ON a hill in Jerusalem there a museum called Yad Vashem, and it in pictures and words one of humankind's most terrible stories. It tells the story of the terrible fate visited on Europe's Jews by the ideology of Nazism.
Tapes repeat the names of the murdered. Banks, of candles flicker in memory of the children. The sepia faces of the dead look out imploringly from cracks in the sides of railway wagons, from the backs of lorries, from the tumbled bricks of ghettos. It is very hard to look at.
And when you turn away from the too sorrowful images, you notice the people who are looking at them, and that is almost as affecting. When I was there I saw a new immigrant to Israel - a Russian, from his grey plastic shoes and baggy suit - in helpless tears in front of one old photo.
The Holocaust is unique. But it is the only event in modern history sufficiently grave to provide the tones in which we may speak of the spectrum of child abuse, if "abuse" is the right word for abducting little girls and wreaking your will on their terrified selves until they get too weak and broken to resist, and you can play with them as they die.
What happened to the little girls in Belgium is too terrible to contemplate. Literally. I don't know how many people last week, reading the description of the prison in which their long drawn out suffering took place, were able to get past the word "soundproof."
And those girls are just the ones we know about. Every single week in this newspaper details of men gratifying themselves through the rape and sexual abuse and terrorisation and corruption and physical and mental destruction of children in this country - things done every day, and being done now as I write - are repeated.
And that is just the witness from the tiny proportion of these crimes which comes to light and which reaches the courts. Until our times and the spread of mass media, all this was hidden. Now, the depth and extent of the ordinary, everyday, endemic evil done to children is coming out. This is not a holocaust, but it is like the Holocaust in at least one way. It changes everything. The state of knowing and fully acknowledging the reality of child abuse is a state utterly different from not knowing it.
About the children in Belgium, is there more we can do than bow the head, like the man in the museum in Jerusalem, and give way to grief? Can we somehow refuse to let evil defeat our human ingenuity? The EU Justice and Home Affairs Ministers, meeting last week, did their best to come up with a bureaucratic response to the intranational aspect of the sexual exploitation of children.
But, of course, the ministers are politicians. They're not artists, or moralists, or prophets. They can't begin their discussions with a howl of outrage. They can't dwell on the central fact of child sex abuse, which is that the abused are children. Children can't match their predators. They can't hope to escape. They are too small. They are not strong enough. They don't know enough.
The crime of child sex abuse is as gross as it is because the children are humans with human imaginations and human emotions who suffer just as adults do the vast pains of terror and abandonment. As the little girls in their cage in Belgium must have done. But unlike adults, they have no resources with which to outwit the designs of the people who hate them.
THE ministers cannot but proceed as if everything is the same this year as it was last year except that some legislative and administrative changes need to be made.
But everything isn't the same. A woman wrote to me about the picture of a little girl on the back of "the 01 telephone directory. "I don't understand the blond under age girl wearing a sleeveless dress and ballet shoes", she says. "Today, when every teenager wears jeans and thick soled runners. Every paper every day speaks of child molestation. What does this ad mean?"
You may turn to this image and say to yourself: "Ah, for God's sake, it's just a pretty picture of a little kid. You'd have to be sick to see anything wrong with it." But I feel for the woman who wrote in. The world is sick. I don't want to see little girls arbitrarily used as models. I don't care if this seems irrational. I want new rules about children. You wouldn't crack a joke about Abie and Solly to a Jew stumbling out of the Yad Vashem memorial museum. Neither do I want to hear a defence of using solitary little girls in woods while the cage in Belgium is still burning in our brains.
If people are serious about protecting children, huge and wrenching changes need to be made within the cultures of the world, not one of which, as far as I know, protects children. Some of these changes will be on the level of general attitude. Some, especially in our law based culture, will be on the level of crime and punishment.
About the latter - cherished notions, such as that an individual is free to do what he or she wants within the law, and is innocent until found guilty, and is purged of all guilt when punishment has been discharged, will have to be examined. Fashion photographers are free, for example, to use anorexic models in cowering poses so as to glamourise the idea of abused girl children.
I think that such provocative cynicism should be actionable as accessory to child sex abuse. Anybody is free, at the moment, to gratify themselves with pornographic pictures of children. Why is possession of child pornography not an offence? Given that the pornography can only exist because the offence of forcing or coercing children into pornographic acts has been committed?
Why are known child rapists, like the one in Belgium, released back into the community without supervision? It is known that paedophilia is an all but incurable perversion.
Is all this not enough to justify tagging? Is it not enough to justify a central register of child sex abusers' passports? Is it not enough to justify the setting up of a DNA database?
Proposals like these may be light years away from the spiritual revolution that is necessary to prevent what is probably the most commonplace evil connected with child sex abuse - that complacent male authorities turn a less than censorious eye to the "fun and games" men might be known to have with their own children or the children around the neighbourhood. But in a way, the more dramatic sanctions are the easiest to put in place.
There would have been no Holocaust if people in general had stood by the Jews. There would be no child prostitutes, paint covering their hunger, there would be no small bodies broken by big ones, there would be no horrors behind sound proof doors, if we were entirely sensitive to children. And, however lofty that ideal may seem, we can all aspire to it.
A friend was telling me of a small but precious sign of a new consciousness. There is a man in her street whom the children love playing with and who loves children. The thing is, these days, he never plays with them in his house. He plays with them in the street.