ways the world is not safe, that adults cannot be fully trusted, that something may be wrong with them. The cycle does not announce itself. It simply continues, one generation written into the next.

There is a particular anguish in recognising this about yourself. I have felt it. The same conditions that were visited on me, I visited — in different form, with different details — on people I love. That recognition is not a verdict. It is, if you can bear to look at it, the moment the cycle becomes visible from the inside. Most people cannot bear to look. The shame of it — layered on top of all the other shame — is too much. And so the looking away continues, and the conditions reproduce themselves, and the next generation begins in the same water.

But the fractal principle reaches further than families. Communities that have endured generations of poverty, displacement, or systemic abuse carry their own version of the Unholy Trinity — a collective fear that expresses itself as chronic vigilance and suspicion, a collective anger that has nowhere legitimate to go, a collective shame that internalises its own oppression and calls it deserved. Children grow up inside this weather too. They absorb not just their parents’ particular suffering but the emotional culture of the world they are born into — its silences, its rages, its deep unspoken beliefs about who is safe and who is not, about whether asking for help is possible, about whether they themselves are worth protecting. Culture is not something that happens to children from the outside. It is something they become.

This is the fractal principle operating at full scale. The same force that silences a child, silences a family, silences a generation. Ireland in my childhood was a nation carrying centuries of colonial humiliation, religious shame, and enforced poverty — and that culture lived in every home, in every interaction between parent and child, long before any individual act of abuse occurred. The same dynamic runs through communities shaped by slavery, by caste, by conquest. The suffering that was done to people does not stay in the past. It inhabits the bodies of their descendants, shapes the emotional weather their children breathe, and becomes — without anyone choosing it — the conditions in which the next cycle begins. Essay 4 examines the system that drives this. Essay 8 will return to the cycle directly. Here it is enough to see it: abuse generates suffering; suffering — unresolved and unwitnessed — generates the conditions for more abuse. This is the current. We are all in it.

• • •

Not Inevitable

Everything described in this essay is real. It is also not inevitable.

The sustained suffering associated with severe CSA is generated by the cycle’s conditions — conditions that create vulnerability, that shape what acts can spark or worsen, and that very largely determine whether what is sparked becomes entrenched. Change those conditions — even partially, even after the fact — and you change the outcome. Amsterdam contributes to the proof: when the cycle’s conditions were sufficiently absent before, and when the response was genuinely good after, severe acts did not define those children’s lives.

For those already deep in the Unholy Trinity, the path is harder, but it exists. Individual work is real and necessary. But as the Catch-22 of Care makes clear, individual work addresses the manifestations of suffering in a person — it cannot change the conditions that generated them. What the evidence points towards is something more fundamental: changing the conditions that make children vulnerable in the first place, and building the response capacity that the current so systematically degrades. These are the ways to break the cycle.

Something historically momentous has recently changed. Humanity now has the material sufficiency, the accumulated knowledge, and — for the first time — the potential freedom from the survival imperative that could allow us to address the cycle at its roots rather than its symptoms. Whether we use that capacity is a question of understanding and will. The reallocation required is not primarily one of resources. It is one of insight and willingness.

The title of this essay is a wish and an argument. If they knew how we feel — not as information, but as genuine comprehension that changes how they respond — most of our sustained suffering would not persist. The suffering does not require the acts to be that powerful. It requires the silence around them. It requires a child to be left alone with something too large to carry, and for that aloneness to be sustained through years of inadequate reaction, and for the culture around that child to remain incapable of hearing what they are trying to say.

Break the silence. Build the capacity to hear it. Change the conditions that produce both.

Most of our sustained suffering exists because we cannot say what happened and find no one willing to truly hear it. That is also why I write.

Essay 4 examines the system that drives this cycle — what the material power culture is, how it operates, and why the dominant culture is so structured as to prevent this truth from being widely seen. The inside view was the necessary beginning.

• • •

This essay has asked something different of each person who has read this far.

If this is your experience:

The Unholy Trinity is not who you are. It is what was done to you, compounded by what was not done for you afterwards. The fear in your nervous system, the anger with nowhere safe to go, the shame that convinced you something was fundamentally wrong with you — none of these are character flaws. They are the precise, predictable consequences of experiencing something overwhelming at an age when you had no means to process it, surrounded by people who had no means to help. Your nervous system did exactly what it was built to do. The problem is not that it failed. It is that it kept protecting you long after the threat had gone, because no one came to tell it that you were safe. That is a description of a circumstance, of cause and effect, not a verdict on a person. The individual work of understanding what happened inside you is real and worth doing. But you did not create the conditions that made you vulnerable, and the responsibility for those conditions does not rest with you. It never did.

If someone you love has experienced severe CSA:

You are living alongside something you did not cause and cannot fix, and the person you love may sometimes direct at you the very fear and anger this essay has described. You may have said the wrong thing — not from indifference, but because there is no map for this, and love alone does not supply one. What the evidence suggests is not that you need to try harder, but differently: less fixing, more staying. Less advice, more presence. The people who make the most difference are rarely those with the best answers. They are the ones who do not leave when it becomes difficult. You almost certainly carry your own challenges and constraints, but there may well be more space and resources than you think. That requires its own kind of courage, and its own kind of support — which you are also entitled to seek.

If you work in this field:

Most experienced practitioners already know from their own clinical observation that the context surrounding abuse shapes outcomes as profoundly as the acts. What this framework offers is not a correction of that knowledge but a language for it — and an argument for the systemic conditions that would allow practitioners to act on what they already know needs doing. The evidence points consistently towards investment in building reaction capacity at family and community level — in the informal systems that surround children long before and long after any professional meets them. That is not a challenge to what you do. It is an argument for the conditions that would let you do it better.

If you are in a position to influence how this issue is understood — in policy, in media, in culture:

The evidence asks two simple questions: what can you do to alter the conditions that cause both acts of CSA and vulnerability to suffering? And if reactions shape outcomes more profoundly than acts, what would it mean to invest accordingly? Your responses must focus on causation not sticking plaster, on substance not appearances, on reallocation of material power.

