Imagine yourself to be a young person plagued by unwanted sexual feelings for pre-adolescent children — a paedophile.
 
You don’t act on your feelings, but you are torn between them and your yearnings to have a “normal” adult sexual interest in men or women, like other youngsters.
 
You get to hear of an NHS clinic that can help you rid yourself of your awful sexual damage. You refer yourself and are politely rejected, because the clinic can now only accept those who are offenders — those who have already committed child abuse.
 
Where does this leave you?
 
You could, if you despair and if you have never been taught an alternative, become an offender yourself and thus repeat the cycle of abuse.
 
You could, in despair, commit suicide. One therapist at that clinic — the Portman Clinic, London — has described how, in a treatment group of paedophiles he led, all six patients had attempted suicide.
 
Or you could lead a life of abstention from all your desired sexual activity. That would be the correct choice — indeed the categorical imperative — but it would probably be a life without the intimate joys of adult couples and the delight of having children in your life.
 
The scenario above is not hypothetical. It is a reality many thousands of young people face today. The numbers of clinically defined paedophiles constitute some 1-3 per cent of the population. More broadly, those capable of being sexually aroused by children could, by some estimates, be as much as 20 per cent of the population.
 
In my youth, when I was a non-offending paedophile, I attended the Portman Clinic. After three years of sessions I was completely cured of paedophilia.

Both my GP and my therapist were quite clear that paedophilia was curable, provided one has the motivation and the capacity for insight. It is clear too that my capacity for cure was greatly aided by my freedom from a life of abuse.
 
Forty years ago, after I completed my NHS treatment, I dreamed that in the not too distant future every town in Britain would have the kind of NHS clinic I had so benefited from. I dreamed that all those suffering from sexual damage, all abuse victims whose lives were being ruined would have access to the kind of empathetic, long-term, analytic, relational treatment that had mended my life.
 
Those days were a time of hope. Labour and liberation movements were still making progress nationally and globally.
 
How my hopes have been dashed!
 
Now, after all the defeats of past decades, the  NHS Portman Clinic in London that helped me to cure still remains in isolation, unable to replicate its successes across the country. Furthermore, it has been obliged to greatly narrow its criteria for access to treatments, and hold back their full curative potentials .
 
If I was to ask for treatment now at the Portman Clinic, I would be rejected and so would other desperate non-offending paedophiles.
 
To put it baldly, you now have to offend first if you wish to have access to these in-depth treatments.
 
Moreover, the Portman no longer uses “cure” to define the success of its treatments. It is now obliged to judge success by whether the patient is able to control their offending and securely manage their behaviour so that they do not reoffend.

That is profoundly important, but it falls far short of the treatment's potential to free paedophiles of this awful distress and have full and normal sexual and family lives.
 
And it means the fading of one great opportunity to challenge all the shallow, reactionary notions that dominate public discourse on paedophilia — that, say, that paedophiles are obligate abusers, manipulative and devious and, if it is not “evil” that governs them, it is genetics. They cannot be cured and therefore why should we waste public money on therapies for them?
 
Bang them up! Chemically castrate them! Throw away the key!
 
But if we throw away the psychoanalytic model of treatment that our Portman Clinic offers, then we throw it away not just for paedophiles or the violent offenders that they also treat but for ALL the other victims of child sexual abuse — mostly women — whose suffering is just as great as that of paedophiles.
 
For there are strong commonalities between the kinds of sexual damage that paedophiles suffered and the many kinds of damage that other child sexual abuse victims suffered. The methods of treatment that cured me could also cure the many thousands of women whose lives are profoundly damaged by child abuse, yet whose damage takes different forms than paedophilia.
 
A future Labour government must reverse the relentless isolation and shrinkage of the Portman Clinic and its in-depth treatments. Many paedophiles can and do want to change, heal and grow. Let us offer them a hand to do so. It is in all of our interests.

Jack Dawson is a pseudonym.