Supply and demand

We live in a commercialized world where many people know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Everything can be bought for a price. The ugliest example of this thinking is in those people who treat children as commodities to be bought or sold.

Those of us concerned at the growth of commercial child sex have usually just concentrated on the victims and tried to help rehabilitate the abused children. But this is just one half of the problem. We must look more seriously at the supply side – the demand for children coming from abusers. Somehow we have to change the behaviour of those men, who see nothing wrong in having sex with a child or enjoy watching a child being sexually abused on the internet.

In the commercial world when the demand for a particular product falls the supply follows. If we can educate some men to change their attitude toward children the problem of child sex abuse will be much less.

Ron O´Grady är en av grundarna till det internationella ECPAT-nätverket. Han var under många år ordförande för ECPAT International och aktiv i ECPAT New Zeeland.