If you carry something that frightens you — thoughts or impulses you have never said aloud:

The forces this essay has described — suffering that goes unresolved, fear and shame finding the only outlets available — are the same forces that run through the lives of people who go on to harm children, and through the lives of people who do not. What separates those paths is not a fixed quality of character. It is what happens next. If something in this essay has landed close to home in a way you did not expect that recognition is not a condemnation. It is a beginning. There are people who can help understand these proclivities and where they come from. There are preventive and diverting possibilities. The Resources section might be where to start.

What has this essay brought up for you? I am genuinely interested in where you disagree — the framework I am building here challenges some well-established models, and serious challenge sharpens serious work. Leave a comment or write to me at nolitimereireland@gmail.com.

Next week: I want to challenge something most people think they already understand — what actually drives child sexual abuse. The answer is not a person. It is a pattern that runs through everything.

This essay avoids complex data analysis. Shortly, I will publish Essay 2.1, a technical complement to Essay 2 for those readers interested in the detailed workings and assumptions. Essay 2.1 will include a substantial source bibliography.

To fight an invisible foe, make it visible

Ten children per minute

Right now, somewhere in this world, a child under fifteen is being severely sexually abused for the first time. By the time you finish reading this short paragraph, it will have happened once.

Based on conservative prevalence estimates, approximately 5.3 million children under the age of fifteen experience severe, penetrative or attempted penetrative sexual abuse for the first time each year. That is an average of around ten children every minute. This is a modelled figure — derived from prevalence data rather than direct measurement, since direct measurement does not exist — and it is, if anything, an undercount. About 81 million people currently under fifteen years old have or will have experienced severe in-person child sexual abuse (CSA) at least once before their fifteenth birthday. That is a conservative estimate of 4% of all under-15s alive today. Full methodology is in Essay 2.1.¹

In any average school classroom, statistically, at least one child will experience or has experienced severe child sexual abuse.

And in the same minute as those ten children experience rape or attempted rape, another twenty children aged fourteen or less experience less severe forms of in-person CSA for the first time — experiences that still carry the potential to contribute to sustained suffering, depending on how the children and the adults around them react.

Let this land…

If you are reading this as someone who has severely experienced child sexual abuse, I want to say something before the data continues. The numbers in this essay describe real people. They describe you. The clinical framing that follows is a tool for understanding, not a way of reducing what happened to you to a category or a row in a table. I ask you to stay with it.

These are the in-person numbers: acts that take place in direct physical contact. They do not include Internet-mediated abuse, which is growing at a rate that dwarfs everything else. We will come to that later in this essay.

Many people feel an impulse to look away or to mentally avoid the truth inside these numbers. The sense that these numbers cannot possibly be right, that they must be exaggerated, perhaps that they don’t cause so much harm, maybe it’s other people’s children? Surely someone would have done something if things were this bad! I understand that impulse intimately. I felt it myself for decades — even as someone who had been raped as a three-year-old. The scale of CSA is so large, so pervasive, so embedded in how humanity organises itself, that our minds don’t properly engage it. Avoidance is the main mechanism through which acts of CSA become a lifetime’s suffering. It is avoidance — by all the people around a child, by institutions, by culture — that turns a wound into something that never heals. And avoidance starts with the basic data.

There are multiple difficulties with existing published data, and my calculation are estimates that required a substantial amount of trawling through what exists to extract reasonable conclusions. It is not because good data is impossible to get, but because we have collectively chosen not to get it. This essay is about what we know, what we don’t, and — most importantly — why the gap between the two is not an accident.

• • •

What we mean by child sexual abuse

One of the reasons CSA discourse is so confusing, and therefore easy to avoid, is that people are often talking about different things while using the same words. Clarity matters here, because the numbers in this essay are only meaningful if we agree on what is being counted.

A child, for purposes of understanding CSA, is a young person who is not yet developmentally ready for sex — physically, mentally, and emotionally. This definition focuses on developmental readiness rather than simplistic legal ages, though the global average age of consent — 16.3 years — aligns closely with what biology, psychology, and common sense tell us.

CSA requires that the person who abuses is at least five years older than the child and is at least partly sexually motivated. This distinguishes it from peer sexual abuse — a separate and also enormous challenge — and from sexualised abuse like female genital mutilation, which is abusive and sexual in character but not driven by sexual desire. These distinctions matter because different types of abuse have different causes and conflating them leads to responses that miss their targets.

The acts themselves range across a spectrum. The numbers in this essay refer specifically to penetrative or attempted penetrative acts — the most severe end of the spectrum and the most reliably measured.

The highlighted row is what this essay primarily counts. Each type carries a different profile of harm, causation, and response. Bundling them all together — as many studies do — produces headlines that confuse rather than illuminate.

• • •

Where it happens

If you asked most people where CSA occurs, you would get a wide variety of answers. The reality is both more ordinary and more disturbing. In-person CSA happens in five distinct settings, each with its own profile and its own trajectory.

The family environment accounts for more than half of all in-person CSA. Not by strangers, not in institutions, but in and around homes — perpetrated by people who live with or are in familiar informal contact with the child. The critical denominator is the child’s perspective: these are locations they associate as home-like and protected. The most common age of onset is around six or seven. The people who sexually abuse in this environment are mostly situational abusers. They typically abuse only one or small numbers of children. Many of these children experience fifty to a hundred separate acts from a single person. The people who abuse fit the broader socio-economic, educational and cultural profile of their nation. Often, when caught, they would not be diagnosed as having paedophilia. There is a very high proportion of penetrative abuse.

