Imputations of evil reveal more about the accusers than the accused, and, like other ogres in the cultural past, child abusers throw into relief the deepest anxiety of our time: the way we have reified children as objects of desire across the whole spectrum of material culture. They 'love children', in some ghastly masquerade of the way so much of the rest of society also 'loves children': by stimulating their desires, by exploiting their vulnerability and suggestibility, by finding them irresistibly cute, by staging, in any number of advertisements, films and infant beauty pageants, the performance of their seduction. Yet, at the same time, material measures taken to improve children's lives - their play, their care, their education, their health, their nutrition, their prospects - remain paper promises, often made to kindle a warm moral glow for the speaker. Politicians no longer simply kiss babies; they drag them round with them when they canvass, as mascots of their own virtuousness.

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