We each have regrets about our childhoods: choices missed, friendships lost, social skills learned too late, piano not practised, inspirations not followed. There were parents and teachers who never saw our potential or our pain. Maybe there were kids we bullied or kids whose bullying we tacitly endorsed because we couldn't see the context.

Some people have profound regrets. Their lives as children lacked something more fundamental: someone who cared, someone who could have chosen not to hurt them but who went ahead anyway, someone who abused them and who blighted their life from that day on, some condition they didn't choose which placed them on the outside. All needless suffering is bad, but suffering inflicted in childhood—before we have the tools and resilience to cope with it—is hugely destructive. Over the last four decades or so—the course of my life—we have seen an ever-growing awareness of the effects of childhood abuse and, in particular, awareness has raised significantly about the effects of sexual abuse. The world is outraged about it in a way it was not in the sixties, and that is a good thing. We are more aware than ever that it happened and that it goes on happening, and we want to stop it. The need to fight child sexual abuse is an issue that crosses political divisions. Conservatives and liberals, heterosexual and LGBT+ folk, millennials, boomers and Generation Xers like me are united against those that traffick, enslave, abuse or sexually objectify children. Or, to put it in the everyday language we hear around us, everyone hates pedophiles. Why? Because they are seen as the root of all this. For this reason, they remain the most universally hated group of people that most people can think of.