Child-serving organisations — schools, churches, sports clubs, residential homes and detention centres — account for the second largest category. Boys make up seventy to ninety per cent of those abused here. In this environment, only a small proportion of the sexual abuse acts are penetrative or attempted penetration. In the mid to late twentieth century, about twenty per cent of all in-person CSA globally occurred in such organisations, but the proportion of severe forms of CSA is significantly smaller. In countries that have implemented serious child protection policies, the number of children sexually abused in these settings has dropped dramatically. This is one of the battles we are winning — proof that strategic, sustained deterrence works. But it reveals something uncomfortable: we have reduced abuse in institutions because institutions are visible and relatively easily controllable. Families are neither, which is why family environment abuse remains stubbornly resistant to formal intervention. Furthermore, even where situational deterrence in these organisations works to reduce incidences of CSA, it carries two subtle costs: when not well done, it creates an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety, and it can restrict children’s freedoms, especially the possibility of healthy relationships with older males.

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) — where material and sexual motivations intersect, where children are effectively sold or trade sexual acts for money, drugs, shelter, or protection. CSE is overwhelmingly perpetrated against post-pubescent girls. In wealthy countries, in-person CSE has declined overall but proportionately involves a high percentage of trafficked or immigrant children. In poorer countries, CSE may be rising, driven by the same material power dynamics that create extreme poverty. International travel has nearly tripled since 1995, and all agencies working on CSE report that abuse by foreigners, and by males who travel long distances internally, is probably rising.

The fourth setting is work: children who are directly employed, or whose families are in extreme economic subservience. UNICEF and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) counted 160 million child labourers in 2020, seventy-nine million doing hazardous work. These children are acutely vulnerable to sexual abuse by adults who hold economic power over them. Their near invisibility in CSA discourse reflects a broader pattern: we count what we choose to see.

The fifth setting — CSA by true strangers in person — was once the focus of enormous cultural anxiety and scapegoating. Today it is vanishingly rare in wealthy countries. The stranger danger we should actually worry about has moved online.

In general, four of these five in-person settings are declining proportionally. In absolute terms this is counter-acted by population rise. The context is changing: the adult-child ratio is rising, average incomes are rising, and the communications revolution is creating cultural change around child protection. The exception is child sexual exploitation. Not only is good data on it extremely hard to obtain — many countries have powerful sub-groups who do not want it revealed — but it has largely moved from visible locations to being hidden with the help of the Internet and smartphones.

Live-streamed abuse, where a paying viewer directs the real-time sexual abuse of a child often in another country, is relatively new and growing rapidly, especially in the Philippines. The International Justice Mission, a global anti-trafficking organisation, estimated that nearly half a million Filipino children were trafficked to produce new child sexual exploitation material and live streamed sexual abuse in 2022. Unlike typical in-person CSE, the victims are younger than might be assumed: in identified Philippine cases, the median age is eleven, with nine per cent aged three or younger and over half aged twelve or younger. The spread of CSE demonstrates the economics of material power applied to children’s bodies.

• • •

The Internet changes everything

The impact of the Internet on CSA represents the single biggest and fastest contextual change in human history regarding child sexual abuse. It has greatly increased child vulnerability, creating whole new categories of risk. More substantially, it has transformed the world of people with either a potential or actualised desire to sexually abuse children.

On the vulnerability side, the Internet is increasingly used for grooming, for voyeurism through hidden cameras, and for control, continuation, and escalation through threats post-abuse — often based on visual recordings. One of the most rapidly growing subsets involves children making videos of themselves, either coercively or cajolingly under the specific direction of an abusive person or apparently self-generated. Before YouTube restricted comments on images of children, there was a particularly infamous wormhole: little girls, about eight or nine years old, making videos of themselves doing gymnastics and dances in their bedrooms became a global magnet for men with paedophilia. YouTube’s algorithms clustered these videos, and there were millions of comments of a paedophilic nature.

Internet-mediated CSA covers five distinct sub-categories, plus a sixth mode of facilitation:

The Internet has created conditions for the largest child-sexual-abusing network imaginable. It facilitates the biggest “paedophile ring” in history. It normalises desires, provides how-to resources and advice, reduces perceived risk, and lowers the psychological barriers to first offending. Every indicator suggests rapid growth. Multiple gateways exist from mainstream adult pornography to real children, and these gateways are remarkably easy — both technically and psychologically — to traverse.

Survey data from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia — countries with near-universal Internet access and sound self-report survey methods — indicate that between 7% and 11% of adult males admit to some form of online sexual offending against children. If these rates were representative of the global male population with Internet access, the implied total would exceed one hundred million. They may not be fully representative: cultural context, legal frameworks, and reporting norms differ enormously across regions. The true global figure could be higher or lower. What the data from these three countries establishes beyond reasonable doubt is that this is not a phenomenon of a few thousand deviant individuals. It is a mass behaviour, and one that is growing as Internet access expands.²

A 2024 Scientific Reports study analysed 176,683 domains on TOR (an anonymised dark-web network funded by US intelligence agencies) between 2018 and 2023 and found that one-fifth share CSAM. Out of over 110 million search sessions analysed, 11.1% explicitly sought CSAM, with 40% of age-specified searches targeting children aged eleven or younger.³ Europol, the EU’s law enforcement coordination agency, made a significant 2025 breakthrough: its takedown of Kidflix — a single TOR-based CSAM streaming platform — revealed 1.8 million user accounts. The volume of material is so vast that law enforcement can only address a tiny fraction of these individuals.

A recent Guardian newspaper headline sounds impressive: “Police arresting 1,000 paedophile suspects a month across UK.” But the same article reveals the truth of failing policing. The artile qoutes the head of the UK National Crime Agency saying that the significant increase in every measure of CSA activity “really worries us.” Childlight (a child safety research organisation based at the University of Edinburgh) estimates there are over 1.8 million men in the UK who have admitted to perpetrating some form of sexual abuse of a child (under-18). Even if police successfully target the most dangerous individuals, this ratio — in the country with by far the biggest effort — is not much of a deterrent.

