The world is full of perverts and other people with sick, twisted minds. Make no mistake about it. There are weird, secret goings-on even in the lives of those who look all right from the outside. They may not be all out bad, but may have a secret life, they go out of their way to conceal, so that they can maintain an acceptable façade. When even evil can be concealed for years, why are we surprised when lesser perversions go undetected for a lifetime?

We think we can tell evil just by looking at others, but that’s not really possible. Look at Harold Shipman, the British doctor who “put down” untold numbers of his elderly patients without their consent, and who then killed himself in prison. Photographs show him to be just like any other family man, with kindly (though distant) eyes, a woolly jumper and a quietly smiling face. Who would have thought it? That’s why he got away with it for so long. The channel Discovery Civilisation has just run a series of documentaries on the most evil men in history: Idi Amin, Nero, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Tomas de Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisitor who put at least 100,000 people to death. Nobody outside Russia knew the extent of Stalin’s crimes at the time, which is why he was able to pose with Churchill and Roosevelt in that famous Yalta photograph. It was only a few years ago, when mass graves were uncovered by chance, that the full extent of his evil was revealed. Look at a photograph of Hitler with his dog, or relaxing with his friends, and what is there to indicate, apart from some rather strange facial hair, that this is a mass murderer who gave new meaning to psychopathic behaviour? Nothing at all. Even old footage of him addressing his mass meetings in the 1930s is not enough to go on. Though he looks very weird indeed, he could be any other odd-ball politician.

I’ve never been much of a person who takes people at face value, and on the whole this tendency has served me well. There may be no Pol Pots and Hitlers in our daily lives, but there are definitely some pretty nasty characters and others who are adept at painting a rosy picture of their lives while inside it’s pretty much like the biblical painted tomb. It’s only when things fall apart that the truth emerges, and then others reel in shock and disbelief. Could it really be true? Yes, it is. Consider yesterday’s news report of a married couple in Kansas, in the USA, who seemed outwardly to be running a genuine residential psychotherapy practice for which they billed Medicare – the state-funded health care system there – at least $1 million. Somehow, somewhere, something went wrong for them and sparked a police investigation. It emerged that for 18 long years they had been keeping as slaves the mentally ill patients in their care, even forcing them to perform sex acts which they then videotaped. This surely has to be among the sickest forms of perverted pornography. In 18 years, nobody else knew, nobody could find out because who is going to believe a mentally ill patient, and they put on a “normal” act for their neighbours and others they encountered.

Some try to understand what makes these twisted people tick, but they will never work it out because they are applying their own norms and standards of behaviour to them. These people operate on a different level; society and the law set the standard for behaviour but they operate completely outside it. We can never hope to understand them because they are a type apart. How can a man or woman who lives a good and ordinary life ever hope to read the mind of somebody who goes to sleep every day knowing that there are people in cages in the next room, and who wakes up each morning looking forward to the entertainment of filming them while he forces them to have sex with each other? These people are abnormal; there is absolutely no point in trying to understand them. Even locking them up for years isn’t enough of a deterrent sometimes, because they come right out of jail and do it again, or worse.

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A social worker acquaintance, whose unhappy duty is to deal with cases of child abuse, recently told me in no uncertain terms to get rid of any misconceptions I might have that the sexual abuse of children takes place mainly in homes where the standard of education is low and there is poverty. Apparently, that is a scenario that contributes towards more “physical” abuse and violence, but sexual abuse is just as likely to take place in homes where there is every luxury and comfort, and where the parents are well-educated. My acquaintance explained that when he started doing this line of work, he was shocked to discover what was going on behind “perfect” facades, and was reluctant to believe it himself, but he has since learnt just how deceptive appearances can be. “It is actually more difficult for all concerned when we are dealing with the “perfect” family from a seemingly unassailable social background,” he said. “The perpetrator has more to lose by being discovered; his wife – for the perpetrator of this form of abuse is usually a man – is keen to maintain respect and to ensure that none of her friends find out; the abused child feels all this pressure and so is less likely to speak. If the child does speak to a trusted teacher, for example, the parents cannot believe that their good friend did this to their child, and will try to work out some other explanation. The wife of the abuser is often the biggest problem, because she has to confront the fact that the man with whom she has shared her life for years, and on whom she has built her future, perhaps even having children with him, is a child abuser. There are cases when the wife will refuse to accept this fact and instead convince herself that the child and the child’s parents are evil liars.”

He mentioned one particular case – no names or other identifiable characteristics, of course, because of very strict confidentiality – in which a call from a private school to attend to a suspected case of child abuse revealed a horrible scenario at home. Horrible to us, that is – because it didn’t seem to be horrible to the wife in the equation. Not only was the child being abused, but her mother was being beaten on a regular basis. The woman refused to do anything about it, however, and justified her husband’s behaviour and her own reluctance to leave him by saying: “He gives us such nice presents that it does more than makes up for it. He takes us on amazing holidays, and he’s just bought me a convertible car. There’s no way I’m going to leave him and live in some poky flat on a tiny maintenance cheque once a month.” That’s self-respect for you – though admittedly, this woman also disbelieved that her daughter was being abused, or perhaps she knew it but blocked the thought out of her mind. No doubt this woman and her husband go through the usual social rigmarole and keep up appearances. The thing is that life like this is very difficult to maintain for years and years. Eventually, the woman cracks – usually around middle life when, if she has any intelligence and sensitivity at all, she will sit down and consider her life and what’s left of it. And when that happens, the sheer horror of what she has taken for granted for so long will hit her like an armoured truck, and she won’t be able to stop talking about it.

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Some try to understand what makes these twisted people tick, but they will never work it out because they are applying their own norms and standards of behaviour to them