Our great, societal Neverland: responsibility for pedophilia, both individual and collective.

EVERY age has its favorite crime, the crime it loves to hate and that sends a delightful shiver of disgust down its spine. Once it was the white slave trade; now it is pedophilia. That is why the Michael Jackson case will capture the attention of the whole world, while matters of much greater intrinsic moment are neglected. Here is where celebrity culture will meet moral indignation: Could the viewer at home ask for anything more?

Every man is innocent until proven guilty, of course, but if the O. J. Simpson trial is anything to go by, proof will have very little to do with Jackson's trial. It will be more a battle of prejudices than an inquiry into what actually happened; and the lawyer who appeals more successfully to the emotions of the jurors will win. The majesty of the law will bow to the necessity for the show to go on.

No one who so much as glances at a photograph of Michael Jackson could doubt that he is a very peculiar person. The plastic surgeons have done to his face what syphilis and arteriosclerosis did to another icon of his age, Lenin. Jackson is a man who believes (and has been led by flatterers and sycophants to believe) that fame and fortune render his whim sovereign over nature, social convention, and perhaps even the law. If one's appearance and race are matters of choice, to be altered at will, why should sexual conduct not also be a matter of choice? To the shallow egotist, the world is an existential supermarket, where the consumer is king and the fulfillment of whim is the sole purpose of life.

This doesn't by itself make Jackson guilty, of course: the evidence must be heard and weighed. But a world in which individual choice is valued very much higher than obedience to social convention should not be very surprised when the law is flouted. Nevertheless, we should keep a sense of proportion, and remember that pedophilia is not one thing and one thing alone. It ranges from the pathetic and the relatively trivial to the truly terrible.

At the age of about eight, for example, I myself was the "victim" of a pedophile. He was a dirty old man in a public park where I used to play; he asked me and my friends to masturbate him (not that we knew the word, or even what kind of pleasure he derived from his strange request). I told my mother what had happened, much as I would have told her about anything else unusual that had happened, and she called the police. My main recollection of the event was my extreme pride when a policeman came with his notebook, and stood at the end of my bed before I went to sleep, writing down what I said. I had never been so important before, and certainly have never felt so important since. I don't think the episode ruined my life.

I meet a number of pedophiles in the prison in which I work. Some of them are of subnormal intelligence, who might once have been cared for in institutions but who now, in the name of individual autonomy, are expected to make their way in the world more or less on their own. Their sexual approaches to children are usually fumbling and tentative, though persistent. I recall one in particular who was deaf and dumb into the bargain, cut off from almost all human companionship: and it is surely reasonable to ask what kind of society would allow such a person to fend for himself.

At the other end of the scale, I have encountered sexual crime so appalling that if I had not seen evidence of it with my own eyes, I should have regarded all reports of it as mere hysteria. For example, the police once brought me videotapes of a couple who sexually tortured their own daughters for years on end, suspending them naked by pulleys from the ceiling and raping them repeatedly. They did this both for pleasure and profit, selling the recordings of their activities down the Internet at very high prices. I have also met East Europeans imprisoned for smuggling underage girls from impoverished countries such as Moldavia into Britain, for use as child prostitutes. Whether the demand creates the supply, or the supply the demand, is a complex question. I suspect that the appetite grows with the feeding.

Most of the pedophiles I meet fall somewhere between the two extremes I have described. I do not think they are ill, and there is little evidence that they can be "helped" to overcome their problem. I recall what one sensible psychiatrist said in the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer: He was not responsible for his bizarre sexual orientation, but he was responsible for acting upon it.

When it comes to child sexuality, our society is Janus-faced, to put it mildly. In the first place, the age of consent has been more or less abolished: No one takes it very seriously anymore. And when I meet a man in prison who has been convicted of having had sexual relations with an underage girl, he almost invariably tells me that the girl told her parents or the police only when he decided to break the relationship off. In other words, the complaint was a matter of revenge, not of outraged morals.

Such convictions are very rare by comparison with the number of offenses that are actually committed, which are numerous. Parents frequently connive at what is, in fact, sexual crime, by allowing their children to have sexual relations before the age of consent. Moreover, doctors, at least in Britain, are actually enjoined as a matter of professional ethics not to tell parents when they prescribe contraceptives to their underage daughters. In other words, the medical profession is not merely permitted, but required, to cooperate in what the law regards as sexual crime.

You have only to look in the magazines aimed at eleven- and twelve-year-old girls to see how strongly the sexualization of life is being promoted in our society. (In part, of course, our difficulties come about because physical, though not mental or emotional, maturity occurs ever earlier, by about one year per decade). Furthermore, the very idea of normality is undergoing ideological attack in sexual pedagogy: The idea is promoted that sexual conduct is a matter of individual choice, like religious belief, and t h a t none can be deemed superior to any other.

So why, in societies such as ours which are so unclear and equivocal as to sexual boundaries, does pedophilia cause such outrage? For example, a 73-year-old man in Britain, with a history of relatively minor offenses, has just been brutally beaten to death after many months of persecution by neighbors and townspeople.

Almost certainly, the perpetrators of the murderous attack, and the persecutors of the old man, are the kind of people to have children in the very circumstances in which sexual abuse is most likely to take place. It is a fair bet that they themselves will have been born out of wedlock, and that their children will be born out of wedlock (as 40 percent of children in Britain now are). In the town in which the man was beaten to death, serial step-fatherhood is probably the only kind of fatherhood that is now known. And stepfathers are many times more likely to commit sexual abuse than biological fathers.

Besides, half of the much-reduced number of marriages now end in divorce. Many of the children of these marriages are also subjected to step-fatherhood, with its attendant risks. And in the social milieu in which pedophiles are so reviled, it is commonly the case that mothers will heartlessly and ruthlessly disembarrass themselves of their own children if their new boyfriend objects to their presence in the household. Their sex life is more important to them than the welfare of their own children. Could there be worse indifference to children than this?

In other words, having created the social circumstances in which the sexual abuse of children is most likely to occur, we turn on pedophiles as convenient scapegoats. We don't want to forego our freedoms, even if their exercise is responsible for the morass in which we now find ourselves: We prefer to blame a small and identifiable group of miscreants, drowning out our awareness of our own, larger guilt and responsibility by the strident denunciation of others.

Whether he be innocent or guilty, the trial of Michael Jackson is a natural consequence of a society that draws no boundaries but is hypocritically horrified by results that any reasonably intelligent person might have foretold. He who says single parenthood and easy divorce says child sexual abuse. There is nothing new under the sun, of course: Every kind of sin that we commit, our forefathers committed. The question is whether we have more or less excuse than they, and I say that we have less.

Dr. Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.