Combining in-person and Internet-mediated perpetration, and drawing on the available survey data from multiple countries, the total number of post-pubescent males who have sexually abused children globally runs into the tens of millions — in all likelihood over 100 million, (a full derivation is set out in Essay 2.1). I use this figure carefully because the methodological challenges are real: the available data comes from a small number of wealthy countries, the overlap between in-person and Internet-mediated perpetrators is unquantified, and self-report survey data carries well-known limitations in both directions. The global extrapolation carries real uncertainty; the structural reality does not. We are not dealing with hundreds of thousands of men. We are dealing with many tens of millions. And the number is growing.⁴

Multiple studies — using anonymous survey methodology to reduce social desirability effects — have found that a meaningful minority of males report either sexual attraction to children or a belief that they might act on such attraction if circumstances made it possible. The figures vary considerably across studies, reflecting different question designs and different definitions. The MiKADO study found 4.1% of German men reported sexual fantasies involving prepubescent children; broader anonymous surveys suggest higher figures when post-pubescent children and situational opportunity are included. The precise percentage matters less than what the data consistently shows: the population of men who might sexually abuse children under particular conditions is far larger than the population who do. Context and circumstance are the operative variables — which is precisely why systemic responses matter more than individual detection and punishment.

This does not mean they will. It means that context shapes behaviour. Change the context, and you change the behaviour.

Research consistently shows that three types of ordinary life change can push someone from potential to actual abusing:

In studies of men who sexually abuse children, about fifty per cent of those caught for in-person abuse were situational — they did not have a persistent pattern of sexual attraction to children but abused when circumstances aligned. We are not dealing only with a population with a clinical condition such as paedophilia or ephebophilia (persistent sexual attraction to post-pubescent children). We are dealing with a much larger population whose behaviour is shaped by context — by access, opportunity, perceived risk, and the cultural permissions and prohibitions that surround them. This is part of the reason why understanding systemic causation matters so much more than identifying and punishing individuals after the fact.

• • •

The severity problem

There is a problem in CSA discourse that makes the data situation worse, and it comes partly from advocates and researchers who care deeply about the issue but have inadvertently undermined the credibility of the numbers.

Not all CSA acts are equally severe. Violent penetrative rape of a young child is objectively more severe than a single incident of exposure. This is not to minimise any child’s experience — any act of CSA can be associated with sustained suffering depending on the child’s vulnerability and the reactions that follow. But by lumping all types together in prevalence estimates without differentiation, studies have equated less severe experiences with extremely dangerous ones. The result is inflated headline figures that might attract momentary interest but before long generating scepticism, defensiveness, and the exact kind of helplessness that clouds all thinking about CSA.

More severe acts are generally associated with greater pre-existing vulnerability. A child subjected to repeated penetrative abuse in the family is not experiencing a random event — the severity reflects the depth of their contextual vulnerability. Understanding this connection redirects our attention from acts to conditions. And those conditions are systemic, not individual.

We need data that differentiates not just how many children experience CSA, but what types, in what contexts, at what ages, details of the person who abused, and with which pre-existing vulnerability factors. This breakdowns exist in some studies but is absent from most public discourse, which prefers the simplicity of a single shocking number to the complexity of a nuanced picture. Nuance, as tedious as it can seem, is what strategies are built on. The numbers in this essay are deliberately conservative and specifically defined to avoid this trap.

• • •

A comfortable illusion: decreased abuse, increased abusing

There is a narrative in wealthy countries, particularly the United States, that CSA is declining. David Finkelhor, the most respected authority on CSA data, has concluded that child protection services data ‘probably reflect at least in part a real decline in sexual abuse.’⁶ He is likely correct — for in-person CSA against children resident in those countries. In-person CSA within the family environment appears to be falling in most wealthy nations, driven by declining absolute poverty, better adult-to-child ratios, increased awareness, changing patterns of child protection, and targeted interventions.

But there is a deeply uncomfortable fact embedded in this good news. It is possible — indeed probable — for the incidence of in-person CSA against local children to be falling while the rate of sexual abusing by that country’s males is rising. It simply means they are abusing children who live in other countries.

International travel has nearly tripled since 1995. Every organisation working on international CSA reports that within this rise, it is their opinion that rates of sexual abuse of children are climbing. Meanwhile, the Internet is erasing geography entirely for Internet-mediated abuse. Soon, if not already, males from certain smaller wealthy countries will sexually abuse more children in other countries than in their own.

This reality — that “our” children may be safer while “our” men abuse more children than ever — rarely surfaces in the data that shapes policy. Finkelhor’s analysis of declining abuse in the USA, for instance, refers only to children resident in the USA. It says nothing about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, of children in other countries being sexually abused by American post-pubescent males. The data architecture itself embeds a nationalism that makes this invisible. We count our children. We do not count what our men do to their children.

There is a pattern here that deserves to be named: the children of poor countries are counted differently in the moral arithmetic of wealthy ones. Their suffering appears in non-governmental organisation (NGO) fundraising campaigns and occasionally in feature journalism, but it is absent from the data systems that drive actual policy. This is not an oversight. It is a feature of how material power organises the world.

• • •

Why we don’t know what we need to know

Good CSA data would give us real insight — insight that could actually be trusted and acted on. It would dissolve ignorance, myths, and misunderstanding. It would reduce anxiety rather than inflate it. It would inform policies and practices, guide strategic thinking, and help monitor whether our responses are actually working. We do not have that data. Getting it is not a resource or methodological problem — researchers know how to do it, prevalence studies can be conducted, technology platforms can produce aggregate data, and intelligence services can analyse patterns at scale. The question is not capability. It is will.

The Catholic Church’s experience with CSA data is instructive — not because it is unique, but because sustained investigation has produced a large volume of data, but probably achieved no more than illuminating how much we do not know about every other setting. Take just two examples that had extensive funding and effort. The American John Jay College of Criminal Justice estimated in 2004 that approximately four per cent of diocesan priests and deacons in the USA were accused of CSA over fifty years. The French Catholic Church’s independent commission (CIASE) estimated in 2021 that between 2,900 and 3,200 personnel (c. 3% of all personnel) sexually abused children over a similar period, with, based on Church documentation, an estimated 216,000 children abused by clergy and religious, or 330,000 including lay Church workers.⁷

Even in an institution subjected to unprecedented scrutiny in at least twelve countries, we still do not have a definitive picture. Neither study accounted for Church personnel who worked in other countries — a massive omission for missionary-sending nations, exacerbated by the “bishops’ shuffle” where bishops, instead of facing their own problems, moved church personnel with allegations to other places, often abroad.

