“Post-Savile, it was almost impossible to be a [child abuse] denier, but there will always be some. Nature created puberty for good reason. We know it is wrong to have sex with pre-pubescent children.”

Not all would agree with Wolmar on the matter of pre-pubescent children being non-sexual. In 1993, Nettie Pollard wrote an essay called “The Small Matter of Children” which begins by discussing “children’s rights”: “But baby boys are born with erections and girls with genitals swelling and vaginal lubrication . . . Masters and Johnson found that lubrication resulted from sexual stimulation in baby girls. Clearly, birth contains elements of sexual arousal for babies.

“Babies often react sexually when being held, or in other moments of physical pleasure. Reaction akin to orgasm has been detected in babies only a few months old, though masturbation and orgasm are rarely detected before the ages of one or two, and not all children masturbate.”

As Pollard’s views demonstrate, those who refuse to accept the harm done to victims of child sexual abuse are not confined to those directly abusing children. Some so-called experts in the field argue that for some adults, sex with children is a “natural” desire. In 2001 Glenn Wilson was ranked among the ten most frequently cited British psychologists in scientific journals. Wilson is co-author of the book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation (2008), which states the case for a genetic basis to same-sex attraction and orientation. He is also co-author of The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (1981), in which he writes that “the majority of paedophiles, however socially inappropriate, seem to be gentle and rational”.

Qazi Rahman, who wrote Born Gay with Wilson, is a highly respected and much cited biologist based at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. I asked him if he believed that the urge to abuse children is actually hard-wired. He said: “There is growing evidence of biological and brain differences, where the brains are cross-wired.”

What about paedophile rights? If Rahman and Wilson use the “gay gene” argument to ask for homosexual rights, why not then for child abusers? All they have to say is that there is a medical or genetic basis, as opposed to the fact that they chose to abuse children for power and sadism.

Rahman agrees that this can be problematic: “Should we feel sorry for paedophiles? As soon as the liberals get that rhetoric going, we will not be able to make any subtle distinctions as to who is dangerous and who is not.”

Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at Essex University. Plummer, who is gay, contributed to a book called Perspectives on Paedophilia (1981). It was a supposedly objective look at paedophilia and was designed to be used on social work training courses. Plummer was a member of PIE in the late 1970s for “research purposes”.