I don't understand your point, Guest.

You say that being sexually abused as a child doesn't lead to becoming an abuser yourself (yes, I completely agree). But then you say all child abusers were abused as children. ??? So the abuse was a trigger setting off some latent aberrent abuser gene or something?

Then you say it's a learned behaviour. Learned from whom?... the abuser who initiated them into the wonderful world of child abuse? Or was it leaned from seeing an example of kiddy porn somewhere? So, like I said, you would consider it some sort of contagion, either from having experienced it or seeing a picture of it?

Either way, you can bet the mob-rule public will grab a hold of the wrong end of the stick the "profilers" and "experts" hand them and start looking for likely abusers "in our midst".

In which case, people who were abused as children better not tell anybody about it or else be looked on with suspicion as some sort of child abuse "time bomb" looking for its opportunity to go off later. Same goes for those people who might have seen a picture of a child naked at some time... bear-skin rug or baby-bath photos, anyone? Where is the line drawn?

And if you think I'm being facetious, think about how there are a lot of people willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak), to be on the safe side where our children's safety is concerned. Catspaw expressed some very valid concerns above. People are ready to throw out all hard-won freedoms and civil rights when issues like this come up.

Look at how some people in this thread have already judged the Townshend incident as "suspicious" without knowing all the facts. Guilt by suspicion. He'll never live it down.