Both studies primarily focused on recorded allegations, a notorious underestimate. Partly for this reason and partly because there was no other such study ever done for France, the CIASE project undertook a national CSA prevalence analysis. This research found that 10.5 per cent of all French adults (c. 5.5 million people) reported that they experienced CSA. Of these, 201,000 said they were abused by Catholic Church personnel — a little less than four per cent of the national total. This would imply that the average church-personnel member who sexually abused children did so against 50 to 100 children. This number is probably quite common for the most prolific church personnel who sexually abused children, but unimaginable for it to be the average number. If this is the quality of data we have for one of the most investigated institutions on earth, imagine what we are missing everywhere else.

The family environment, where up to sixty per cent of all in-person CSA occurs, has been subjected less scrutiny. Society has found it far easier to focus condemnation on the Church than to examine what happens in homes. The institution was visible, containable, and already losing cultural power. Families are none of these things.

Six groups of actors could produce better data: governments, technology companies, specialist NGOs, international bodies, academia, and mass media. All express concern about CSA. Almost none can claim to be doing a good job of getting and sharing the facts. The reason, when you trace it carefully, leads back to the same place: the same forces that prioritise material accumulation and institutional self-protection over human wellbeing create conditions where avoidance of CSA truth becomes systemic, and where denying its scale becomes the first line of that avoidance.

Notice how this pattern — the institutional silence around CSA prevalence — follows the same logic as the child’s silence: avoidance enforced by shame, shame reinforced by power. A child who has been abused stays silent not from weakness alone, but because the conditions that created the abuse — the shame, the isolation, the poor capacity for trust — also destroy the conditions for disclosure. The child is silenced by the same forces that enabled the person who abused. What is true for the child is true for the institution. Governments do not count what they cannot face. Data systems do not measure what would demand a response. The personal and the political are not merely analogous here. They are the same mechanism, operating at a different scale. The same pattern of silence enforced by fear, anger and shame, repeats at every level from the individual to the institution and whole cultures.

Consider the United States — the country with the most public discourse around CSA, many NGOs and lobbying organisations, and a high level of emotional energy directed at the issue. America has no federal prevalence study. It has no serious strategic framework for addressing CSA. Authorities and leading academics are falling back on proxy data from police and social services. These proxies capture at most 20% of in-person cases, and the cases that come to attention are wildly unrepresentative. There is a dearth of information about Internet-mediated CSA; the Childlight research regarding the USA was initiated by a Scottish-based organisation. And there is nearly no information about international CSA. The US federal authorities responsible for catching people who sexually abuse children in-person in other countries secure only a handful of convictions each year — by most estimates, fewer than a few dozen.

If the MiKADO study — a German research project on sexual offending — estimated that 0.4 per cent of German men when travelling abroad sexually abusing children in-person in other countries were extrapolated to the US, that would suggest around 600,000 American men doing this.⁸ Even allowing for the fact that American men travel a lot less internationally than German ones, this is indicative of almost zero concern by US authorities about their men who go abroad to sexually abuse children — the vast majority involving penetrative rape.

The US government gives the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) — the biggest organisation of its kind in the world — about forty million dollars a year regarding CSA. NCMEC is an NGO dedicated to locating missing children and to tackling CSAM production and distribution. They have evolved to be the main clearing house for law enforcement worldwide by receiving reports of CSAM, analysing them and forwarding information to law enforcement agencies around the world. Their funding is roughly 0.005% of what the United States spent on its military in the same year. This is not a number that reflects a society taking CSA seriously. It is the minimum required to maintain the appearance of concern.

Has any Big Tech company attempted to calculate the total number of users engaging in CSA through their platforms? They have not published or acted on such data. They could. The technical capacity exists. But the knowledge would threaten profit, require action, and challenge the comfortable fiction that this is a problem of a few deviant individuals.

This is not a conspiracy. It is something more ordinary and therefore more entrenched: a system of priorities where material power — geopolitical advantage, technological supremacy, GDP growth, corporate profit, and the ideas that justify all of these — consistently outranks the protection of children. Not through conscious malice, but through the relentless logic of what gets measured, what gets funded, and what gets avoided.

I should acknowledge a genuine tension here. The anonymity technologies that facilitate child sexual abuse — including TOR and end-to-end encryption — also protect dissidents, journalists, and persecuted minorities. Encryption massively increases privacy. Weakening these technologies carries real human rights costs. I do not dismiss these costs. But the current balance of priorities, where privacy concerns routinely override child protection with minimal debate, reveals something about whose suffering counts in the figuring out of policy. The question is not whether privacy matters — it does — but whether the protection of children can be weighed against it honestly, rather than being treated as an automatic subordinate.

• • •

Making the invisible visable

I think about this often in relation to my own experience. I was raped and almost killed when I was three years old. Nobody counted what happened to me. It did not appear in any dataset, any prevalence study, any police record. For decades, the only data point was the fear in my body — a record written in neurobiology rather than numbers, legible only to me and only partially. Sadly, felt by others close to me too. When I finally began to understand what had happened and why, it was not data that led me there. It was the slow, painful work of facing truth in a body that had been organised around avoiding it.

But data matters enormously for the collective response. Without it, we are navigating blindly. Without it, we cannot tell whether our efforts are working or merely displacing the problem. Without it, every opinion carries equal weight, and the loudest voices — the most emotional, the most politically convenient, and the most dedicated to suppressing discourse about CSA — dominate. We need the discipline of numbers to anchor our responses in reality rather than reaction.

