Been working in day care and with children off and on for the past 20 years, and once turned in my boss for abusing a kid, slapping him so hard he was knocked down.
Personally, the vibe I get from Jackson is that he was somewhat asexual, but trying to look confidently heterosexual in his performances and personal life because that's what's is considered "normal" in America.
I think he put all his energies into his creativity and recently, his children, and was afraid of sexual contact and intimacy because of his body dysmorphia. That's an extreme form of obsessive compulsive disorder where you feel too ugly to be loved and see yourself as disfigured, and can be addicted to extreme dieting, exercise regimens and plastic surgery. Social phobia and depression tend to go along with it. Jackson exhibited all of these things. People with it tend to be secretive about their disorder and can mistakenly be thought of as being vain because of their preoccupation with appearance. They're just the opposite, they feel defective and often become very reclusive out of fear of inflicting their defects upon others.
People with dysmorphic disorder tend to avoid intimate contact, feeling undeserving of sexual intimacy, too. They believe they're too hideous to ever be loved. I do think he enjoyed being around children more than most adults and that was for a couple of reasons. He felt children are less judgmental about appearances and more accepting in general (they aren't, actually, by age 5 children have definite views about who is fat, ugly, pretty, slim, etc), and also he felt he'd been deprived of his own childhood.
Even Jackson's preoccupation with dwarves and "The Elephant Man" were manifestations of body dysmorphia. He felt he had physical defects and these were people who he identified with. The method he used to have children is how a person who is "defective" has children, they cannot have them naturally, so they use a surrogate mother. It's been discussed publicly whether these children are even his biological offspring. They don't look like him at all. He may have wanted children but not wanted to pass on what was to him his genetic "defects". Again, manifestations of body dysmorphia.
Most of the adults he was friends with describe him as a very charming and humble person, charismatic, eccentric, a creative genius, obviously and yes, vulnerable and damaged in some way (he had body dysmorphia disorder and was also a hypochondriac..always worrying about his health and he did have some health problems, it seems). When it came to his music, he was focused and very hard working, but he tended to work intensely, in spurts and then recede in the background for a long period.
Deepak Chopra, a doctor whose works I read and have a great deal of respect for, was a friend of Jacksons and says he had become addicted to pain medication, which he discovered when Jackson started asking him to write him prescriptions for oxycontin (he refused, telling him that there were better ways to manage pain). His dancing and performing had taken it's toll on his body, he was 50 and still trying to look and move like a 20 year old. There was a need to remain eternally young and boyish, obviously.
Chopra also mentioned that his children were frequent visitors at Neverland and they have no signs of having been abused or molested, and were good friends with Jackson's children, playmates.
The two occasions Jackson was accused of child molestation, well, as I remember (I might be remembering inaccurately) it was the parents who claimed the boys had been molested. The kids, upon examination, had signs of being coached by the parents, and weren't showing signs of trauma that children who have been molested exhibit. The parents were all too willing to accept money to make it "go away". Most parents who have children who have been molested would be more reluctant to be bought off, it seems to me, because if they had a case, they could win far more money for damages with a conviction than without one.That's mainly why Jackson was cleared of the charges. It may well have been an attempt to get money out of an obviously eccentric and troubled man.
Or he simply may have had enough money to buy them off, but would you be bought off so easily if your child had obviously been molested?
And yes, some social workers tend to be overly sensitive to child abuse, seeing it everywhere, because unfortunately, they do see more of it than the average person, a lot of their job is dealing with the result of abuse and neglect. (My daughter in law was a social worker, she had to quit because it depressed her too badly, but I've worked with many of them working in daycare and education for years). It's like how some cops see criminals everywhere because they deal with criminals all day.