Stranger Danger – Is Every Man a Suspect?

A kindly adult outside the family can act as confidant, mentor and safety valve, as Esther Rantzen, founder of Childline, explained in a Daily Mail article denouncing hysteria about child abuse:

Last week, I met one of Europe’s most successful architects. He told me his parents were extremely poor, and that because his mother had a serious mental illness, his father left the family home.

But they had a neighbour – a man with no children of his own – who noticed his talent when he was young and gave him art classes.

Child Maltreatment:

Seemingly, the “dirty old man” in the park is the least of a child’s worries. As the statistics show, most abuse, sexual or otherwise, takes place within the family. A particular problem in the UK’s Muslim community is that of forced marriages, and in Islam, a girl is deemed marriageable at just nine years of age. In an article for the London Times on the connection between paedophilia and terrorism, Stefano Dambruoso, Italy’s anti-terror magistrate, is quoted as saying: 
The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which — as in many parts of the Arab world — wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture.