So what drives mature grown men to molest children?

Imagine you are suffering stress at work (those of you who are fortunate enough to be working).

Stress can be overpowering, it can upset your life balance, it can build up an extraordinary sense of despair inside you.

But could you seriously believe that it would drive a 45-year-old married man with his own children to kidnap, rape and kill a 10-year-old boy? Particularly if you have no history of being a child predator?

Such unbelievable and unacceptable logic though was apparently what drove a German murderer (called Olaf H - surname not issued in the German press as is the standard practice here) to abduct and kill a boy called Mirco in Nordrhein-Westfalen in September 2010 in what has possibly been the most infamous murder case here in the past few years.

Described invariably as a "monster" in the media, this guy had reached the age of 45 without ever appearing above the public parapet for anything, and then .... Why suddenly did this happen? On the surface the whole series of events has no apparent logic, nor is there any satisfactory explanation. Had this guy kept a secret life (or at least desire) hidden for years? And surely he would have been aware of the consequences of any such action.

Not dissimilar (except for the fact that the victims survived) are the cases of Wolfgang Priklopil in Vienna and Michael Devlin in Missouri in the USA, who were both 26 and 39 respectively when they kidnapped their victims (Natascha Kampusch and Shawn Hornbeck respectively). Both reasonably mature men with no reported history of being child predators (although after his suicide, Priklopil was mentioned by potential victims as someone who did try to abduct them).

Why would you get to that age and suddenly .... It makes no sense, on the surface at least. The desires are hidden and suddenly become uncontrollable and emerge in a macabre daylight? Better frankly that the desires stay hidden, and never emerge - but anyway!

In the case of the Californian girl, Jaycee Dugard, her abductor, Phillip Garrido, had a criminal record (and someone in California still bears the responsibility for allowing this individual to be released from jail after serving only 11 years of a 50-year sentence).

You might at least in his case understand the concept of "motive", even if his conduct was abhorrent in the extreme.

In my attempts to understand humanity though, this is one of the most difficult things to accept. Predators are usually serial recidivists who start really quite young (check out the notorious Russell Bishop in the UK for example). That suddenly some repressed fantasy would turn into a grotesque reality? Sad, depressing and almost inexplicable.

Postscript. For those of you who can read German, I would recommend Natascha Kampusch's Website (natascha-kampusch.at). Don't expect gaudy details of her captivity though - it involves her humanitarian work and her attempts to help women and children in need wherever in the world. Highly laudable and (to repeat the word) highly recommended!