In the MIND of a child MOLESTER

The paedophile has a favourite saying: "I see the world, but not as you see it."

When he looks at children, they are in a bubble of light, highlighted and more vivid than the rest of the world. But more: the paedophile is two people, a real-life Jekyll and Hyde. Logically, he knows what he did was wrong, or as he says, "served no purpose". Instinctively, he thinks it did no harm - that his scores of victims enjoyed it.

"Did I think it was naughty? Yeah. Did I think it was wrong? No. Even now, I don't."

This small man with the thoughtful face and good manners could be anyone. He could be your babysitter, the man who runs to help your child when he falls over in the park. He was trusted by parents to look after their children. "I'm a massive faker. I'd adjust myself to the situation."

Even those who knew about his history often did not want to acknowledge sex abuse, preferring to pretend it wasn't happening, believing it happened only to other people.

This man agreed to speak to The Dominion Post in the hope that by raising awareness of sex abuse, by offering an insight into how he thinks and how easy it was to offend so prolifically, parents would pay more attention to the dangers.

The man can remember the exact moment he stopped thinking like a normal person. He was seven.

He was face-down on a mattress with no sheet, counting the lines on the mattress, being raped. His airway was blocked, he couldn't breathe and he started to panic.

"I just gave up, something snapped," he says. "Since then, my mind just works differently."

He learned to disconnect. "I started thinking the way I think now, which is, you don't get something for nothing, no one can be completely trusted - stuff like that."

The paedophile might have told someone back then, if they had asked about it with love and care. "You have to ask in the right way," he said. No one did.

Of all the horrors that this man has faced, he says it was the sexual abuse and the emotional abuse from his mother that were most damaging.

"I've had physical abuse and sexual abuse and neglect and all the bits and pieces, but emotional abuse from a parent, from someone who's supposed to care for you, just, excuse me but, but f...s you up, eh?"

He began offending when he was seven, persuading a boy down the road to fool around.

"We did everything basically over the next couple of years. Every conceivable thing."

He groomed children in his class, using the notion of "naughty games" and making them complicit partners to ensure they didn't tell.

"In my standard 2, standard 3 class, of all the boys there, probably nearly half of them I would have done something to at one point or another."

The drive was not sexual. He wanted to be part of their life, to connect with them. Afterward, he felt "hurt". And alone again.

When he looks back at his childhood, he says he felt hollow. "I felt my soul was black, I suppose. I didn't feel human."

When he hit 13, boys his age were no longer attractive to him. He targeted younger children. Victims ranged from toddlers to about 13. Over the years, he estimates, he had about 40 victims.

He has an ideal: always a boy, 10 years old, blonde hair, blue eyes, skinny build, affectionate. He screws up his nose at the thought of fat freckled kids, but says he cannot state categorically he wouldn't abuse them.

Though he prefers boys, he offended against a small number of girls too, mostly out of curiosity, and in one case, he admits, out of spite.

As he got older, he became better at grooming them. He gave the boys marijuana, played Xbox, showed them porn. The sense of being "naughty", of doing something that they weren't allowed to do, helped him in his aim.

There are two types of child abusers - the opportunist stranger who targets young children in malls, swimming pools and other public places, and the person who befriends vulnerable parents, inveigling himself into the parents' and child's lives. This man did both.

The opportunist offending was more out of desperation. He would sit in mall toilet cubicles for hours watching small children use the urinal. He would size up swimming pools and other public places for where he could offend.

His most prolonged offending happened when he moved into people's homes, often babysitting the children, and often abusing them for years.

He got one of his victims to recruit others from school and the boy helped him to groom them and then was made to join in the offending.

"I managed to get into his friend - sex as such - within an hour and a quarter. You name it, I did it. Amazing, that's probably a record."

Most of his victims had had "good touching, bad touching" talks. But it made no difference. He was, he says, "a pro".

"Put me in a room now and it wouldn't take very long at all."

He explains the technique: "You'd rummage their hair, noogie, hugs, tickling, then the tickling would go lower, it would become fondling. Then a couple of them would say that feels nice, do it again. And you're in."

