There is (I presume) an enormous amount of illicit sexual urges around. People, many of whom we would not necessarily think of as monsters, are endlessly fantasizing about people who they simply aren't going to have sex with - colleagues, friend's wives, people of the same sex who are decidedly hetero, people they saw on the bus, models, TV stars, porn stars etc. These fantasies hardly ever (as a proportion of fantasies engaged in) spill over into rape. There must also (I suspect) be a huge number of people who have at some stage entertained the idea of sex with siblings, animals and indeed children without ever actually doing it.
Equally, there are plenty of people who live their entire lives sexually fixated on one particular person they can't have, or on people of the same sex when they simply aren't going to have sexual relations with them for religious/moral or legal reasons.
Sexual abstinence is not particularly abnormal, and not acting on desires that we know to be inappropriate is very, very common. We all do it.
I think what I certainly don't really understand is what happens between someone looking at very young children and feeling sexual desire for those children and them actually doing something about it. What proportion of the people who look at a three year old and want to have sexual contact with one get anywhere near that point? Perhaps it is impossible to know. If the proportion is actually rather low (if most people with such urges never have sex with a child), then it doesn't seem much of a reach to say that the widespread public hysteria over this issue is deeply unhelpful to preventing it happening. It may be that the absolutely, positively best thing that could happen would be that most of those people who realised they had sexual urges towards children felt tolerably confident about walking into a doctor's surgery and explaining that they had this difficulty, knew it was problematic and wanted help with arranging their heads so that they never did what they sometimes thought about doing.
I rather doubt that many of them do this at present, though I don't know. Presumably, while you can't "cure" a paedophile anymore than you can "cure" a homosexual you can help them not to act on what they fantasize about, and thereby reduce the actual risk that they pose to anyone to an acceptably low level. Most of us have never raped an adult woman afterall, although many of us are big, strong and want people who aren't interested in us. We just have our heads adjusted so that we understand that there are lines you do not cross.
People, afterall, are not fundamentally defined by their sexuality. The fact that someone has sexual desires for children need not make them a monster, as long as those desires are never acted upon. Polanski is a case in point. If he was a brilliant film director who had never raped a teenager we would have no problem with him at all, although we might not want to see inside his head some days. Likewise, there are certainly plenty of catholic priests who are homosexuals and have never, ever felt up a choirboy. They are far more than the sexual urges that they restrain and keep in check.
Don't know. 
) by child abuse but then would happily kill the perpetrator. So unlawful killing is OK but child abuse isn't. Hmmmm....
why???
