European police have smashed a child pornography network that actually produced tailor-made videos for paying clients. This means that men would send in their order, saying that they wanted to see this or that child being abused in this or that particular way, and pay to get it done. Now here’s the really nasty bit: this thriving enterprise had 2,500 clients in 19 countries. And that was just one child pornography business out of many. Somehow, we have to wrap our heads around the knowledge that there are really this many sick, perverted and cruel men around – and who knows? We might know one, or unwittingly have dealings with one in the course of our daily life.

I found out by chance that I knew one such man around 10 years ago, when it was discovered that a friend’s eight-year-old niece had been routinely interfered with on those days that she slept over at the neighbours. It is a great shock when somebody you thought of as a normal person is revealed in this light, not least for his wife, who refused to believe it and decided that the whole thing was cooked up by a sick and perverted eight-year-old and her sick and perverted (and deeply distressed) mother.

I imagine that the desire to protect yourself from such terrible knowledge about your husband, knowledge that would inevitably lead to a choice between breaking up your home or living with a paedophile, made it easier for her to believe that a young child could invent such things rather than that her husband was doing them while she was asleep in another room. The unfortunate thing is that this man was not publicly branded a paedophile, and so the information didn’t reach many people who had dealings with him, including the parents of other children and various friends and acquaintances. The inherent risk is obvious, but it also allowed the family to pretend that nothing had happened, and the wife to take her place in the prayer-group craze sweeping the island.

I have a friend who says that when she hears about things like this, she has to struggle against the belief that men are animals who driven by their sexual urges into causing most of the world’s harm and chaos. “If I hear another story like this, I’m going to end up getting put off men altogether,” she says. “It’s sickening.” Men think this is an exaggeration; other women will know what she means.

In earlier decades, some feminist groups used the slogan that all men are rapists. This was an extreme view, designed to shock people into thinking. All men are not rapists, clearly. Ah, but here’s the thing. While only a very tiny percentage of men are actual rapists, there is a much larger percentage of seemingly normal and innocuous men who get a secret and guilty thrill out of the idea of raping a woman – any woman, or one in particular. They won’t do it (the very thought fills them with horror) but they will fantasise about it, and they create the demand for violent pornography in which women are raped and humiliated.

The thing about men in general, something that women can’t understand because our mindset is completely different, is the capacity for compartmentalising different aspects of their lives. Women segue from one thing to another, juggling everything, while men put the various parts of their lives and character into boxes. This means that the kind of men who are fuelled by fantasies of rape or child abuse can compartmentalise that, too. Inside their heads, they are arguing to themselves that watching a child or a woman being raped on the internet is not the same thing as going out and doing it themselves. Somebody else has done it, so they’re not guilty. They reason that whether they watched or not, that child or woman was still going to get raped, for other paying customers, so they might as well watch too and what’s the harm? They find it convenient to pretend that there isn’t a real child or a real woman being hurt at the other end.

You might have noticed – I certainly have – that in general, men never initiate conversations about child abuse or violent pornography on the internet. When the subject comes up among a group of people, the women get all fired up, angry and upset, while the men tend to stay silent or brush it off. For some reason, they become covered in embarrassment. When they do contribute to the discussion, it is usually with a trite and irritating comment that seeks to belittle the issue, or to bring the conversation to a close. Sometimes, I am tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they cannot grasp the full horror of what is happening. At other times I tell myself that it is precisely because they cannot grasp the full horror of what is happening that so many men provide the giant client-base for this terrible abuse.

Internationally-coordinated police efforts against child-pornography are improving all the time. Another recent success was the arrest of a Canadian man in his 30s, who had been filmed abusing boys over the internet for years. Rather than wearing a mask, which is what these men usually do so as not to be recognised, he used to distort his face digitally on the film using a swirl effect. Computer experts working for the German police – yes, German, even though the abuse took place in Thailand, but that’s what cooperation means – managed to reveal the face. A few short days of pan-global effort and he was caught in a remote Thai village. People are willing to help because paedophiles are the most despised people on earth, at least by women.

In the recent pan-European operation, police seized thousands of computers, videos and photographs in what they called Operation Koala. The whole thing began with the arrest of an Italian man running a website that sold videos of small girls. The videos were produced to order in the Ukraine and they included some of a father raping his daughters, aged 9 and 11. So how did they know he was their father? That’s part of the thrill and excitement, you see: it’s the kind of information that paying customers want to know, and pay more to see. So far, the police have managed to identify 23 children who were abused by this paying network of paedophiles. Police in all 28 EU member states worked on the operation. It all leaves you with a very real sense of how exposed children are, how very vulnerable to the predations of these dreadful men.

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I find it interesting when a great deal is said about the dangers of letting your children loose on the internet without a ‘net nanny’ or supervision. The real dangers are in letting men loose on the internet. They are the ones preying on children in internet chat-rooms, creating the demand for pornography (violent or otherwise) and for paedophile material, and providing the content. The internet has given the terrible freaks of nature that are paedophiles a way of finding each other and meeting in groups in the ether, as they could never do before.

The most that previous generations had to contend with was the local paedophile whom mothers warned their children about, the pervert who went abroad for sex with street-boys, or the scout leader, school-teacher or orphanage administrator who abused his charges. Now we have all that, and so much more. There is child abuse tourism to far-flung countries which have been brought closer by cheap and efficient air travel, and there is a booming paedophile industry on the internet.

Closing down the internet is not an option. First of all, it can’t be done. Secondly, the huge benefits far outweigh the negatives. Better policing, like that we are seeing now, helps a great deal. It’s not going to push the paedophiles underground because by their very nature that’s where they are already. But there is something equally important that needs to happen, and this is for men, even ordinary men, to look within themselves and ask why they browse these sites and what it says about them.