SOME, the special ones, he took more time to groom, building up a trust and dependency. "It was better if you were slow. The slower you were, the more you could get out of it. They would do more." He says it is amazing what he got away with. He tells of fondling a boy in a public swimming pool. The parents walked up, asked if he was all right, and walked away. In another case, he abused a boy in a public place as the boy's parents sat two metres away, playing, tickling, then fondling the eight-year-old before taking him to a bathroom cubicle and performing oral sex on him.

His offending crossed all socio-economic and cultural boundaries. No one was immune. Many of the parents loved their kids, and were good parents. But they were distracted.

There was one group, though, that was "impossible": the ones whose parents loved them and paid them attention. "There was one specific one that I remember I kept trying to groom. I tried and tried, and couldn't get to the next stage. He was from a mother-and-father family and was well loved. Just impossible."

He thinks people are unwilling to believe he was capable of such things, unwilling to stare such offending in the face. Some of his victims were asked directly if he had abused them. They denied it. Even after he admitted his crimes to police, some victims denied the offending.

Another told his parents of the abuse, but when the man apologised and promised never to do it again, he was forgiven. He continued abusing the boy for the next two years.

There are elements of his offending that embarrass him. This man hates the word "sodomy". He has spent his life doing it to small bodies, but he blanches at the word.

It is hard to understand why someone who had been abused himself would harm others in the same way. He called his abusers "monsters", but in his mind his offending was different. "With my ones they were quite comfortable with me."

He had his own moral code: no strangulation, no burning with cigarettes, no force, no violence, no threats. All things he suffered himself.

Does he think his offending was wrong?

"I have two aspects of me. I have the logical point of view, where it's obviously something that's quite unnatural and doesn't make any real sense and there's no purpose in it. And then there's the instinctive part of me where I don't see anything wrong with it. It feels right. What harm can really come from it?"

Does he think they enjoyed it? "Honestly? Yeah, they enjoyed aspects of it, definitely."

Yet the thought of someone abusing his young sister makes him "sick in my stomach".

He is aware of this paradox. It trips him up. Though he has spent uncountable hours mulling it, analysing and rationalising, he cannot reconcile the two thoughts. It is this that prompted him to think about "getting out".

"There were points when I went too far and I broke my own boundaries. Where I was a little more forceful and possibly coercive than I intended to be at the beginning."

He had amassed DVDs, department store catalogues, photos of his victims, and says he planned to stop offending and to resort to living in a rich fantasy world.

"I'd got everything I wanted. I'd tried every conceivable thing I wanted to do with a child."

When police arrested him, it was a relief.

Asked if his victims will become offenders, he says he never considered the consequences of his actions, but admits some probably will. His feelings about that are characteristically mixed.

"Logically, I basically made another cycle, have perpetuated it on, and they will offend and cause more damage to others, and that's pretty bad. (Instinctively?) It's arousing."

Police say the victims were damaged beyond repair.

IT SEEMS there is little that would have stopped this man. He stopped once - for two years when on supervision, frightened by the threat of imprisonment - but quickly resumed. He has tried to stop thinking about little boys, but the longest he ever lasted was four to five hours. In the few hours we meet, he says he has had more than 100 fantasies.

He is dismissive of offender-prevention programmes, on which he was played a video interviewing adult victims, alongside pictures of them as children. "I just found it arousing."

He has asked himself whether, had he not been abused, he would be happily married, normal. He doesn't know. He has never had sex with a woman, spurns the thought, and says that when he wonders if he could be satisfied by adult males, he turns cold.

"Children smell good, even when they sweat."

He likes their personalities. They are fun. Adults are complicated, create drama.

The god be believes in would condemn his actions, but on the prospect of hell, he says: "I've experienced enough where it doesn't really bother me. My dreams are probably hell enough."

He is confident he will be able to stay clean, relying on his ability to fantasise.

Yet the delusion that the kids wanted him, loved him, that he did no harm, remains. Asked how he would feel if his favourite wrote him a letter telling how hurt he was, how damaged, he admits: "That would make me very, very upset. That would probably make me really question myself as a person - even more than I do."

- © Fairfax NZ News