If you are an insider — someone who experienced CSA — these numbers may feel simultaneously validating and overwhelming. Validating because they confirm what you already know viscerally: that this is not rare, not a personal misfortune, not something that happened because of who you are. It happened because of how the world is organised. Overwhelming because the scale can make your individual experience feel like a drop in an ocean of suffering. It is not. Your experience matters. And the fact that it is shared by hundreds of millions of people is not a diminishment — it is a measure of the systemic failure that created the conditions for your suffering.

If you are someone who has sexually abused a child, or who is afraid of what you might do, these numbers say something important to you too. You are not, as the data makes clear, the rare deviant that public discourse imagines. The conditions that shaped your desires were created by forces larger than you. That does not remove your responsibility — it does not. But it does mean that understanding those forces, and seeking help before acting or acting again, is a real possibility rather than a fantasy. The data in this essay points toward something the later essays explore directly: that context shapes behaviour, and context can be changed. That begins with you choosing to seek help, which takes more courage than most people will ever need.

If you are a family member, partner, or friend, these numbers should recalibrate something. 4% of all children — one in every twenty-five — experiencing severe in-person CSA before fifteen. The total including less severe forms and Internet-mediated abuse is far higher. In any school classroom, any sports team, any friendship group, there are children who are being abused right now or who have been.

If you are sitting with that image — one child in every classroom — and not quite knowing what to do with it, that is the right response. What you do with it is what the rest of this series moves towards.

Your awareness matters. Your willingness to see, to not look away, to understand the scale of what you’re facing — this is the first step toward responding effectively.

If you are a professional or policymaker, these numbers demand something specific: demand good data. Fund good quality prevalence research. Require technology platforms to produce aggregate statistics. Build data systems that track trends rather than just recording individual cases. And critically, build data systems that are honest about the global picture — that count what your country’s males do to children everywhere, not just what happens to children within your borders.

Three things, specifically. Fund a national prevalence study — not a proxy derived from police records, but a properly designed population study that captures what is actually happening. Require technology platforms to publish annual aggregate data on CSA activity through their systems. And build data systems that track international perpetration, not just domestic victimisation — that count what your country’s males do to children in other countries, not only what happens to children within your borders. These are not expensive asks relative to the scale of the problem. They are the minimum required for honest governance.

Data is not neutral. The presence or absence of data is itself a form of power. When we do not count something, we render it invisible. When we render it invisible, we do not have to respond to it. The absence of good CSA data is not a failure of resources or methodology. It is a successful exercise of power by those who benefit from the absence of truth.

To fight an invisible foe, make it visible

• • •

Next week: we go inside. What does it actually feel like to live with the legacy of child sexual abuse? The Unholy Trinity of Fear, Anger, and Shame shapes every dimension of an insider’s life. If you think you understand CSA because you know the numbers, what follows will show you what the numbers cannot.

• • •

Notes

[1] There are approximately 2 billion children under-15 alive today. A conservative estimate of 4% prevalence for penetrative or attempted penetrative CSA by someone at least five years older is derived from extensive analysis of available studies. Childlight’s 2025 Into the Light Index found approximately 1 in 15 children (6.7%) in Western Europe and 1 in 8 (12.5%) in South Asia experienced rape or sexual assault before age 18 — broader in both age definition and act definition than the 4% figure used here. Full methodology is set out in Essay 2.1.

[2] The Childlight Into the Light Index (2024–25) found that in three countries with near-total Internet access, the following proportions of adult males admitted to some form of online sexual offending against children: US 10.9%, UK 7.0%, Australia 7.5%. These are the source figures for the seven-to-eleven per cent range cited in the text. The MiKADO project (Dombert et al., 2016, Journal of Sex Research) reported 2.4% lifetime CSAM use prevalence among German men (children defined as under-13). The lower German figure likely reflects both the narrower definition of children used and the earlier survey date. Full extrapolation methodology, including the basis for the global estimate, is in Essay 2.1.

[3] Nurmi J. et al. (2024), “Investigating child sexual abuse material availability, searches, and users on the anonymous Tor network for a public health intervention strategy,” Scientific Reports. All figures confirmed: 176,683 domains analysed (2018–2023); one-fifth sharing CSAM; 110,133,715 search sessions; 11.1% seeking CSAM; 40.5% of age-specified searches targeting age 11 and under. Additionally: 65.3% of CSAM users first encountered the material when they were children themselves; 48% said they wanted to stop. TOR has historically received significant funding from US government agencies including the State Department and Department of Defense.

[4] Full derivation in Essay 2.1. The estimate draws on Childlight perpetration-rate data from the US, UK, and Australia applied to the global male population aged 15+ with Internet access, combined with in-person perpetration estimates from multiple country studies. The overlap between those who abuse in person and those who abuse online is unquantified in the available research, which is the primary source of uncertainty in the combined figure. The direction — many tens of millions, in all likelihood over 100 million — is not seriously in doubt. The precision awaits better data.

[5] The MiKADO study found 4.1% of German men reported sexual fantasies involving prepubescent children. Broader anonymous surveys — including Briere & Runtz (1989), Seto (2008), and more recent online studies — find higher figures when post-pubescent children and situational opportunity questions are included. The variation across studies reflects genuine differences in what is being measured rather than methodological error: attraction, fantasy, and stated conditional intent are different things. All converge on the same structural point: the at-risk population is much larger than the population who actually abuse children, making context and opportunity the decisive variables.

[6] Finkelhor & Jones have published extensively on this trend since 2001. Their most recent update (2023) shows substantiated sexual abuse cases in the US declined from approximately 150,000 in 1992 to around 58,000 by 2021 — a roughly 60% decline. Multiple data sources — Child Protective Services (CPS), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) — show corroborating declines. Finkelhor notes these are primarily based on US-resident children and caregiver-perpetrated abuse.

[7] John Jay College (2004): 4,392 priests accused out of approximately 109,694 active during 1950–2002, equating to approximately 4%. CIASE (2021): estimated 216,000 children abused by clergy and religious 1950–2020; 330,000 including all Church workers. Both studies confirmed approximately 80% of victims were male, consistent with institutional abuse patterns. The 330,000 figure was challenged by eight members of the Académie catholique de France; CIASE issued a detailed 53-page rebuttal.

