A good point cabbage.

You need to also remember that the terms 'paeodiphile', 'child sex offender', 'molesterer' and 'rapist' are ALL different crimes that may or may not overlap each other in any one case.

The media are having a field day with the latest canningvale news, to the point where everyone is led to believe that the world is a dark and evil place at the moment. On the same day of this unfortunate case, tens of thousands of innocent young children used public toilets unaccompanied by a responsible adult... and no harm came to them. Unfortunately this particular little girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We are led to believe that these crimes are 'on the increase' when in actual fact they are more likely to be on the decrease over time. This is due to increasing ammendments of laws etc. In the 'old days' people didn't come out and talk about what happened to them as a child, the more recent accessability of social service groups whithin the comunity and encouragement 'to talk' has brought forward many more claims of sexual abuse in recent times... this does not necessarily equate to an 'increase', it just means it has become more socially acceptable to 'speak out'... which leads to law enforcement being able to act more regularly! Therefore, more likely resulting in a growing decrease etc.

It may also pay to note that in most cases of sexual abuse, the perpetrator is a family member or friend... not some undetected predator simply 'biding his time', such is the case of the recent tradgedy.

To act on our emotions, as the media would have us do each time an event takes place with this magnitude is not to function as an educated, 'reasoning' society. Remember, it was also the media who gave out the address of the perpetrator's family home which was consequently severly damaged by enraged members of the community that decided to take the law into their own hands the very next day. The perpetrator wasn't residing there, he was in lock up. Didn't this family that had committed no crime have the right to feel safe just as much as the deceased little girl did to go to the toilet in public? The family of the deceased girl seemed to think so, and made a public plea to stop such further actions toward the perpetrator's family!! Such control of our thoughts the media seems to have eh??

Always pays to remember that the reasoning mass of our brain takes up 2 hemispheres that together, are about the size of a small basketball. The insitinctual part of our brains, that cave-men were believed to have functioned on (fight or flight etc), is the size of an almond. Food for thought.