The matter was raised in a year or so ago and it is being raised again: “Padeophilia” is not only psychiatry’s enduring misnomer but the closest thing to a travesty of medical ethics, to boot.

And the next best thing is to boot it out of the medical lexicon.

If there were any doubts, as to the inappropriateness of the term, the details that emerged in the 117-page landmark court judgement a fortnight or so ago must certainly by now have allayed those doubts and laid them to rest once and for all.

The term was created around the turn of the last century when a section of British society (yes, it was concocted by an English shrink) was besotted by the Classics, to the point that merely dipping one’s toes in Latin and Greek was enough for some to entitle one to membership of the cultural nobility and the upper reaches of the social ladder.

Though “paedophilia” means “love of children” it wasn’t this term that entered the vernacular, and rightly so.

It made more sense, in everyday language, to resort to “child abuse/molestation” and “child abuser/molester”.

Yes, the common people had more (common?) sense than the experts these common people were expected to resort to in seeking a cure for a perceived mental ailment.

Love can only be destructive when it is unrequited. Unrequited love very often destroys the giver, not the one supposed to be receiving it. The person it is intended for is usually left unscathed.

These 117 pages clearly show that those who were destroyed were those whom this version of “love” was intended for. It was the one pressing his love on the other that was left unscathed. The exact opposite of unrequited true love.

Calling a child abuser a “paedophile” (ie, a “child lover”) is the equivalent of calling a rapist a “gynophile” - a lover of women.

Let some macho shrink merely entertain such an idea, let alone think it out loud, and you'll have the womenfolk thronging the streets, beating the drum and screaming themselves nuts as they try to make him screech in falsetto.

Having society referring to child abuse as “child love” is nothing short of collective child molestation.

So, you shrinks, put your, well, heads together, and see what you can come up with.

Joe Genovese

Birkirkara