[8] The 0.4% MiKADO figure and the US extrapolation involve multiple assumptions: that German perpetration-abroad rates are comparable to American ones, that international travel patterns are analogous, and that the MiKADO methodology translates to US populations. The resulting 600,000 figure is illustrative rather than evidence-based. The underlying point — that the gap between this indicative number and a handful of convictions per year reveals a catastrophic enforcement gap — is difficult to dispute.

Noli Timere: Understanding Child Sexual Abuse

Making sense of child sexual abuse — its real scale, its systemic causes, and the path toward meaningful response. Be not afraid.

By Donnacadh Hurley

This is the first essay in the NOLI TIMERE series. It introduces the author, the quest, and the invitation. It connects to the Conceptual Framework page.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett

You may remember the story of the princess and the pea—the girl so sensitive that she could feel a single pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. It kept her awake all night. Only a “real” princess would be so delicate.

I have lived with a pea beneath my mattresses for over sixty years. But my pea is not delicacy. It is truth—truth I could not face, buried beneath layers of forgetting, denial, achievement, busyness, and carefully constructed normality. The mattresses are my many efforts to avoid thinking about this truth. Like the princess, I could not rest. Something was always wrong. Something kept me awake, kept me clenched, kept me from ever feeling truly safe.

The pea was child sexual abuse (CSA). The world around me could not face the truth about this, any more than I could. It happened to me as a very young child, and I spent most of my life not remembering it. When I finally realised what had happened to me—in my fifties, after decades of symptoms I couldn’t explain—I set out on a personal journey to understand it.

I am writing this essay and launching this Substack because of the ten years I have spent trying to understand child sexual abuse—not just what happened to me, but why it happens at all, why there is so much suffering connected to it, and why humanity seems unable or unwilling to face it clearly. I developed a comprehensive framework for understanding it. I drafted a book about the subject, from the perspective of a social scientist. And then I received feedback that made me realise that before anyone reads an analysis of this problem at a global scale, they need to know who is speaking and why.

So here I am. Terrified. Putting my head above the parapet for the first time.

The questions that wouldn’t leave me alone

My quest for understanding was propelled by discomfort and curiosity. I was always a “why” person, and being uncomfortable and feeling anxious drove me to dig deeper.

Why do acts of CSA happen? What is the relationship between these acts and suffering? My efforts to answer these questions led me somewhere I didn’t expect. There is no simple causal connection. We cannot isolate cause and effect in a linear fashion. There is an ocean of suffering associated with CSA. The question became: Why is there so much suffering? Then: Where does it truly come from?

When I searched for reliable data and understanding, I found it unsatisfying. The research was patchy and of varying quality. The thinking was often superficial. And then it dawned on me: most of the researchers and commentators were avoiding the truth.

There are two reasons for this avoidance. First, emotional: people feel so uncomfortable thinking about CSA that they shut down. From friends turning their backs to the highest levels of academia, people turn away. Second, practical: when you start really asking “why?” you end up questioning how we organise our societies, our economies, and our families. You end up implicating systems that benefit powerful people. Jeffrey Epstein and the deeply prejudiced behaviour of those associated with him is but a glimpse into the utterly disrespectful mindset of powerful people. Imagine their reaction to a request to do things that might reduce child sexual abuse.

No wonder we prefer to focus on “monsters” and “predators”—on individual evil that can be punished and contained. It’s so much more comfortable than facing systemic truth.

Who I am

I need to tell you something about myself, and I find this difficult.

I was violently raped as a very young child. I clinically died and was somehow resuscitated. It was never addressed. I grew up in a shaming, put-down environment where I learned that nothing good could happen to someone like me.

I have a photograph of myself taken a few months before the first rape. I am a happy, chubby-cheeked, bright-eyed, nearly three-year-old boy. All the subsequent pictures of my face are different.

Me at nearly three. A few months before everything changed.

I am 67 today, the launch day of my Substack. This is the 64th anniversary of my first rape. Every year in between, I have experienced an immensely stressful, fear-soaked few weeks in the lead-up to my birthday. I hope to slay this dragon.

I consider myself an insider. This is the term I use to refer to people who know CSA from the inside. I am unusual in that very few insiders, who experience my severity of abuse, live as long as I have. I survived. I appeared, to most people, to be functioning. But I was not resting. The pea was always there.

As I approached my fifties, I could no longer hold everything together. At the time, I managed a youth work organisation. For my 50th birthday, I insisted that the staff not hold any celebration. However, they arranged a surprise event. That anyone could surprise me so completely was terrifying in itself. I had spent decades being hypervigilant, constantly scanning for danger. Then, during the celebration, my friend Maria addressed the assembled group. She required me to stand beside her as she read a long speech praising me and my achievements.

My face smiled. My inner voice went into defensive-aggressive overdrive: What complete lack of understanding they have. If they knew how unworthy I really feel...

Nothing good could happen to someone like me. This was still my core belief, decades after the abuse, despite everything I had accomplished.

I made it through the birthday party, gritting my teeth, but I left as quickly as I could and collapsed as soon as I got home. That event marked the beginning of a process that eventually led me to retire from full-time employment and begin the work that has consumed the past ten years. Shame saturates the reality of most of us who experienced severe CSA as children. It makes us question why we continue.

Why I’m afraid to do this

I have spent ten years researching and drafting a comprehensive book about child sexual abuse. Three hundred pages. A complete theoretical framework. Sixteen chapters. I interviewed dozens of people. I read hundreds of academic papers. I developed concepts and models that I believe genuinely advance understanding.

And I have been hiding behind that book.

Writing a “great work” that might never be published is safe. It exists in potential, where it cannot be criticised, cannot disappoint. A Substack is different. It is weekly. It is exposed. It might reach many people, or only a handful. The size of my audience is not what frightens me. What frightens me is the exposure itself — the possibility that truth, once stated plainly might not bring the psychological relief that I hope for. But perhaps I need to see this as a process that will bring more acceptance of who I am and better connections to the people I care about?

