Some have gone missing and we, the public, are asked to tell on them. The paper wants a new law named after Sarah which, like a similar American law, would give people the right to know if paedophiles were living in their communities. We are asked this pernicious question: “Would you want to be told if a predatory paedophile lived next door to you? If you say yes, you back Sarah’s Law. If you say No then you are a LIAR.”We are also given “reliable” league tables of places with the fewest child sex offenders. House prices will soar in those areas as we speak: the City of London, since you will be wondering, and Oswestry, Berwick-upon-Tweed Ealing is bad, but not as bad as Barnet and Croydon. So the bald man in the red car has 649 potential friends in my borough, how will I sleep tonight? And what do I feel about this campaign, especially now that John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, says that it is a thoroughly good thing and as useful as Crimewatch, and that Carol Vorderman, Chris Tarrant, and other celebrities have blessed it? I am uneasy about it. Something about it is mucky.I believe that child sex abusers don’t get long enough sentences, that they are supervised poorly, that they should be tagged and forced to undergo therapy.

All such offenders, once they have done time, should be sent to a distant commune – maybe made castaways – where they can live in peace and love with each other with good facilities but high walls and security, until they are too old to harm any child. All of this would be better than the witch-hunts the NoW advocates, because those only help society to deny the depth and extent of the problem of child sex abuse and because it makes beasts of us all.Supposing the newspaper emerges victorious and Sarah’s Law is passed. Will that deal with the true extent of sexual brutality against children by perpetrators who are not strangers in white vans? These unknown violent men hit the headlines and our innermost fears and fantasies, while fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles and cousins who are abusing children in their own families can carry on without this level of hostility and condemnation from society.The domestic nature of these crimes gives them a strange protection because children are still seen as possessions of their parents, who can do with them what they wish. Watching the mobs on television last year I often wondered how many of those people were abusing their own children A vile thought, but not wholly unreasonable. Hard-core images on the internet apparently show dozens of men abusing their own infants, sometimes with the help of the mothers.The kind of men who want to rape children, must be constantly aroused and tempted by the sexualised images of children all around them. Why should they not think that children want to have these thing done to them when the clothes, songs and even books for children are so grotesquely adult? It is now considered brave when television channels make spoofs about child sex abuse.Then there is that incredibly difficult question of whether these men are sick or evil or so devilishly voracious and clever that we must apply different standards to judge them.

Eddie Mair interviewed a child sex offender on Radio 4 on Sunday morning.The man was gentle when he talked, persuasive in his arguments that men like him would not offend and reoffend if they could get human sympathy, relationships with their neighbours and some chance to learn to be better.One part of me hated and mistrusted him and wanted to put him away with the rest in the windswept commune; the other thought that I had to try to believe that some of these men could be made to see the light. Neither of these solutions would be possible if we had panicky crowds of parents using Sarah’s Law to hound abusers and make them hate human beings even more than they do already.y.alibhai-brown independent.co.uk
More from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. In Washington, everyone is talking about “O” Day: the day, hoped to be imminent, when Osama bin Laden is killed or captured (preferably killed) But “O” Day will only be the end of the beginning. It will not be a signal for relaxation; it will merely enable the Americans to redeploy commitment and concentration to the next phase of the war against terror and terror-sponsoring states, with Iraq as the principal target. During a recent trip to Washington, I was often asked about British public and parliamentary opinion. I told my questioners that public opinion would be uneasy, partly because the liberal left had succeeded in depicting George Bush as a dunce president controlled by hawks and cold war warriors. The UK would be much more apprehensive about an attack on Iraq than the US was.As for Parliament, the Tories would support the American line while the Liberals opposed it outright In the Labour Party there would be dismay.