Not human

One of the side-effects of my current job is seeing a lot of clippings from the newspapers. It suits me just fine, as I've always been an avid follower of current affairs.

It's a bit depressing, however. There is a never-ending stream of material in these clippings about either 'crime' or 'security/terrorism' that completely eclipses all the other categories combined, in terms of volume.

One of the editorial pieces today was about terrorism. It mentioned all the latest horrors - holding children hostage in Beslan, decapitations in Iraq. Part of the argument was that it was useless trying to understand the motives of terrorists capable of these atrocities, because they were "not human".

What a tragic mistake.

The first step towards being able to do horrible things to another human being, is to regard them as somehow less than you. To regard them as having no value. It is precisely because terrorists see us as less than human that they can pick a random victim among us and wipe them from the face of the earth. I cannot imagine a worse solution than to head down the same path ourselves.

The biggest story in Australia at the moment is the arrest of around 200 men all over the country for child pornography offences - predominantly the viewing of images on the internet.

Several of the accused have committed suicide. One of the more prominently reported arrests was of a man who was director of a company running several child care centres. Bricks have been thrown through the windows of the centres, and there have been reports of people celebrating the suicides.

There are also stories, not for the first time, of people who know they need help to treat their pedophilia but are too terrified of the consequences of admitting their need.

If these men have committed offences - and it seems from the reporting that there is a strong case against most of them - then they should be convicted and punished. But demonising them to the point where they are no longer regarded as human will miss the main point of why police chose to be so public about the arrests in the first place: that the men who committed these crimes were ordinary people from all walks of life.

You see, if they are in fact human and ordinary, we might need to try to understand them, and recognize how little they differ from us.