That scares me. Most of us who experienced severe child sexual abuse as children and didn’t get the help we needed have survived by hiding from reality. Dissociation protected me. Exposing myself could reveal the shameful truth that I am not a good boy.

But I have come to understand that the fantasy of the great book has been another mattress. Another layer between me and reality. Another form of avoidance.

One of the central insights of my work is that avoidance of truth causes suffering — not just for individuals, but for humanity as a whole. The same mechanisms that kept me silent for over sixty years operate at a collective scale. This is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism I trace throughout this series: the way that not facing truth creates the conditions for suffering to perpetuate itself.

If I believe that, I have to act on it. So here I am.

What I found

I cannot summarise ten years of work in a few paragraphs. But I can share where my quest led me.

I came to understand that child sexual abuse is not an aberration. It is not a matter of individual “monsters” who are inexplicably different from the rest of us. It is a predictable outcome of how we organise our societies. The same forces that create economic inequality, stress families, and isolate people create the conditions in which children become vulnerable. Some people develop the capacity to exploit that vulnerability.

I have come to understand that the acts themselves do not cause suffering in a linear, straightforward way. Two children can experience similar abuse and have vastly different outcomes—not because one is stronger, but because of how people around them react. Suffering is shaped by reactions at every level: family, community, institutional, and cultural. Most reactions are inadequate, because the same conditions that created vulnerability also undermine our capacity to respond well. And the suffering flows forward: into the next generation’s parenting, into the culture, into the conditions that make the next child vulnerable. This is a self-perpetuating pattern through which suffering in one generation creates conditions for abuse and suffering in the next. I call this the Cycle of Abuse and Suffering (CAS). I examine this critical dimension in Essay 8.

Fear is at the heart of it all. Fear, anger, and shame — the Unholy Trinity — operate similarly in individuals and in humanity as a whole. What I experienced in my body, I can see reflected in our culture. The personal and the systemic mirror each other.

Drawing on prevalence studies across dozens of countries, I calculate that roughly four hundred million people alive today have or will have experienced severe sexual abuse — rape or attempted rape — before their fifteenth birthday. That is about 5% of all people alive today. On average, ten children experience this for the first time every minute. The evidence base and methodology behind these figures is set out in Essay 2 and in detail in Essay 2.1 (fortcoming).

No wonder we look away.

However, once we understand causation, we can face it and change it. We do not have to wait for macro conditions to shift. At every level—from those who know CSA from the inside to those with power and influence—there is something we can do. All of it requires not unthinking, habitual reactions, but insight and understanding.

An invitation

The pea is there, beneath all the mattresses we have piled on top of it. We can feel it. We cannot rest.

We have two choices. We can keep adding mattresses—more distraction, more denial, more focus on individual monsters rather than systemic conditions, more treatment of symptoms rather than causes.

Or we can lift the mattresses. We can face what lies beneath. We can feel the terror and move through it. We can transform displaced anger into purposeful action. We can dissolve shame by speaking truth.

I am lifting my mattresses. I am terrified. I am doing it anyway.

I invite you to join me.

What to expect in this Substack

I will write about child sexual abuse—what it is, why I think it happens, and what can be done. I will share frameworks that illuminate the problem in new ways. I will write about fear, anger, and shame. I will write about what good responses look like and why they’re still failing.

I will also write about my own experience—not as self-indulgence, but because what I discovered about myself reveals something about humanity. The personal and the systemic are not separate. Light on one sheds light on the other.

In coming weeks I’ll explore the real numbers, what suffering actually looks like, what really causes CSA, why some children are more vulnerable, who the people who abuse actually are, what reactions reveal, the broader Cycle of Abuse and Suffering, and what we can all do about it.

I expect to publish weekly. I expect it to be imperfect. I expect to be afraid every time I press “publish.” Comments are encouraged if genuinely trying to contribute to understanding. If I’m wrong, I’ll learn and adjust.

• • •

Next Essay: the numbers we prefer not to know. How many children are being sexually abused right now, what we actually know about the scale of CSA, and — most importantly — why we have collectively chosen not to find out.

Something is wrong with the way the world understands child sexual abuse.

Not wrong in small ways that careful adjustment might fix. Wrong in ways that are fundamental — in the questions being asked, the frameworks being used, and the silences being maintained. Wrong in ways that leave hundreds of millions of people without adequate understanding of what happened to them, and why.

I am Donnacadh Hurley. I grew up in Finglas, north Dublin. I am an economist, a researcher, and a former community development worker who spent nearly two decades in Ballymun. I also experienced severe child sexual abuse.

I came to this subject as an insider and stayed with it because I could not find an existing analysis that satisfied me. Ten years of independent research later, I believe I have something worth saying — and this is where I am saying it.

What this publication is

Noli Timere — Latin for Be Not Afraid — is a series of essays on child sexual abuse: its real scale, its systemic causes, and what a meaningful response would actually look like.

The central argument runs against the grain of most existing thinking. Child sexual abuse is not primarily a product of individual deviance meeting bad luck. It is a predictable social outcome — generated by economic, institutional, and cultural forces that create the conditions in which abuse becomes statistically probable and suffering reliably follows.

I estimate that approximately 400 million of the 8.1 billion people alive today have experienced, or will experience, severe sexual abuse before their fifteenth birthday. That figure is almost certainly an undercount.

This is not a comfortable argument. But it is, I believe, a true one — and a necessary one.

What is coming

Starting this week, I will publish nine essays, one per week. Together they build a complete framework for understanding child sexual abuse — from its scale and causes, through its consequences, to what genuine response requires.

The writing is accessible. The analysis is rigorous. The invitation is open — to survivors, to professionals, to policy makers, to anyone who has ever asked why this keeps happening and received an answer that did not satisfy them.

You are in the right place.

Donnacadh Hurley March 2026