Talk about repression, punishment, protection or even therapy (as necessary as those can appear to be from a short-term perspective) obscures (and, really, postpones) deeper and more disturbing questions, such as, why has child molestation become such a central issue over the last few decades?
In a sense crime is a mirror of society. There is a direct connection between the structure and "values" of society at any given time and the kind of "crime" which challenges them through transgression. My opinion is that our current views about sex, childhood and individual identity, and their specific grounding in (now mostly secularised) religious ethics, somehow generate this kind of crime as the most shockingly meaningful. The strongest the social reprobation, the more sickly attractive it becomes to "sociopaths". Society never kills, mutilates, tortures, emprisons or even "cures" fast enough to eradicate its "evil" -- no more than any of us can successfully run faster than his/her own shadow. At some point one has to stop and face it -- own to it in a sense.
Trying to understand the painfully ununderstandable is more difficult than howling to death with the "good people" crowd, but sooner or later that's what society has to do. And, really, that's what people actually dealing with such issues have to do already, far from the noise of popular political discussion.
